Imagine: How Creativity Works (14 page)

Nobody knows why Clay feels so different in the salt water. Some speculate that it’s the negative ions, or the predictable rhythms of the swells, or the way liquid wraps around the body. Clay himself describes the ocean as a kind of psychological vacation, the only place where he can truly relax and be himself. “When I’m there [in the ocean] I don’t need to think so much,” he says. “I don’t need to worry. I’m just there.” The effect of the water is instant: as soon as Clay slides into the water and paddles forward on his board, all of his autistic anxieties disappear. His body goes slack and loose. It’s as if his DLPFC — the fold of brain that keeps us in handcuffs — is soothed by the ceaseless pulse of the waves. The boy who is so stiff on dry land turns into a jazz musician, able to translate his immense surfing knowledge into bursts of athletic creativity. He’s no longer thinking about what he doesn’t understand, or what might go wrong, or what the people on shore will say. Instead, he’s absorbed in the possibilities of the moment, in the strange range of movements that can be wrung from a fiberglass board and a wall of water. “People always ask me, ‘How did you do that? Why did you do that?’ But I never know,” Clay says. “Because it’s like when I’m in the water, I’m just doing it. I’m not thinking. That’s why I love it.”

The mysterious ability of the ocean to silence Clay’s inhibitions is apparent in conversation. While spending time with Clay on Maui, I watched him flail for words during our interviews; he avoided eye contact and stared instead at his feet. Even the sim-plest questions led to awkward silences or stammers, as if Clay were terrified of saying the wrong thing. And yet, when I talked to Clay in the warm Hawaiian water, he surprised me with his eloquence. His sentences were filled with vivid metaphors; the same teenager who couldn’t finish a sentence on dry land morphed into a poet. One day, when Clay and I were floating on our boards on a remote Maui beach, I asked him what it felt like to surf inside a barrel. “It’s like being inside a throat when someone coughs and spits you out,” he said. I then asked Clay what he loved about waves, why he always wanted to be in the ocean. Clay went silent and looked away at an incoming swell. I assumed he was going to ignore my question. But then Clay uttered a line that could easily be his slogan: “Waves are like toys from God. And when I’m out here, I’m just playing.”

3.

The Second City theater and training center in Los Angeles — the largest school of improv in the world — is located on a seedy stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. It’s surrounded by lost tourists, chintzy souvenir shops, and X-rated-movie theaters. There’s the Walk of Fame on the sidewalk, but most of the celebrity plaques are obscured by old gum. Step inside the school, however, and everything changes. The hallways echo with laughter and loud voices; hipsters run about like preschoolers on a playground.

When Second City was founded, in 1959, it was the first American theater dedicated to comic improv. At the time, the concept seemed absurd: Why would anyone want to watch actors make stuff up on stage? Performers were supposed to recite their lines, not invent their own. It didn’t help that the techniques of Second City were borrowed from a set of theater games for children developed by the social worker Viola Spolin. But the childishness was the point: the premise of Second City was that little kids shouldn’t have all the fun. The activities that were so liberat-ing for third-graders might also help professional actors. And so the opening lines of Spolin’s influential 1963 textbook Improvisation for the Theater became the credo of Second City: “Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater.” It’s just a matter of learning how to play.

In the decades since, Second City has become a factory for comic talent. Its alumni include many of the most influential figures in American comedy: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Joan Rivers, Harold Ramis, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Adam McKay, and Tina Fey. These performers have headlined network sitcoms and pioneered classic skits on Saturday Night Live. They’ve anchored shows on Comedy Central and starred in Hollywood blockbusters. In recent years, their emphasis on improv — the kind of spontaneous humor mastered at Second City — has redefined American comedy. If the old model for funny movies was Airplane! or The Naked Gun — scripts filled with punchy one-liners and elaborate gags — the most successful comedies are now full of improvised scenes. Just look at The Colbert Report or The Office or the films of Judd Apatow: the funniest moments are rarely written in advance.
(
One of my favorite examples of cinematic improv comes from the Austin Powers series. Mike Myers, playing Dr. Evil, repeatedly shushes his adult son, Scott. After a few standard shushes, Myers starts improvising, and this is when the laughs begin: “Let me tell you a story about a man named Sh!” Myers says. Scott looks confused, and then begins to open his mouth. “Shush even before you start,” Myers says. He then shushes again: “That was a preemptive Sh!,” before ending the scene with the following ad lib: “Just know I have a whole bag of Sh! with your name on it.” The shush scene is the best in the movie, and Myers made it up on the spot.)

