Failure With A Side Of Funny: HOW Improv Helps Us Deal With The Messy Unknown

During an audition for a cabaret show in New York City I was hungry to be cast in some years ago, I blanked out on every lyric of Tonight from West Side Story, a song I chose with absolute confidence because it’s been baked into my brain since 8th grade. With my working memory off-line, I demolished the full length of a Sondheim masterpiece with insane, improvised lyrics that included entire sections of nothing but vowel sounds. In terms of my goal at the audition, it was a humiliation. A defeat. As an improviser and trainer, it was proof that the psychological “muscle” and skills learned to make things up with other people in an improvisation transfer to other situations. In terms of my own well-being and mental health, it was an authentic triumph over a lifelong struggle with performance anxiety that had successfully blocked me from even showing up to a challenge like this many times over many years.

I did not run from the room.
I did not give up on the song.
I did not stand in awkward silence because I could not conjure the correct words.

Also I did not get the gig.
But the capacity to make things up on the spot under any social conditions and carry on with creative confidence while sinking internally was a real-life testimonial to the power of improv training. And it was ripe for comedy.

Through improv, I learned to take my failures with a side of funny.

What happened was a classic ancient-brain-meets-modern-problem scenario. The combination of high stakes, self-doubt, and my subconscious tilt toward self-sabotage with the coldness of the casting people triggered the same survival mechanism vulnerable humans needed to run from a charging lion: shoot adrenaline and cortisol through my body and drain the blood from my pre-frontal cortex — which is where the lyrics live.

The call was coming from inside the house. That’s nothing new for me, or for anyone else who lives with chronic anxiety and pushes through it. But because of improv training my brain switched from memory-seeking to making something up at lightning speed. This had a galvanizing effect, endowing a sense of empowerment over the messy moment. When the improviser broke through, it was a triumph of creativity over rationality. It was weird. It was funny. It took the starch out of the formality of an audition and pulled us into our humanity. It was a chance to choose joy over ego. The casting people did not hire me, but when they saw me laughing at the end, they laughed too.

They laughed with me. (That’s what I tell myself).

To be clear, it still hurt to know I was not getting this gig. But another benefit of improv training is learning to let go of an idea that is not working. To improvise, we have to expand into a non-linear, off-center reality in which we do not know what will happen next, and this creative expansion makes space for the messy unknown in real life. Also, we know every improv scene will end. We create and once that creation is complete, we let that go, too.

The only thing that remains of an improv experience is its impact on the people involved. We can take what that experience showed us into a new thing. The question is not whether we have those moments of panic, failure, or cognitive overload, but how we mine them for growth.

Improv training is rewarding and fun for its own sake, but it is also a psychological preparation for the messy unknowns of life that can emerge at any time.

Performance anxiety can derail us unexpectedly. Changes and unforeseen pressures at work, the challenges of caregiving for a loved one, a family crisis that demands decision-making, or any other situation in which the stakes are high can activate the stress response. Even when the odds are against us, we can keep on going. Do what we can. Improv has been shown to improve:

Engagement with non-linear reality
Positive encouragement and support
Exploration of the weird

There is plenty of research about the benefits of this creative practice Like this study: “Improving By Improvising: The Impact of Improvisational Theatre On Handling Expectation Violation During Social Creativity from The Journal of Creativity.

Or this one: “Comedic improv therapy for the treatment of social anxiety disorder” in the Journal of Creativity in Mental Health

There are so many more. I’m not just making this up.

Jude Treder-Wolff is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Creative Arts Therapist, storyteller, improviser and trainer.