Impro is a handbook for running a cultHere’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro:

Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed adults by Western culture and education

The process of becoming more creative and expressive is largely a process of unlearning these habits of repression

Improv — improvisational comedy — is thus not just the skeleton key for learning to act, but for unlocking a more authentically human way of life

This take doesn’t sound particularly original, but references to Impro pop up in all kinds of places: in influential tech blogs, as part of the initial process of onboarding for Palantir, and on the reading list of multiple big-tech founders. Impro is part of the secret canon of Silicon Valley, right alongside books like Seeing Like a State and The Power Broker. Why is that? For two reasons: first, because Johnstone’s outsider critique of established institutions is appealing; and second, because Impro is a handbook for running a cult.

Defense mechanisms and status

The part of Impro that is most obviously useful to software engineers is Johnstone’s chapter on status.

According to him, status games pervade all social interactions. Even innocuous, friendly conversations operate in terms of status. When you apologize or downplay something to “be nice”, that’s performing low status; when you reassure somebody, that’s performing high status; when you and a friend are comparing stories, you’re making friendly bids for status from each other. In the workplace, these status games are conditioned by the formal status of your role: you must allow your boss the high status position most of the time, or you’ll be (correctly) perceived as insubordinate. This is understood in some cultures, where it’s often called “face”, but in Western cultures it’s taboo to openly discuss status games.

The core social skill is the ability to deliberately alter your status. Someone who can only perform low status is a weak person, pitiable, annoying. Someone who can only perform high status is a braggart, a posturer, dangerous. To be effective socially, you must be able to switch between high and low status when appropriate, sometimes from sentence to sentence. I wrote about this exact point at the end of Big tech engineers need big egos: effective senior+ software engineers must be able to present as high status in order to be useful authorities, but also to switch to low status in order to take direction from the company leaders.

As an example, Johnstone describes in detail how he manipulates status in the classroom. He begins by sitting on the floor (deliberately assuming low status), and explaining that if his students fail, it’s his fault not theirs, since he’s the expert. The initial low status puts the class at ease, but in his words, ”[my] actual status is going up, since only a very confident and experienced person would put the blame for failure on himself.” These skills are not just useful for improv comedy.

Improvisation as a lifestyle choice

Impro is not just a book about improvising well. It’s a book about how you should live your life. In other words, Johnstone thinks that everyone would be better off if they became more spontaneous and ditched their shells of over-analysis. He criticizes the culture of Western thought in a number of different areas. According to him:

Everyone is more or less equivalently mentally ill, but “sane” people simply have better coping mechanisms

Cities and “taking pills” (read: antidepressants) are obscene, but you should be able to make sexual jokes in the workplace and generally be uninhibited

If we were free from the puritanical shackles of Western culture, childbirth would not be painful1

Johnstone didn’t come up with these ideas — they’re standard counterculture positions from the 1960s and 1970s — but it goes to show how he connected improvisational comedy to this general anti-establishment political program. Johnstone ran his classes and theatre troupe like a revolutionary cadre. Here are some quotes from Something Like a Drug: An Unauthorized Oral History of Theatresports:

So of course when I was invited to join Loose Moose Theatre and train at improvisational games late at night in an abandoned garage in a run-down portion of the city, I was thrilled. I remember thinking, This is a revolutionary act.

Keith [Johnstone] got a group of his more talented students together to start improvising outside of school hours. Usually in his basement.

The Secret Impro group—it’s very strange. It was very much that Keith said we were going to do this, and we’d just do it. It was like we were sheep. Keith would say when we were going to do a show, and we’d just do it, blindly. Like I said, if we had the videotapes now, we’d be very embarrassed and probably never go on stage again. We became a group of people who would follow Keith. There was always that sort of “tag” put on those people who were with Keith and those people who...