"Yes, and..."

Joan Rivers ruins everything. The fundamental principle in the art of improv on stage is the "Yes, and..." Principle. In order for any improv game or scene to work, all the actors need to be able to trust their partners to leap with them into made-up territory. And not just leap, but leap and add.

They use this rule of "Yes, and..." to do this.

If someone says "Its great to be in Spain," then you comment on the weather in Spain. If someone then says "Look at that bull," you yell stampede and run away. You agree and add more information. Yes, and...

Del Close was an improv master and pioneer from Chicago who taught students like Chris Farley, Stephen Colbert, John Candy, Tina Fey, Bill Murray, and Mike Myers. In the book "Truth in Comedy" Del recounts the night Joan Rivers screwed it all up.

Del and Joan are playing a married couple in the middle of an argument.

"I want a divorce." Joan said. "Honey, what about the children!" Del said. "We don't have any children!" Joan replies.

Del explains that what followed was cheap laughter and a breakdown of the scene. Apparently this incidence angered him for years. He would often bring it up in classes as an example of what not to do.

"She would break the reality of a scene in order to get a laugh. Someone would say, 'What about our children?' and Joan would say, 'We don't have any.' Okay, you get a quick, easy laugh, but you've also punched a big hole in the scene. All the actors have on stage is each other's belief and faith and if that's gone, then you've just got cheap wit."

Joan got laughter from a cheap joke, at the expense of the scene and Del's trust. Del was giving himself to the scene and going out on a limb, providing more information. "What about the children!" He was giving Joan an easy pitch.

He was improvising.

As Del explains in the book, everything falls apart when there is no trust and no willingness to take whatever your partner is giving you - no matter how dumb or off topic - and not only say "Yes," but to say "Yes, and...". Agreement is the one rule that can never be broken.

Yes is better than a no. "Ok sure, what about the children?"

But a "Yes, and..." drives a scene and two actors into interesting territory. "The children can take care of themselves, its been years since we adopted them from the circus."

When improv actors constantly trust each other and continually say "Yes, and..." the scene takes flight.

The Obvious

There are some obvious areas we could apply the "Yes, and..." Principle: conflict resolution, negotiating, dealing with insane toddlers... marriage...

I believe the best leaders are good at improvisation and the "Yes, and..." Principle. Good leaders take the input and energy of a team, no matter how dumb or off base, and are able to say "Yes, and..." They find what is good in the team members and their views and opinions and are able to affirm while also using their expertise and foresight to push the group forward towards something better and bigger than anything one individual, even the leader, could have accomplished.

If you want to start increasing the motivation, energy, and creativity of a group start saying more "Yes, and..." and less "No. That won't work. That's not right. We can't."

Here's the Deep...

Life can suck at times.

Sometimes it doesn't suck and its more like that time you overdosed on double chocolate cake chocolate ice cream at your 5th chocolate birthday party and your mom had to chocolate induce a sugar coma with horse tranquilizers to get you chocolate down from the top of the Dallas football stadium chasing chocolate squirrels.

But a lot of times life can suck. People die. Friends move away. Jobs are hard. Your wife never folds her clothes and leaves her boxers on the floor. (Wait...)

One of the hardest things to grasp as a Christian is man's free in stark contrast to God's all-knowing, all-forseeing, all-powerful, and all-everything-ness. If God already knows what will happen, do we really have free will? What about all the suck in the world?

God's providential care and ability to direct and steer everything towards goodness and love and truth, even when people are making the wrong decisions or life sucks, is hard to wrap the brain matter around.

The Improv

But maybe the way life works, and the way we should dance with God, is a lot like improv on a stage with two actors.

There are things we can't control: genetics, other people, cancer, Michael Voris, weather, our upbringing, mistakes. These things are handed to us. And they don't make sense most of the time and they seem unfair.

And we could spend a lot of time stomping our feet and giving a "No!" Or maybe we get a cheap laugh out of our NO by resorting to things like drinking, depression, complacency, porn, anger, resentfulness, envy, gluttony, sloth, and the like. Its a quick fix that doesn't last.

From the book:

"What kind of improvisor goes for the quick joke at the expense of his partner and the scene? Usually someone who is weak, insecure, or egotistical. It is an act of desperation, done to control the scene or to try and look better."

