The Improv Wiki

Welcome to the improv wiki--the wiki all about improvisational comedy and improvisational theater.

We're a haphazard collection of people's ideas, observations, and prejudices about improv. You are invited to extend, improve, edit, monkey with, change, tweak, radically revise, and especially add to this wiki. Please give us your improv experience, ideas, and imagination whenever you feel the inspiration.

See Sandbox to see how to edit.

Structures

Warm Ups
Exercises
Performance Games

Skills

Tips And Techniques
Improv Skills
Preparation

Yes And
Listening
Commit

Teams

List of Improv Groups

Thoughts

Ask For
Advance the Scene
"Always Funny" Stuff that Doesn't Work in Improv
Outside the Box
Improv vs. Instinct
Take The Obvious Choice
Paradox of Improv
Platform
Conflict
Relationship
Improv Jargon
Disrupting a Routine
Canceling
Gagging
Cuing
Active Choice
Status
When a Scene Is Sucking
Your Personal Search Engine
All You Do Is Accept Offers
From Standup to Improv
General Improv Advice

This wiki is hosted by Ben Kovitz.

Other Improv Sites

What is a wiki?

A wiki is a web site that lets you edit its pages. See the Sand Box if you'd like to experiment.

If you think you can explain something better than you see it on a page on this web site--you're probably right! You are invited to rewrite it and make it better. Just click the "Edit" button at the bottom of any page. Or add any new content you like: performance games, exercises, warm ups, thoughts, questions, or any other improv-related musing that's on your mind.

The first wiki ever was Ward Cunningham's Wiki. It was where many of the ideas of Extreme Programming were hashed out, as well as many software development patterns. Ward's Wiki still thrives as a meeting place for the software world to discuss culture, techniques, and ideas of all sorts.

Wikis, like Extreme Programming, involve a special style of collaboration: unilateral cooperation. Each collaborator edits without asking permission from the other authors. There is little or no planning or discussion: you just edit the text itself. This results in an anonymously, collectively written work that is never "complete" but just keeps on growing and improving. It's a lot like improv!

So you are invited to modify any text on the wiki you like, to make it clearer, more interesting, more stimulating. It doesn't matter who the "original" author of the text is. You are invited to improve it however you like. That might be as simple as fixing a typo or as involved as splitting text into several pages or rewriting it from scratch. The one proviso is to please never "improve" some text by having it no longer express an idea that you believe is mistake. The wiki expresses all ideas that anyone found interesting or persuasive--rightly or wrongly. The improvements are to express the ideas so they are more stimulating to readers, and to add more ideas, never to take away.

The name "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian word wikiwiki, which means "quick". Editing a wiki page is quick and easy, and requires no knowledge of HTML.