Fix The Harold: Skip the Opening
Hate the premise, love the game.
I’m in Berlin at Das Improv Fest, hosted at the Comedy Cafe Berlin. It’s a really friendly, fun, improv nerdy delight. I’ve already done a jam with friends from Glasgow Improv Theatre, forced Craig Cackowski to talk with me about mid-90s iO Chicago, and taken a photo with Jim Woods in front of a Marx-Engels statue.
All the house teams are doing: Harolds. And they all seem to have read my essay saying how I think the Harold is too long!
I must admit: after weeks of thinking about it, I don’t think it’s Harolds I’m sick of. It’s premise initiations. Big long full initiations that tell everyone in the scene a full idea. “I see from your resume you’re qualified, but you just told me you want to do MMA fighting in the lunch room. And you’re my father?”
It’s not game of the scene I dislike. It’s one-sided improv where someone is trying to solve the scene in one line.
Look, it’s 8am and I’m about to head out to Museum Island (a real place which SOUNDS like an improv premise) so I can’t get into it too much (or come up with fair examples).
Less Premise, More Scenework
I don’t want to get RID of premise initiations. I just want FEWER of them.
The solution to my woes seems to be easy: skip the opening. I’ve sometimes referred to this as a “headless Harold.”
(Several people have suggested this to me, including: my brother Kevin Hines and my non-brother Alex Fernie).
A Harold with no opening sounds very fun to me. The Bozos (my team at WGIS) tried it a few weeks ago and it was great.
First of all, it’s shorter! You get right into scenes.
Then the first beats have to start off of just a suggestion. So they very necessarily start small, with the players really watching each other. There’s no opening to distract them. These are “organic scenes” in UCB parlance. They ramble, and it’s harder to find a comedic game. But whatever you DO find is done together.
But then — the second beats are a place where you CAN have what amount to “premise scenes.” Start with a big full initiation that plays the game you found in the first beats. If you failed to find a clear game, then this second beat can be a sort of “do over” where you focus up on a comedic idea.
First beats: find the game organically. Keep it small, watch each other, discover.
Second beats: Start with the game right away. Heighten fast, support from the group.
You know what? I love it.
Comedy Cafe Berlin
If you’re in Berlin, come to Comedy Cafe Berlin. Nice people, great improv. I visited here in November 2015 a month after the opened, and the place has grown so much. But it still feels like a cozy happy joint.
Plugs, Fresh
The Bozos in Berlin - Bozos play Friday night 9pm, then also Sunday night there’s a jam of all headlining acts. So fly out here and watch.
Plugs, Ongoing
Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk About Comics - Comic book podcast, hosted by my brother Kevin and I. This week, Kevin and I continue reviewing Grant Morrison’s 1990s run on Justice League of America. We are loving this series, even as it gets too complicated to summarize with human brains. We are coming up on our 250th episode!
Clubhouse Fridays - WGIS’ weekly improv show. Fridays 7pm at The Clubhouse. Free! We are doing a Harold tonight to teach me a lesson!
The World’s Greatest Improv School: The improv school I run with Jim Woods and Sarah Claspell. We’ve got classes online, in LA and even a few in NYC!
How to Be The Greatest Improviser On Earth - My improv book, available at Amazon. Kindle or print. It’s a hodge-podge of advice I wrote in 2016 about doing improv. If you’re broke and want a free PDF version just email me and I’ll send it over.
I feel compelled to comment but it’s one of those bad comments where it’s just a story about me and not a clarification or a critique. I don’t think Will intended this but unfortunately his post is a spell and, when uttered, it reawakens the damned spirit of a terrible UCB NY Harold team, my first Harold team, Deckard.
We started in like 2010 and were full of cocky veteran indy improvisors with lots of shitty opinions. Noteably we thought openings had gotten lame and were making weak, premise obsessed improv with no magic. No soul. So we started doing Harolds with no openings just as Will deacribes. We really thought we were gonna revolutionize the theater or something. Our first beats would be patient. We’d really look in each others eyes to find connection and we’d listen so good we’d find game no matter what.
That’s not really what happened. Instead we were all such scared little harold team noobs we freaked out every show. Sometimes it worked but often it didn’t. Premise improv, though it can be stiff, does, sadly, give you more consistency. Without it, 1 or 2 if your first beats wont work and I felt it was hard to do the little cheat Will talks about where you do it again but better/clearer this time. Sometimes that would just lead to an even more confused 2nd beat that just felt like another bad 1st beat.
This was all compunded by us getting pressure immediately from “higher ups” to stop what we were doing because we were too new a team to try to do something like this and that pressure put us even more in our heads. I think we thought we wanted to piss everyone off but then when we actually did we just got scared and mad at each other.
Anyway after like 2 months we got put on notice and got forced to do pattern games until we got broken up.
There is no real lesson here because it sounds like a cautionary tale but I don’t want that. I actually really still believe the headless harold can work. I think we were just the wrong people in the wrong situation to try. So maybe I’m not a harold team ghost with a warning, I’m a ghost saying if someone wants to go down this road I want you to know I personally really believe in what you are doing and I hope everyone else really supports it.
Maybe my constructive idea is to feel ok dropping one of the 2nd beats if a first one didn’t work at all. Who cares, harolds should be shorter, right?
Love this man. You've almost described a Melbourne Harold. We still teach openings, but I've long been allergic to premise first beats. We do organic first beats derived from the themes of the opening, so you might come on with a POV at most, and let the game arrive naturally. Then second beats, as you've mentioned, we use premise to have games return/recontextualised efficiently.. so the whole harold feels like it increases in pace across the 20-25 minutes.
I've always preferred grounded discovery in first beats so that audiences get a chance to care about the characters and what happens to them as a result of their inevitable flaws.