As a form, the Harold is lauded by some and treated less reverentially by others… there’s no doubting that it’s had a huge impact on improv but, all these years since it was first invented, how relevant - and how watchable - is it now?

Love this podcast? Help it keep going here: https://supporter.acast.com/the-improv-chronicle-podcast

This episode features:

Kim “Howard” Johnson
Take a class with Howard at https://thecomedylab.net 

Michelle Gilliam
Take a class or workshop with Michelle by clicking here: www.improvmke.com

Alex Keen
See Alex in Sex, Lies & Improvisation and MATES: The Improvised '90s Sitcom, both appearing at theSpaceUK at Edinburgh Fringe 2021 and (hopefully) The Warren at Brighton Fringe 2021

Aarti Shastry
Follow The Adamant Eves on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/adamanteves 
See The Adamant Eves show on Saturday 19th September online here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/364499154532348/?acontext=%7B%22action_history%22%3A[%7B%22surface%22%3A%22page%22%2C%22mechanism%22%3A%22page_admin_bar%22%2C%22extra_data%22%3A%22%7B%5C%22page_id%5C%22%3A336042210433685%7D%22%7D%2C%7B%22surface%22%3A%22events_admin_tool%22%2C%22mechanism%22%3A%22events_admin_tool%22%2C%22extra_data%22%3A%22[]%22%7D]%2C%22has_source%22%3Atrue%7D

Episode transcript:

It’s Tuesday 8th September 2020

As a form, the Harold is lauded by some and treated less reverentially by others… there’s no doubting that it’s had a huge impact on improv but, all these years since it was first invented, how relevant - and how watchable - is it now?

Like many things, a lot of this debate can be put down to ‘do whatever works for you and your team’ but the debate around The Harold as a performance piece and training tool raises some interesting points… so let’s go back to the beginning of the creation of the form for a little slice of history.

Howard: I’m Howard Johnson, Kim ‘Howard' Johnson. I’m the co author of Truth In Comedy, I am an improv dinosaur. I go way back to the first days of the Improv Olympic, a Monty Python colleague and founder of The Comedy Lab dot net which is a TV writing program that's just launched online earlier this year 

Lloydie: So how did The Harold come about?

Howard: At the improv Olympic as it was known then, Del and Charna had just started it and I came along and a few months after I started working with the group, with the class and with Del and Charna there was some talk about doing classes er, doing shows out of the classes.Del and Charna had experimented a little bit. See, Charna had worked with David Shepherd. David Shepherd was not very interested in doing shows he was not very interested in anything theatrical 

Lloydie: He was he was the Compass Players correct? 

Howard: That’s right, absolutely. David Shepherd went all the way back to the very beginning. His main interest was more as a social experiment. You know if you get a group of rabbis together and just put them on stage and just improvise together what would they come up? With a group of cops if you put a bunch of policeman together what would they come up? And Charna did the same sort of things when she was working the David Shepherd. It didn't turn out terribly well. They kind of went their separate ways by mutual agreement. That's when Del came along. Charna had met Del - she taken some workshops with him before and they started working together on improv. They didn't know exactly what they wanted to do. When I first started with Del and Charna they weren't talking about performing quite yet. We were doing you know the usual exercises Del was you know, we're doing scenes with Del. Then we got into something called slow comedy. it was something that Del was particularly interested in but er slow comedy would involve giving up your first immediate knee jerk response to a statement not your second but waiting for your third so it would take about thirty seconds to comment or respond to someone's comment and you came up with some really interesting stuff. Del and Charna sat down and just try to figure out how can we make this thing as bulletproof as possible. How can we make this stuff that had previously been a big gamble, because that was the problem with long form improv when it worked it was brilliant but when it didn't it just died. So they wanted to come up with a way to make long form improv into a performance piece that would be acceptable, you know to audiences. So that there would be at least a minimum standard of quality and the way they did that was Charna took the old time dash game which was an old Viola Spolin game. It was basically and I’m sure you guys I'm sure know, it was an interwoven series of three scenes that would just kinda jump through time and it would make three stops. So you would have Scene 1A, 2A, 3A,  then you would have a game then you would have  2A, 2B… well you get the idea. That there was the classic time-dash game and Del or rather Charna would come up with all of these games. That's what Charna did she taught her students, who were very beginning students, games. And we would plug those in kind of like the act breaks if you will so that's how that was set up and Del would focus on the scene work with us and that was great because there's no better person you could have working on the scene work than Del. It really seemed to click right off the bat. I don't remember anything really terrible.

