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What Does a TV Writer on Plays Well With Others Say Improv Feels Like?
On Plays Well with Others, a writer describes improv and sketch as putting an idea out, watching it get smashed, and jumping back up to do it again. The useful part, he says, is depersonalizing the joke: you have bombed a thousand times, so a silent room does not have to ruin the day. In a writers' room the same rule is yes-and. You get more trust by expanding the idea already on the table than by yanking the room in a new direction. He has been a sounding board for Judd Apatow's stand-up, the way he once worked with Jimmy Fallon, and they had built two hours of material, all of it Apatow's.
