Improv, Trauma, and Recovering our Agency: What Stephen Colbert can teach us

Stephen Colbert’s commitment to improv sprung from tragedy. At ten years old Colbert lost his father and two brothers in an airplane crash. Colbert grieved by embracing nihilism. If these lives that meant so much to him didn’t matter to the universe, then surely nothing mattered. Colbert’s darkness was so extreme that a theater professor at Northwestern urged him to seek counseling because he feared “you were going to punch me today in class” (Sam Wasson, Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art, 345).

But, one night a friend took Colbert, now a theater and philosophy major, to see his first improv at Second City. Colbert was struck by how improv players did not fear “free fall”—perhaps an echo of that tragic plane crash.

In improv, there are no mistakes. Whatever your stage partner offers, the more off kilter the better, is a new way forward: Yes, and… You provide the “and,” taking it in any direction you want.

Read the rest of “Improv, Trauma, and Recovering our Agency” at Randy’s Substack.