Lloydie: Fast forward to 2020 and there’s a new improv theater being set up in Milwaukee

Michelle: I'm Michelle Gilliam I'm based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and I started doing improv a little over twenty three years ago right here in Milwaukee and I absolutely love it. I just started my own theatre here but I've also had the pleasure of being immersed in the Chicago scene as well as the Boston scene and have performed in New York and hung out there quite a bit as well. 

Lloydie: So with starting a theater and with your breadth of experience, what has been yur approach to using Harold?

Michelle: Being in Milwaukee we're kind of the short form capital of the world is what I call it because Comedy Sportz has been here for almost forty years so I haven't broached the Harold quite yet, just because my town is so young as far as long form improv is concerned that I have to look at how it's actually going to be approached 

Lloydie: Given that you are starting up do you think it's still relevant form? 

Michelle: I do think it is still a relevant form. I think that the Harold is sort of like a nerdy form that most people should learn but I mean I don't think everybody has to like get good at it or and and even if someone doesn't learn it I don't think it's a huge deal but I think that to be taken seriously like if someone from my Milwaukee community moves out to LA let's say when things are safe to do so again I would want them to have, you know, those skills and abilities to have under their belt but also be just as comfortable doing short form or all form or anything Is it relevant still? Maybe not as much as it has been but I do think it's still relevant.

Lloydie: Alex Keen runs the Sheffield Improv Jam in Yorkshire U. K. as well as coaching Strike Comedy in Sheffield and teaching workshops and drop-ins. He feels improv has moved on a lot since Harold came into being and as a result its relevance has diminished.

Alex: I think at the time when the Harold was being created, a lot of the concepts that the group was striving towards were kind of unknown in improv this this push towards more kind of more emotionally connected scenes and exploring themes more than, you know, simply putting on something that was there to have a laugh and Harold was around that time and became the format where all of these things were manifest and that was a hugely important moment in improv history but I think it's it's presence in so many so many different courses and and on so many different stages in in the modern age is more of an artifact of that than because it is the perfect ideal form for improv.

Lloydie: How would you replace it then?

Alex: I don't know that it needs to be replaced necessarily. I think for me there is, with the Harold comes this, the purpose of it is this striving towards having these three seemingly disparate story lines or scenes that that sort of merge either narratively or on a common theme and that when done well is really impressive but I don't think it's necessarily the only way to achieve those goals of having, you know, emotionally connected scenes and engaging storylines that deal with thematic topics.

Lloydie: Is there something to be said for the skills he learned in Harold you know call backs and what have you and the complexity of the format being a good training tool for people who do want to go in and do say free form montage:

Alex: I think they’re definitely useful skills to work on but I don't know that the Harold is necessarily the best way of teaching to make a call back. I mean if you want to teach someone to make call backs why does that have to happen within a framework of, well you're gonna have. you know, you're going to definitely come back to this scene in in your second beat and then the next scene following that in the second beat. Why don't we just teach, well you're gonna do this exercise you gonna do three scenes one after the other and they’re gonna be unconnected but in the third scene, you know, I want you to reference something that happened in the first scene. If you want to train call backs as a specific you know comedic device you can teach that independently of a much broader structure that comes with its own huge set of baggage.

Lloydie: But Michelle feels there is a lot to be gained from learning and performing Harold 

Michelle: I remember when I was on one of my first Harold teams in Boston, just learning you know what it took for me to remember the beats and be able to do call backs and be able to you know flesh things out in second and third beats was huge after having performed so, you know all the first beats and everything in the, in the group game. So I think that it helps with memory, I think it helps with, you know, if you're on a team for quite some time I think it helps with you know the camaraderie and the chemistry of your teammates. I do think other things of course can do that as well, but I think, I think it can help with a lot and also like I said it's unfortunately kind of like a snobby or a nerdier thing, but I think that when you do kind of know the Harold there's like  that whole like level in our industry but that is kind of going away which is really cool too 

Lloydie: So what about people who have just never performed Harold before? I spoke to a member of a successful team in Bangalore he's never performed a single Harold.

