Improv is not about telling jokes, it's the infrastructure of cultivating intimacy, authenticity, and vulnerability. It gives the skills needed to be inclusive, bold, powerful, and funny. The corporate world (including Google, McKinsey, Deloitte, and more) uses it to teach "soft skills that don't suck" - teaching people to be themselves instead of telling them how. 

I've created a curriculum for bringing the power of quick-thinking, cooperation, and flexibility into the world of social impact. This includes advocates, activists, journalists, peacemakers, political candidates, and anyone who wishes to be bold and bridge our political divides. 

This collaborative seminar exploring a new model of winning. It uses the basics of improv comedy to effectively develop a participant's authentic voice and mixes in moral psychology, neuroscience, and a bit of play. Participants then learn to let go, lose powerfully, disrupt power structures, and create community spontaneously through the power of dance, ritual, curiosity, play, and joy.

We've tried fighting, we're all tired of it. It's time to dance.

Creativity can be taught and authentic presence is natural. These are techniques that allow us to savor uncertainty and see possibilities in adversity. Politics is improvised theater, it's just crappy theater. Let's teach potential leaders the ability to find ease under the pressures of performance. 

Sam Bonar: Beyond Political Comedy

Sam Bonar grew up in South Florida: an entitled, picky, and problematic theater kid with a funny last name. He learned quickly that embracing his flaws and laughing at himself were powerful tools for moving social consciousness. He has continued to joke, laugh, and advocate for the power of humor through high school drama club, his physics major at UChicago, improv comedy teams in college, a government data analyst job, and now teaching and coaching improvised theater for the past 6 years. He has 14 years of theater experience and is a headliner/teacher/coach at Washington Improv Theater (WIT) in the future Douglass Commonwealth (DC). He has trained and led workshops in the ethos of improv for the past 5 years for organizations such as Deloitte, NIH, Beekeeper Group, DC Peace Team, National Student Leadership Conference, Washington Improv Theater, Marie Reed Elementary, Basecamp Strategies, and more.

Sam is a subversive lobbyist, comedic advocate, videographer, and teacher in the dark arts of comedy, authenticity, and cultivating vulnerability. He's using tech, guerrilla theater, and comedy as tools to “unfork" politics in DC. He is the creator of a new app, GetMadGo, which is meant to bridge our many divides and inspire random acts of activism. It's also owned by its users: if you build trust in the system, you reap real rewards. 

Why comedy?

​Need to find the joy and levity in our political and moral self-expression, instead of just the outrage, moralizing, and boring explainer videos.

• John Oliver and how to make a boring and serious subject compelling:
  • Poignant yet ridiculous metaphors whole way through
  • Selectively lying to your audience and then immediately revealing the lie actually builds trust
  • Highlighting the funny rays of sunshine, both good and bad: finding something to laugh at even regarding horrific subjects
  • Laughing throughout and showing that it’s ok to be overwhelmed at how screwed everything is
  • Reveal urgency and preach/make a point only at the end: ease them into it and leave them with a call to action ​
• Stirring the pot is an authentic and effective form of political action. There is "political electricity generated among oppressed groups when, for the first time, the hidden transcript is spoken directly and publicly in the face of power" (1). Elected leaders who are out of power can build electricity by accepting blame and subverting the existing zero-sum war of words, thus getting out in front of the reaction cycle.
• Baudelaire’s Treatise on Laughter describes two types: “significative comedy,” which you recognize by its carefully expressed “moral idea,” and “absolute comedy,” which you recognize because you are laughing (2).
• Most political comedy only focuses on the significative - the message and the ritual despair. But you also need good, pure ridiculousness to break through a bubble. Most late-night comedy is largely one of narcissistic gratification, or lectureporn (3).
• Fritz Stern, in 1961, wrote of Germany's "cultural Luddites, who in their resentment of modernity sought to smash the whole machinery of culture" (4). Today, our cultural Luddites are internet trolls and flat-earthers. If comedy is only used to shake our heads and shrug, it only sinks our head further into the sand.​

Why improv?

• Talking about yourself activates the same areas of the brain as food and money - people are addicted to sharing themselves and there are no outlets for that in modern politics (or even modern society). Improv has been shown to be incredibly helpful (even to skeptics) in conflict management, alleviating anxiety, improving public speaking, and many other communication and strategic skills.
• Again, improv is not the art of being clever or telling jokes — it’s the infrastructure of communicating, coordinating, and storytelling. If you are trying to be funny in improv, it doesn't work. Success comes from authenticity with the situation and embracing the twists and turns. Throw away your best-laid plans because the screw-ups are way better. 
• Improv builds empathy by inhabiting characters and finding their motivations and emotions in the moment. This can help combat trolling and be an alternative to it. Trolling is actually correlated with high levels of cognitive empathy (knowing what someone else might be feeling) - they only lack affective empathy (actually feeling the feelings) (6).
• Improv is an excellent way to engage with trolls as they might find pleasure and success in the chaos and weirdness of it, while providing a space for affective empathy to build. Empathy building is possible and effective through a variety of methods (5), including (and possible more effectively) with non-traditional methods such as improv.
• Organizational Improv training has been found to have tremendous benefits to group cohesion, trust, and collaboration. It has been used by Google, McKinsey, PepsiCo, many government agencies, and more.
• Personal improv training has been shown to strengthen personal awareness, interpersonal attentiveness, and connections to a group identity (6). One becomes clearer about what they represent and fearlessly stays true.

(1) James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300056699/?tag=slatmaga-20
(2) Charles Baudelaire, The Essence of Laughter
https://www.amazon.com/Essence-Laughter-Essays-Journals-Letters/dp/B0007DSFVQ
(2) https://slate.com/arts/2017/07/trump-and-his-trolls-arent-killing-comedy-theyre-saving-it.html
(3) Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology
https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Cultural-Despair-Germanic-California/dp/0520026268
(4) Gordon Bermant, Working with(out) a net: improvisational theater and enhanced well-being, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3857531/
(5) Emily Teding van Berkhout, John M. Malouff, The efficacy of empathy training: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-32537-001
(6) Natalie Sest, Evita March, Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691730427