Maybe a better response is a constant "Yes, and..." to God. We don't have to just sit back and passively accept things. But we don't have to spend our life boxing air either.

Sometimes an actor won't know where his partner is going until later in the sketch. I sure as pants don't always know where God is going with things. I tend to think in timeframes like the next hour, the next week, the next year. God thinks in much longer timelines.

Some People who lived the "Yes, and..."

• St. Patrick, captured into a slave trade, effectively makes Ireland Catholic.
• St. Ignaitus takes an cannonball to the leg, then becomes the founder of a religious order.
• St. Jerome, plagued by lust, translates the Hebrew Bible into Latin as a form of distraction. (Hebrew is frustrating.)
• Chaira Badano gets bone cancer, inspires thousands, becomes one of my favorite recent almost-saints.

(Comment at the end of this post with a Saint or person of faith who took an obstacle thrown into their lives and made the best of it. I'll add it to the list.)

The genius of the best improv actors is they can take any situation, however bad or good, and run with it.  The most beautiful and insightful works of art come from the exposure to conflict, pain, and suffering faced bravely and honestly. There is a truth to be learned in the emptying of self into suffering. The greatest artist once said "Take up your cross and follow me."

So maybe today you can start trusting and leaping into the unknown. Trust God a little more on the stage and start saying "Yes, and..." to those unclear and hard parts of life. That's way more interesting. That's way more fulfilling.

Don't be a Joan Rivers.

Yuck.

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The book Truth in Comedy: A Manual for Improvisation(recommended by @ChaseWReeves)  is well worth a few bucks. Why would you read an improv book if you don't do improv? A lot of the ideas in this book are transferrable. They apply to writing, speaking, working with people, enjoying people, and art of making art. If you get in front of lots of people to speak on a regular basis, this book helped me and it will help you.

Full Discolure: When I link to books on my site they are normally affiliate links.  I get a few cents if you order something from Amazon after clicking through a link on my site. This goes to help pay for the expenses of maintaining this website. Thanks a bunches and bunches.

God Plays the Lottery

So I asked God to tell me he loves me. Sappy I know but I needed a hug ya feel? So I randomly flipped to Isaiah 43 and then proceeded to cry a bit. Trivial? Chance? Easy for you to say, until it happens to you.

It's a cognitive bias to constantly assume cognitive bias. The God of chance will always give you a way to explain Him away, an easy out, so you remain free. But what if, just for today, you lived as if everything happened because He willed it?

Sure it sounds like over-optimistically pushing purpose onto the purposelessness of time + matter + chance. But faced daily with chance and free-will as simultaneously part of the human condition, we don't blink.

Or at least we would rather not.

Is it too much to ask to believe God freely wills chance to work for his and your good?

God is eternally drawing lottery numbers, like an ecstatic three year old with too much money to give away, and showering winners with divine providence.

Chekov's Guns

In 4th grade we lived in Biloxi Mississippi on the military base so it was safe enough for me to walk 8-10 houses down from ours to get my friends Robbie, who was a little older than me and had a wicked mean sister, and a hispanic kid who's name I don't remember. I do remember that his house smelled weird and he was missing the first two knuckles of his pointer finger and he limped when he ran because "my legs are not the same length." All the cookie-cutter stucco houses looked the same and it was hot no matter who's 20 sq. ft. front yard you were in. But we knew to stay away from the girl's house across the street from me because she had a mean Dalmatian that was big and going blind and only my driveway had a basketball hoop so we played basketball at my house most days anyway.

A welcome addition to our crew was Sara who was a skinny tom-boy with a bowl-cut of short blonde hair. I liked Sara because she had a quiet cuteness and was funny and could hit like a 5th grader. She lived one block of houses over, across a more busy main street, so I always prayed that she would come play with us because I wasn't allowed to walk that far. Before I moved away to New Hampshire she gave me a gorilla beanie baby that I didn't get rid of until a few years ago.

Our weird community of friends ran the neighborhood and other kids would join our adventures and elaborate games/dramas. For some reason I was always the mediator. Not necessarily always in the sense of being the peace-maker (though this happened a lot) but also being morale-booster and visionary adventure-brainstormer. And I really put a lot of myself into being the mouthpiece of our group. I wasn't the strongest, Robbie could beat me up if I got too cocky, but I definitely could sway the group one way or another most days.

