Improv and the Problem of Free Will

Within a week, six friends sent me this brilliant New Yorker cartoon. Clearly my branding is set in stone. Randy, the improv guy.

I may be set but the cartoon’s humor gets some of its impact from its flexibility. Look at it through Randy’s lens and it morphs.

The cartoon’s premise: the Lord is worried that free will might engender improv. Ha! Ha! The hidden premise: fostering free will is improv’s far more likely result.

Anxiety about the loss of free will has long plagued mankind. Do we have control over our actions, and if so, what sort of control, and to what extent? Are our decisions determined by fate? By necessity? By our genes? By social mores and rules? If those forces in part shape our decisions, how can we hold onto some measure of free agency?

Trust in our free agency may be the modern world’s most profound loss. Our behaviors tick to the tune of society’s metronomes. All those rules! We continually punch one clock or another.

Social media has now made it worse. Surveillance capitalism, knowing our every desire recorded in our history of clicks, steers us to that next, decisive click. That click may be costly, but it feels so orderly, after all, just what we wanted. It’s not chaos: just how did they know I need a hammock and that my favorite color is orange? These impulse purchases are “happy accidents” not the least bit accidental. In them AI’s Cold Cognition coopts our embodied Hot Cognition. Putting “deceit and sneakiness at the absolute center of everything we do,” according to futurist Jaron Lanier, and fomenting political division, surveillance capitalism unravels community, disconnects us from embodied desire, and destroys personal agency.

Both surveillance capitalism and comedic improv are creatures of the same discourse: improvisation. Comedic improv embodies our longing for autonomous agency in a world that increasingly denies it. Surveillance capitalism coopts our agency and autonomously monopolizes and monetizes it at the summit of late capitalism’s hierarchy: corporations. The Dionysian Trickster, strongman Trump, monopolizes agency too—I alone can do it—sucking up the agency of his followers.

The Sound of Surprise

The New Yorker’s Whitney Balliett defined jazz as “the sound of surprise.” For the improviser, every surprise is a gift, an opportunity to explore an unexpected trajectory. For Kelly Leonard, who moderates The Second City podcast Getting to Yes, And, “Any suggestion that you get from the audience, even if you think it's lousy, if you see it as a gift, you have an opportunity to, we'll say ‘transform,’ but it's very similar to ‘transcend.’” That transcendence is free will in action. Herbie Hancock’s famous wrong piano chord inspires Miles Davis’s alchemy on the horn. “Rotten fruit” becomes jazz gold. A terrible audience suggestion becomes comedic gold.

Fight, Flight, or Freeze

Trauma—defined as an intrusion of the unexpected and unthinkable—shares this element of surprise with improvisation.  But if improv empowers, trauma disempowers. The traumatic intrusion of the extraordinary disrupts our sense of agency. We didn’t see it coming last time. Anxious to avoid its return, we put ourselves on hyperalert. Hyper alertness may not stop its return, but at least worrying about it makes us feel we’re doing something. Because of our efforts, it hasn’t come back. Yet.

For trauma specialist Peter Levine, trauma activates not just fight or flight, but also the impulse to freeze. Pushing back against the frozen state minimizes trauma and helps victims recover. Recovery starts with re-empowerment, a return to a sense of agency.

Levine offers the example of the 1976 Chowchilla, California kidnapping to address one of mysteries of trauma, why people experiencing the same event can have totally different responses. Of the 26 children buried in an abandoned quarry, only one survivor differed from all others. Michael Marshall found a way to dig his way to freedom. Finding a way out and urging his schoolmates to follow him, Marshall retained his sense of agency. During confinement, his fellow victims succumbed to a state of dissociation and numbness. Afterwards they suffered “recurring nightmares, violent tendencies, and impaired ability to function normally in personal and social relations.” Marshall stayed symptom free.

The Indelible Hand of Agency

If I build a narrative based on some rulebook, then who is doing the deciding, me or the rulebook? For African American novelist Toni Morrison, improv’s impromptu call and response creates “an indelible hand of agency”—restoring what was stolen by enslavement. If you and I create a story out of whole cloth, something never seen before and oblivious of rules, then the agency is ours.

On the one hand improvisation is a solution to enslavement.

On the other it enslaves.

Hard to acknowledge but impossible to deny, Trump’s free associative ramblings promise agency to his followers, an agency of which they feel long deprived, left behind by globalization.

YouTube and other social media radicalization work much the same way with machinelike consistency. YouTube’s Reinforce algorithm, introduced in 2017, and social media in general, Max Fisher argues, “arrived, however unintentionally, at a recruitment strategy embraced by generations of extremists,” called by sociologists “the crisis-solution construct.” Destabilized people often reach for a strong group identity to regain a sense of agency and control. It’s not personal circumstances that make you unhappy, it’s that some villain persecutes you. Just as conspiracy theories explain away anomalies, persecution gives meaning to hardships. You’re no longer facing them alone.

Trumpism, surveillance capitalism, and comedic improv are all responses to our increasingly chaotic world: the first two tearing down community and agency, while the last builds them up. That’s what the New Yorker cartoon gets wrong — and what my book aims to prove: improv isn’t the butt of the joke, but the solution.