Funny Business is Now Available on Kindle and Paperback
An Exploration into the History and Future of Improvised Comedy
Welcome to Play Fool. This one is a landmark: I have published a book. This post is a brief reflection on the writing process and an invitation to buy and read the book. I’ll have more to share in the coming weeks.
Well, it’s here.
I first admitted I was writing a book to a friend, Ted Snell, back in early 2020. I had outlined a few essays and begun to apprehend that they might cohere into something with form, like an argument or a manifesto. Ted knew I was already a ‘writer,’ in the sense that my professional work involved participatory research and report writing. He knew that I was no stranger to getting 3,000 words down over a day or two. So, Ted asked me: “How long does it take you to write 500 words?” I answered: “Maybe an hour or two.” In my professional work I would usually use the small, focused hours of morning, between 7:00 and 9:00am, to get through the most difficult writing. He then suggested that I only needed 100 days at that pace to produce a 50,000 word first draft. A book, in well under a year, with all the writing done by 9am each day? It suddenly felt achievable. Spurred by the optimistic mathematics of it, the first 20,000 words or so came out with vigour and gusto, as if a decade of pent-up thoughts had finally found release.
However, the next 20,000 were much slower, the final 10,000 were a crawl, and then proofing and editing was absolute torture. Ted suggested 100 days, and yet here I am over three years later, bloodied and bruised. I hold this thing in my hands as if I can’t decide if it is a gift or a burden: like an unwanted child. There’s some truth to the idea that books write people, rather than people writing books. The final year was a lot of contraction without a lot of movement, and it was only with the support and encouragement of my partner that the final product came into being at all.
My problem is that I write the way I improvise: one word at a time. I begun the book with an initiating impulse, rather than a fully-formed idea, which is generally how I improvise (I am not a good premise-based improviser!). As legendary improvisation duo TJ & Dave put it, I just aim to do the ‘next little thing,’ which serves the scene. The problem, of course, is that improvisation scenes are short-lived, fleeting phenomena, whereas a book promises a certain amount of coherence, longevity, and authority. It is hard to write a book if you are repeatedly erasing it.
What I found is that life would get busy, and I would necessarily need to set the book aside for several weeks or months. When I revisited it, I would find I disagreed with it and would need to rewrite large sections of it. In my professional work I usually have a good idea of what I need to say and what I want the audience to hear. In the book, I did not know what I needed to say, what I wanted the audience to hear, or even who my audience was.
I considered abandoning the cursed thing multiple times. Play Fool was partly an attempt to return to writing on a human scale. I thought I might be able to compost my bullshit book into a series of essays. However, I underestimated how cursed I truly was. Like a scene from a horror film, I would awaken in the night and find the book there in my thoughts, demanding some new impulse or idea be translated into clunky language. Whenever work and life found some quietitude, the book would be there, knocking on the front door, standing perfectly still in the pouring rain, begging to be let in.
So, I let it in, over, and over, and over again. It eventually cohered into something called Funny Business. It cost me three years to write it, but it will cost you less than eggs on toast to buy it.
I recognise now that the impulse driving Funny Business was a very simple one: the way we think about improvised theatre is limited. Broadly, I consider it a return to its originators’ ambitions for a collective practice grounded in egoless spontaneity. In Paul Sills’ words improvisation is “beyond art and comedy: as necessary as conversation.” The first chapter grounds this vision in a historical context before exploring its implications through a number of shifting, overlapping enquiries. The second chapter focuses on the commerce of improvisation, the third focuses on the idea of improvisation as a kind of play, the fourth on improvisation as an art form (with a social justice lens), and the fifth chapter, loosely, explores it through the lens of the ancient Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi.
I see each of the five chapters of the book as possible routes up a mountain. I am still uncertain which, if any, is the most worthwhile direction in which to take improvisation, and my own work at the Perth Improvised Theatre Society reflects this ambivalence. At the Enspiral Foundation, which works on similar principles of decentralised organisation, they landed on: ‘Different for everyone, defined by you.’ I like that. If the only purpose of this book is to invite a handful of existing improvisers to question why they improvise, so they can better have a sense of the value they derive from it and the value they bring to it, then I will be happy.
I’ll have more to say on the book over the coming months and will post a few excerpts. However, for now, I do have a favour to ask: If you’re reading this post, there’s a very good chance you and I are already on a first name basis. I would consider it an enormous favour if you buy and read the book and, if you like it, leave a review. I do not have a publisher or a marketing budget, so my best hope is that it finds some traction within my immediate circles, and that those circles become wide enough to include audiences I don’t know personally.
Writing the book was a difficult, bloody process, but I genuinely believe there isn’t an improvisation book like this. I do believe, as Spolin and Sills did, that improvisation has the potential to be a practice of deep, meaningful importance to people, and that this modest little volume can nudge the improvisation community, however gently, in the direction of more depth, consideration, and imagination.