As a result, the jokes feel visceral and unstudied, ripe with the humor of real life. (Apatow has said that improv helps “gets the imagined typer out of the way.”) Bill Murray, another Second City alum, once explained why every actor should learn how to improvise: “I think that good actors always — or if you’re being good, anyway — you’re making it better than the script. That’s your fucking job. It’s like, Okay, the script says this? Well, watch this. Let’s just roar a little bit. Let’s see how high we can go.”
(
The rise of improv in Hollywood comedies is re
fl
ected in the amount of tape that’s now shot during production. While most scripted comedies shoot fewer than four hundred thousand feet of tape — a 
fi
nished movie is between eight thousand and ten thousand feet long — 
fi
lms that rely on improv typically require more than a million feet. Apatow might use a thousand feet of 
fi
lm on a single scene while he lets the actors explore and improvise.)

And this is why I’m visiting the Second City training center. Comic talent seems so innate — some people are just funnier than others — but the premise of these packed classes is that humor can be taught. Of course, this doesn’t mean the process is going to be painless or that any of us will turn into Stephen Colbert after a few classes. “The hardest part of teaching comic improv is that people think it’s so easy,” says Joshua Funk, the artistic director of Second City in Hollywood. “They just see some people talking and being funny and they’re like: ‘I know how to be funny! I said something funny last week! I can do this!’ But they can’t. It takes years of work before you can get good at improv. It’s like music that way. You can’t just pick up a sax and expect to be Coltrane. You have to work at not giving a fuck.”

This ability to not care what others think is one of the fundamental skills taught at Second City. A typical class begins with a series of warm-up exercises. First, the performers play a few children’s games, such as duck, duck, goose or Simon says or zip-zap-zop. Then the actors start strutting around the room making a series of inappropriate bodily sounds, from errant belches to flamboyant farts. After that, the students move to “conducted rants,” screaming at the top of their lungs about something that makes them angry. Finally, they arrange folding chairs in a circle and engage in what’s known as “five minutes of therapy.” The goal is to get confessional as quickly as possible, to share secret thoughts and repressed feelings. One student talked about a random hookup that went badly; another described a recent fight with her mother. The short stories feel raw and unfiltered, and that’s the point. “The warm-ups are all about getting rid of the censor,” says Andy Cobb, a veteran Second City instructor. “It’s about putting people in a state of mind where they’re going to say the first thing that pops into their head, even if it seems silly or stupid. Because that inner voice, that voice telling you not to do something — that’s the voice that kills improv.”

The voice Cobb is referring to comes from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, that chunk of tissue responsible for impulse control. The students are learning how to switch it off, how to silence their inhibitions like those jazz musicians in the brain scanner. “When someone is struggling onstage, when they’re just not being very funny, we call that ‘being in your head,’ ” Cobb says. “The audience can smell fear. It can sense even the slightest hesitation. And that’s why we spend so much time teaching people how to ignore their better judgment when they’re onstage.” (Keith Johnstone, one of the most influential instructors of improv, puts it this way: “In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers.”) According to Cobb, the best improv artists get so good at turning off their filters — he refers to this as “leaving your mind” — that after the show is over, they have no recollection of what just happened. “It’s really weird,” he says. “You’re so in the moment that you disappear. You’re making people laugh, but it’s like it’s not even you.”

