For many people, comedy fans or not, improv is something you want to experience as little of as possible. Ideally, perhaps not at all. It’s a fact that people who do improv and like doing it need to overcome and deal with.
Which is why the success of Middleditch and Schwartz is so surprising. The show ditches the usual shorter format that improv takes and instead extends it to over an hour. And audiences seem to love it.
The show premiered on Netflix back in 2020, but the duo continue to tour to large audiences to this day. Part of this may be due to the recognizable stars, Ben Schwartz and Thomas Middleditch. Schwartz is best known as the remarkably obnoxious Jean-Ralphio Saperstein on Parks and Recreation, while Middleditch’s main claim to fame is his leading role on Silicon Valley as Richard Hendricks, a neurotic coder/start-up developer. Recently he also featured as Drew in the CBS sitcom, B Positive.
Both Schwartz and Middleditch have roots in improv, and their most famous performances rely heavily on this particular background. Their shows, along with many other comedies, rely on their leads improvising funny riffs off of a script. In their show, however, the script is gone and only the improvised riffs remain.
Despite a wide disdain for improv, many of the biggest comedic stars have some sort of improv background. Watch any behind the scenes footage of a Will Ferrell movie, for example, to see its prevalence. This can be credited partially to the accessibility of improv – it’s not hard to join a group, and its a common club on college campuses. Also, many people view improv skills as good building blocks for other comedy forms.
More recently, one of the most famous masters of improv has made his return, and is trying to improve the comedy form’s reputation. Colin Mochrie achieved fame for his appearances on several iterations of the improv show Whose Line is it Anyway? which continues to this day.
His new show, Hyprov, combines his improv skills with that of a hypnotist’s. Volunteers go under hypnosis and then, with the guidance of Mochrie, go through improv routines.
It may be that these shows are winning over some people to the medium. But it seems that many fans of both shows are improv enthusiasts themselves. While you might have trouble finding big comedy names who didn’t take part in improv at some point, most people who do improv move on relatively quickly. It’s not usually something that you can make a living off of.
But as these shows achieve greater mainstream success, it may be a sign that there is a bigger market for improv than there was before. Meaning that for that person in your life who is still sticking with it, it might be even harder than you feared to get them to move on.