'Something that you can’t get wrong' - Gary Morgan - New Unity - 29th June 2025
/Something that you can’t get wrong
This morning, we’ll look at improvised comedy and its parallels with Zen Buddist teachings, and how we can bring some spontaneity into our lives.
I was inspired to write this message by a phrase I’ve heard both doing improvised comedy, and someone said it once here in the meeting: ‘Here’s something that you can’t get wrong’. It’s a phrase which sums up a lot of the principles around improvised comedy, which as an anxious perfectionist who’s always rehearsing everything I want to say or do, I also find very helpful in daily life, and it got me thinking about what I can learn from taking part in going on stage and making things up on the spot.
When I was growing up one of the most exciting parts of my week was watching the TV show ‘Whose Line is it Anyway’. My hero was Richard Vranch, who made up a song on the piano while comedians like Josie Lawrence made up the words on the spot.
I always wanted to have a go at this, and it’s been a dream come true for me to take part in the last few years, as a musician and later as an improviser. And a big inspiration for this message comes from an online course I did recently, run by Andrew Cain of Play Connect, a Brighton improviser who focuses on how improvisation can improve our lives – in this case, how Zen buddhism and improvisation overlap.
How can there be something that you can’t get wrong? Nerves always ruined the joy of performance with a script for me. If I’m in a play or a musical and reading lines from a script or singing a song that’s already been written, then if I go off-piste or forget the words then you could say I am getting it wrong. Indeed, people can get quite angry if they go and see their favourite show and the cast are not performing it to the letter – unless it’s a jazz version!
However, if there isn’t a script, then there’s nothing to compare it to. So whatever I’m doing now must be right, it must be the definitive version – even if it involves stuttering, awkward silences, fainting, crazy ideas or things which don’t make people laugh or make sense in any way whatsoever. This is the way it was meant to be (my inner critic sometimes has other ideas). It’s like the poet David Whyte says: ‘We have to find the part of us that doesn’t know what to say. That’s the part that will speak.’ In fact, the ‘mistakes’ and missteps can be the highlight, just like the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing pottery with gold or silver, so instead of hiding the cracks we accentuate them and revel in them. The stress of performance is all about being attached to the outcome – so if mistakes make it better, there’s no need to worry!
It’s about the dichotomy of caring less and caring more. As an improviser, I’m trying to care less about my insecurities, who’s in the audience, and trying to make things go as they should. This frees me up to really be in character, who really cares a lot about what’s happening – we may even playfully build up the problem to comic effect and let the chaos ensue for a while, like films and stories do, before we try and fix problems like we usually would straight away in real life. Instead of ‘We’ve run out of strawberries’. ‘I’ll go to the Co-op and buy some’:
It would be:
‘We’ve run out of strawberries.’
‘Oh no, our jam making business won’t survive’.
‘Oh no, our parents are going to kill us for bankrupting their business only six months after they gave it to us’.
‘And they’re coming this afternoon!’
Does manufacturing catastrophes to resolve help us deal with the difficult situations life throws at us with a bit more composure? I hope so!
It’s interesting to compare how children and adults play. According to the book ‘The Improv Handbook’, children have one mission when trying something new: this is to have lots of goes at it. The more goes the better – I had 4 goes and you only had 3! Whereas adults want to sit back and assess whether they’d be any good at it, and only if the answer is yes, then they might get up and have a go – often expecting that one go to be perfect even if they’ve never done it before. That’s why in improv workshops, people are often asked to volunteer before they know what they’re volunteering for. We’re encouraged to walk onto the stage with absolutely no pre-conceived ideas about what’s going to happen. To try and figure out where I am and indeed who I am on the fly.
I recently did an improv workshop where we played the same way children play. If a child wants to play at being Batman and the scene takes place in a cheese shop, then the scene will be Batman in a cheese shop, and we’ll just have to work around the fact it’s a bit of an incongruous situation. Whereas an adult taking part in a cheese shop scene will be unlikely to choose Batman as a character because it doesn’t make much sense, even if they’d love to pretend to be Batman and the idea of Batman in a cheese shop has the potential to be a lot of fun. Being a stickler for logic and playing by the rules can really hold back creative possibilities.