Of course, it’s not enough to just relinquish self-control. Even as the improv actors silence their DLPFC, they still have to remain profoundly aware of everything happening on stage. Comic improv, after all, is an ensemble performance: every joke is built on the line that came before. This is why, after the Second City students learn to stop worrying about saying the wrong thing, they begin practicing a technique called “Yes, and . . .” The basic premise is simple: When performing together, improvisers can never question what came before. They need to instantly agree — that’s the “yes” part — and then start setting up the next joke. I saw this process at work during a late-night performance at Second City in which six actors were doing a long-form sketch known as a Harold. For this sketch, the audience shouts out two difficult themes, and these are then woven into a single skit; in this case, the themes were obesity and religion. For a few brief seconds, the actors looked lost — they had no idea what to do. But then someone moved a chair to the center of the stage and began acting out a meal. Someone else followed with a second chair and then moaned: “Jesus, I’m hungry!” This led another actor to say: “Hold your horses, Jesus is coming as fast as he can.” At this point, an actor named Jamison strolled onto the scene: “Okay, I’m here, we can all eat! And I brought some wine I just made out of water.” After a few more exchanges, the story of the sketch became clear: the ensemble was acting out the Last Supper. A rambling conversation ensued, full of witty references (“Why is damn Judas always late?”) and blasphemous jokes (“Jesus, these crackers are the same color as your flesh! Isn’t that weird?”) At one point, Jesus sees Mary Magdalene stroll by and makes a few ribald comments to Paul and Peter. The audience erupted in laughter. Not all of the lines worked, of course. Sometimes, the crowd just chuckled po-litely. But the sketch was often deeply funny, eliciting the kind of belly laughs that can only come from spontaneous jokes. Afterward, Andy Cobb gave them the ultimate compliment: they had been playing out of their minds.

4.

The lesson of letting go is that we constrain our own creativity. We are so worried about playing the wrong note or saying the wrong thing that we end up with nothing at all, the silence of the scared imagination. While the best performers learn how to selectively repress their inhibitions, to quiet the DLPFC on command, it’s also possible to lose one’s inhibitions entirely. The result is always tragic, but it’s a tragedy often limned with art.

Anne Adams was a forty-six-year-old cell biologist at the University of British Columbia when she was overcome with the desire to paint. She had no artistic training or experience, just a sudden need to create. And so she bought some stretched canvases and turned a spare bedroom into her studio. Before long, Adams was spending ten hours a day making art, painting everything from local streetscapes to abstract representations of pi. After a few years, Anne began receiving high-profile commissions; her art was featured in numerous galleries and exhibitions. She continued to create for the next fifteen years, until she was felled by an incurable brain disease.

John Carter decided to become a painter shortly after his wife passed away. He was fifty-two years old and a successful investment broker with a two-stroke golf handicap. His friends were shocked by the sudden career change, as John had shown no previous interest in art. (He’d never even been to the local museum.) But John said he had no choice: he was suddenly “bombarded” by visions. And so he moved into a run-down loft, stopped eating red meat, and started wearing bright purple shirts. At first, his paintings were ugly, filled with random streaks of color. But then, after a few months of John’s intense art-making, his canvases started to take on an ethereal beauty. Bruce Miller, his neurologist, describes the shift:

No one can remember exactly when John’s paintings began to appeal to the eye, but it seemed to happen around the same time that he began to have trouble remembering the meaning of words. Unexpectedly, as John’s language abilities eroded, his visual senses became more acute. John devoted these new visual skills to his painting, spending hours in front of a canvas perfecting every line, often using the same purples and yellows that he favored in his clothes.

John started winning numerous local art awards, and his work was displayed in a New York City gallery. Despite this artistic success, John’s mental health deteriorated. His short-term memory vanished; he was prone to angry outbursts; he was no longer able to live alone. John was put on numerous psychiatric medications, but nothing helped. By the time he died, at the age of sixty-eight, he couldn’t talk or drive or eat. But he still painted every day.

Anne and John both suffered from the same fatal disease: frontotemporal dementia. Nobody knows what causes the illness, but the damage is irreversible. The disease begins when spindly neurons in the prefrontal cortex start to die; the brain area is soon riddled with holes. While frontotemporal dementia comes with a long list of terrible symptoms, from memory loss to paralysis, one of the first common effects is an insatiable need to create.