Aarti: Hi, I’m Aarti and I’m part of Improv Comedy Bangalore and the Adamant Eves, and I've been improvising since 2016. The Adamant Eves were part of Improv Comedy Bangalore so when we joined Improv Comedy Bangalore, we realised that there were equal numbers of men and women in the ensemble and that's when a couple of other improvisers said we could create an all women improv ensemble which would be the first in India and which would be amazing to have one. So in 2017 June or July of 2017 we met up and we decided to form this ensemble and this was just going to be an experiment of sorts in my head at least and I thought we’re all women and we love improv and we do improv and let's see how everyone responds to an old woman ensemble especially with the stereotypes that at least in India that go around, that women are ‘not funny’ and a lot of jokes at women's expense. So how would an audience like that react to an all women improv ensemble that do like comedy theater, storytelling and all like that.

Lloydie: And what's the reaction been like?

Aarti: It's been fantastic. So when in 2017 we were like, we’ll do one show in six months and there was a huge prep-work to it, as if we were like holding a festival, and now The Adamant Eves are like, okay let’s do a show next week or something and the week after that.

Lloydie: So is there a reason you’ve never done Harold and opted for other forms instead?

Aarti: So it also goes back to how we got into improv and I can speak about the Adamant Eves, the improv team I’m part of. So all the learning that we've gotten is through instructors and teachers who’ve come and visited us or if we have gone out to somewhere and learned something we’d do like information dissemination with our group. So in all of this experience we never had a teacher who delved deeply into the Harold so we never really got to learn the Harold in depth. So we never performed better but we had teachers who taught us things like the Armando and The Cutting Room just open senes, montages etc. so we've been lucky that we've learned all those other forms as well. Sometimes I feel that we've missed out a little, because we  love the Armando so much and storytelling so much that we that's become our go-to format whenever we perform because we love storytelling and we know that we’ll do good when we do the Armando, but at the same time I also feel that there are so many other forms and formats that  I haven't explored and the Adamant Eves as an ensemble hasn't explored and it's just that one push and nudge or someone telling us exactly how it goes, or someone just popping the question ‘here why don't we do this or that’ so yeah even though I love all the other performances and formats that we’ve done I fell like we can try the other formats as well 

Lloydie: For Michelle, Harold is now part of a wide range of forms that people can learn and learn from 

Michelle: I think that there was a time you know when it was obviously more relevant. I think that now that our landscape is expanding and its expanding even more with online, which is pretty neat, and I don't think we're beholden to this standard that we used to be beholden to as improv nerds. I think that a lot of different styles are being respected and yeah you don't have to know what that is or or do it in order to love improv, be passionate about it and and want to perform it and yeah I like I kinda like that it's going away from that because I definitely don't come from a traditional background of improv you know, started in Milwaukee with just short form and then went to college in Chicago and and then I moved to Boston a little bit you know later on and just all different types and and focuses. Yeah I don't think we're as beholden to it as we once were 

Lloydie: As a form, one of the criticisms of Harolds, certainly ones that don't work at least, is that they're not very easy for non-improvisers to understand. Here’s Alex again.

Alex: There's a piece of music called “Classical Gas” which was like a very minor hit in the 1970s but it’s become incredible popular with classical guitar players because playing it on the guitar, it jumps through so many different styles and so many different kind of, you know, keys and different kind of elements of music that it's a huge challenge to play but it's only really popular among guitarists. If you hear it without having the context of it it can almost - some performances of it sounds like just this big jumble of stuff coming at you and I kind of feel like the Harold is a bit like the improvisers version of “classical gas” it’s this thing that's incredibly fun to do and show off your technical prowess but you wouldn't necessarily want to bust it out at a karaoke night or something.

Lloydie: But for Howard, when it comes to watching Harolds, as with most forms I suspect, it's all down to the skill of the performers.

Howard: I think a Harold is as good and as worthwhile and as valid as the people that are performing it.  I think you could say that about most people. I'll bet if you saw you know, brought back from the grave John Belushi and Harold Ramis and people like that to perform a Harold I’ll bet it would be a pretty good Harold and I bet a lot of people would really enjoy that and get a lot out of it. If, you know, it's people that aren't terribly inspired by the form and are just going through the motions, yeah it's probably not going to be anything you're going to want to sit through so I think it's totally dependent on the people that are doing the Harold. 

You’ll be able to see shows, take classes with and find out more about our participants by following the links in this episodes show notes. Do check them out.

Next time…. On the Improv Chronicle Podcast…

Accents and impressions… some people can and others of us… struggle.

How useful are accents and impressions in improv, how can we use them respectfully and what do we do when most people can’t tell our French accent from our Australian?

The improv chronicle podcast is produced and presented by me, Lloydie James Lloyd. YOU can help the podcast right now - Please subscribe and rate us on your favourite podcast app If you have an idea for a possible episode  go to  - www.improvchronicle.com