How is the New York improv scene different from the Chicago scene?
I’ve noticed that things in Chicago play a little slower. That was a hard transition for me to make. The scenes accelerate faster here in New York. Two people will start a scene and before you know it, somebody will tag one of them out and take it to a different location. It gets faster and faster and faster. In Chicago, you would have a four-minute scene with just two people, or one scene for 45 minutes. It’s a different style in terms of the patience it takes. You can go two minutes without laughs, but then you’ll hit something and get really hard laughs. In New York, it’s a rapid-fire, not-gonna-let-you-breathe sort of pace. But it’s all the same principles even though it took me like two years to feel comfortable doing their style of improv. I’d stand on the back line like, “What? Oh… I have an idea oops. They did it. There it goes.” Do you think you access the same part of your brain when you’re writing as you do when you’re performing? When it’s really going well writing-wise, it