So it’s a great workout for your flexibility muscles, and with my particular brand of autism, boy do I need it! I may have the best idea up my sleeve, but when I go into an improvisation or even a conversation with an open mind, it may take a turn that I don’t expect, because it isn’t just me writing the dialogue. I could try and shoehorn my idea into it, but why not just let go of it and try and be present for the magic that is happening in the moment – like the Po-Chang quote which says ‘Looking for the Buddha nature is like riding an ox in search of an ox.’ What I’m looking for is right here! This kind of flexibility can help in real life, where we need to be able to improvise around our loved ones’ responses rather than assuming the conversation will go according to our script.
The phrase ‘yes and’ is used to build on what someone else has said. When someone says ‘We’re in a bakery’, that becomes the truth which we all need to accept if we’re not going to get stuck. It’s so tempting for me to say ‘No, we’re in a post office’ if I had a good post office joke ready, but that has to go out of the window in support of the team effort. ‘Yes, we are in a bakery, and we’ve just got an order for 1000 doughnuts!’
And it’s no accident that improv groups run a lot of corporate team-building events, as you’re really building trust with the people you’re improvising with. To me it feels similar to the Quaker concept of ‘holding people in the Light’. It’s like we’re weaving an invisible safety net around each other, always affirming and helping your scene partners (yes, we call each other scene partners!) to look good and enjoy themselves.
Another thing that I’ve learned doing improv is to be able to let go of the good moments. There’s such a delicious alchemy that can happen when a certain group of people come together, and things just flow, minds ‘meld’ together in a way that is more than the sum of their parts.
Sure, this occasion can be recorded for posterity, but even if you’re lucky enough to get the same people in the same room again, it’s not going to be the same. It may actually be better in certain ways, but I won’t appreciate that if I’m trying to recreate something that was never meant to be recreated.
It reminds me of the movie ‘Groundhog Day’, when Bill Murray’s character is trapped in a day which keeps recurring, and has an impromptu moment of closeness with Andie MacDowell’s character when having a snowball fight. Then he keeps trying to recreate this moment, and of course the moment has gone. In the meantime by trying to recreate history he’s missing out on anything that’s really happening now, and getting a daily slap round the face for his trouble.
There’s a bittersweet feeling knowing that when things are really working, that they won’t necessarily work in exactly the same way again. I attended a course where we did a wonderful end of term show where the venue, the participants and the show based on audience suggestions all just came together, I was really in my element. The next term, the venue and participants were different, and I had to work so hard to adjust to the new conditions and enjoy it for what it was. Grieving doesn’t just involve sad events, it’s also about saying goodbye to fleeting happy moments.
And in those fleeting happy moments, we experience a flow state, where we’ve no idea where we’re going. Mindfulness teacher Henry Shukman said that pilgrimages in the Zen tradition weren’t about getting to a particular destination – he called them the ‘pilgrimage of not knowing’. There is nowhere to get to, no finish line, we’re doing something for its own sake. Zen has a concept of “Wu Wei” – effortless effort. If we keep enjoying the moment, we’ll end up where we end up and enjoy the journey, with our delicious sparks of creativity free to be expressed.
Finally, I’ve witnessed that diversity, with people bringing their entire identity as we do here, makes everything better. I was in an improv workshop with someone who uses an electric wheelchair. Trigger alert: I’m going to talk about a scene with someone dying in hospital. We do sometimes try to make humour out of traumatic events, and I was pretending to be a doctor in a hospital and someone else was pretending to be a patient, who was unfortunately flatlining. From the sidelines we heard a very convincing ‘beeeep’ sound, even though there were no actual life-support machines in sight, and I looked up to see where the noise was coming from. It was my friend in the electric wheelchair was using the alarm on their wheelchair to produce the beeping noise.
Wonderful things can happen in a room full of people with different races, backgrounds, genders, sexualities, languages, disabilities, neurodiversities, and preferences where they express them to the full rather than work so hard to hide them and fit in that they can’t participate fully.
May this continue to be such a room.