I remember a few summer days of continuous 4th grade melodrama causing tense division in our hood group and waking up one morning in bed wishing we could all play together again like the good old days (last week). I woke up and tried clenching my fist as tight as I could and, as you know if you've ever tried this, it was really hard to do.

All I remember is that somehow I used this phenomenon as an anecdote during a rousing speech to my sweaty peers in front of Robbie's house that somehow reconciled all our friendships and made everything better again.

I'm not sure I honestly understand how the guts of vocation really works. To me it seems like it involves two impenetrable mysteries: our free will and God's omniscience. But now that I'm three years into being a husband, father, youth minister, and catechist, I'm getting more and more Chekov's Gun kind of moments. Every time I prepare a catechesis, or walk on a stage to speak to a large audience, or get excited about explaining things I'm passionate about to my kids, I remember how hard it is to clench your fist in the morning and how our neighborhood's order was restored by a kid preaching to seven other elementary school kids standing in the grass.

Maybe when we die and are standing next to God looking back on every single moment of our lives, all those flickers will seem like an infinite number of Chekov guns. Every moment, regardless of how banal and boring sitting in your room when you are ten with nothing to do is, returns in the third act to show its latent significance.

I think I could spend an eternity laughing and crying with God as He explains all the elaborate work He put into writing my life. And realizing all the clenched fists and lost friends and words I yelled and really meant deep down in my gut all came from and sent me to the only Person who could pull any of this off, I think I could spend an eternity right there.

Criminals and Jesus

For Lent I've been trying to pray everyday with the Passion parts of the Gospels. Today was Luke 23:39-43. Jesus is crucified with two criminals. One who is repentant and one unrepentant.

One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” Luke 23:39-43

Sometimes us Christians are plagued by the curse of familiarity. Its tempting with this part of the passion to just gloss over and simplify it because we've heard it so many times. One criminal is angry and one repents. Jesus rewards the repentant criminal with "today you will be with me in Paradise."

Today in prayer I was wondering what the repentant criminal was thinking. His words seem odd.

He's saying his fear of God comes from the fact that He is condemned to die next to a man he strongly believes is innocent. It seems like Jesus and the criminals spent a good amount of time with each other. All three were "led away to be put to death" (Luke 23:32) and this makes me imagine all three of them making the journey from Jerusalem to the outer walls and hill of Golgotha. For some reason the repentant criminal knows Jesus is innocent. And this knowledge makes him feel his own guilt all the more.

I imagined myself, covered in guilt and being sent to my just punishment for my sins, like a criminal. How intense would I feel my guilt as I walked beside innocence himself? If I was forced to carry the instrument of my just death-sentence alongside an innocent man doing the same, how would that affect me? Would my cross seem a little lighter, my fear a little absurd, and my suffering a little small? Would I feel the pain of Jesus more than my own pain?

Crucifixion was reserved only for the worst criminals. Obviously these two guilty criminals did something so heinous and inhumane that the only acceptable punishment was a death that matched the perverseness of the crime.

The repentant criminal clearly believes on some level that Jesus is more than a man when he says "Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power."

The words that kept ringing in my head as I put myself in the place of the repentant sinner are: "I deserve this. You don't deserve this."

Walking next to a bloodied and beaten innocent man to our execution.

"I deserve this."

"You don't deserve this."

Walking in guilt next to the Son of God innocent and totally rejected.

"I deserve this."

"You don't deserve this."

Being crucified to my own cross. I who caused evil, hurt, pain, deception, suffering, destruction.

Watching nails go through the hands and feet of the one who did nothing but love, heal, forgive, accept, build, and purify.

"I deserve this."

"You don't deserve this."

I found myself screaming from the cross of my own sin:

I deserve this! You are all mad men! God is a madman! Take this innocent man's pain and give it to me! My hands deserve nails and His deserve adoration. I deserve this. Crucify me twice, but don't let me watch his blood spill and mix with mine. I can't bare to watch it. It is a scandal for the martyred man to die for the the one who makes him a martyr. The executed is dying for the executioner. Surely a graver sin is heaped on my guilt by condemning me to hang next to love's hanging? Does not this act of God make the depths of your soul shudder? God is a madman! Justice is being wretched apart in my soul by a mercy that will surely break me.

The just sentence is hard. But who could survive this sentence of mercy? Who could accept it easily?

Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.

Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power.

Jesus, remember me.