For the past six weeks, I’ve attended an improv comedy class. Well, I missed the first week with COVID but I’ve already told that story. This was my second improv class. I took another one when I lived in DC. That one had a younger crowd of people in their 20s and 30s. In this one, there was much more variation in age among the participants. This one also had a public graduation show as a focal point instead of just doing exercises.

I took an improv class again for two reasons. One was to have an opportunity to meet new people and make new connections. This didn’t work as well as I’d hoped but I’ll keep trying. The second was to force me to be more present and spontaneous in conversation. Sometimes my conversations with prospective clients can get repetitive, introducing a danger that I go into autopilot, miss their core concerns, and lose out on the business. A similar dynamic can occur in my personal life as I focus more on what I’m going to say next than on what my conversational partner is saying now. In improv, you cannot get away with doing that. You must be present with your scene partner and in so doing get out of your own head. That alone was worth the time and money I invested into taking the class.

On Saturday, we had our graduation show. Only 8 of the 13 people who started the class were there for myriad reasons and there were only about that many people in the audience. Two of the audience members were even people I’d invited. My set was with 5 of the 8 as there were two sets during the show. During the set, I gave a monologue about a certain groundhog (or more realistically series of groundhogs) named Rufus that resides under my parents’ shed. This idea resulted from a prior scene where a young child named a racoon. My three scenes weren’t great in my own assessment. I inadvertently took over the first one about a frog from my scene partner and it stalled. A second saw me trying to buy a Christmas present while hopelessly lost in what became a French shopping mall. And I could not even remember my third scene at dinner afterwards. Overall my performance was better and I had more fun during the practice show we did on Tuesday, but that was largely immaterial.

Will I take more improv classes next year? Maybe. I don’t feel any compulsion to make a run at becoming a cast member of SNL. It may depend on scheduling and what other activities I find.