Improv So White?
“EVERYONE IN IMPROV TROUPE BALDING,” READ a 2012 Onion headline, with a photo showing a scrum of middle-aged white guys. The satiric story noted the guys’ collective pride in their accomplishments and their shared sensibilities, all while sidestepping their homogeneity and significant financial investment in their pastime.
The Onion’s parody hit on an uncomfortable truth about the improv world: For much of its history, improv has been a straight white man’s game. Anecdotal evidence abounds. Amy Seham’s history of underground improv, Whose Improv Is It Anyway?, shows that many women and people of color in the early improv scene felt estranged from all the “white guys in ties.” Native Chicagoan Shaun Landry, who cofounded the nation’s first African American improv troupe, Oui Be Negroes, recalls that during the late 1980s and early ’90s she could count the number of Black improvisers in the city “on one hand—and not even cover the entire hand.” And the improv luminaries on the Sgt. Pepper’s-style cover of Sam Wasson’s recent Improv Nation include only a handful of women and just two people of color.
Once upon a time, back in the ’50s and ’60s, improv was a tool; it helped Viola Spolin train actors, then aided Second City performers and directors in generating sketches. In the ’70s and ’80s, revolutionary guru Del Close reimagined improv as an art unto itself. By the ’90s, those ideas took
