Culture – Act Social Club

If you’d asked me six months ago if “online improv” has any place in this world, I would have chuckled and told you that our online lives stand opposite the deeply transformative experiences applied improvisation can provide in person. Yet, for the past three months, I’ve been proven wrong over and over again.

Yesterday night I watched four students brand new to improv perform one of the most playful and hilarious scenes I’ve ever had the pleasure of viewing. On Zoom. In a class that I’m teaching this summer using improv to teach leadership skills (originally scheduled to meet in person), we played the game “dubbed interview.”* Everyone turned off and hid their video cameras except for two students who muted their mics and acted out a job interview. While they spoke to each other, two other students dubbed over their voices. Aside from the lessons in commitment, listening, yes, anding and more offered by the exercise, it struck me that with an experimental mindset online improv can offer different and sometimes better ways of doing improv than in person formats. I’ve observed improv communities in the last few months experimenting by using the chat box to have everyone in an audience provide suggestions, changing backgrounds for scenes (e.g. so that we can actually see two improvisers seated in a park), and even all kinds of angles and on/off and close/distant features with their cameras to replicate the experience of film.

As I found myself rushing to figure out how I could teach an applied improv class online, I went through all my lesson plans and put a check mark next to each exercise that seemed like it could be pulled off through Zoom in some way. To my surprise, exactly 92% of what I’d normally teach in the course worked. It just took sitting down and thinking through how to do each. I also turned to the incredible knowledge sharing and creative applications offered by so many members of the Applied Improvisation Network Facebook page that has been abuzz with how to pull this off (many are even experimenting with improv in virtual reality!), and the inspiring new Global Play Brigade, formed by performers around the world as a response to the pandemic. Improvisers have been busy doing what they do best: working with what’s at hand, co-creating, and developing new ways of connecting amid one of the most challenging times in modern history.

As I prepare to run an applied improv workshop with a group in Japan this evening, through all this one larger conclusion has been hard to miss. While the virtues of in person improv may never be fully replicated online, the online experience is democratizing improv as never before—bringing improv to more people, in more places, with more accessible digital tools at our disposal, unshackling the offer of improv’s benefits from bounded places to unbounded spaces. As we all look to a world filled with new futures, that’s worth building on.

Don Waisanen is a professor at the Marxe School for Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Improv for Democracy: How to Bridge Differences and Develop the Communication and Leadership Skills Our World Needs, SUNY Press New Political Science series (hardback release November 1, 2020, paperback release January 1, 2021).

*Kudos to Marian Rich for introducing me to the Zoom version of this exercise.

Old Joke: “There are two kinds of people in this world, those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.” (1)

Declaring, “You’re either with us or you’re against us,” sounds like a polarizing rallying cry to some, but to anyone who has ever debated philosophy, it sounds like an over-simplification at best and outright lying at worst. This fallacy is known as a false dichotomy (2).

Imagine you were a FIFA soccer fan and I said to you, “If you’re not a fan of Team Brazil, you’re not a real soccer fan.” If you liked any of the other dozens of teams competing, you would find my statement biased and ridiculous.

When there are 3 or more “logically valid opinions” about a topic, and you propose an “either/or” choice, such as the one above, you’ve proposed a false dichotomy. Your argument is false because you propose that there are only 2 choices, but in this case, there are 3 or more opinions that are plausible. For example to say, “All Americans are either Republicans or Democrats,” discounts the numerous other political parties in the country and would be a false dichotomy.

Conflict resolution practitioners know that parties in a conflict often use false dichotomies in order to drive a hard-bargaining position, gain power, and appear tough to their constituents (see books: Getting to Yes and Crucial Conversations). Sometimes the tactic is successful in gaining desired support and sometimes it backfires, e.g. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the early 1950s.

McCarthy claimed that 205 Communist spies were working in the U.S. State Department, then called in various elite Americans before a Senate panel and asked them to name names of Communists. When an Army general refused to cooperate, McCarthy said, “Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says, ‘I will protect another general who protects Communists,’ is not fit to wear that uniform, General.” That’s a false dichotomy. There are a number of plausible situations where a person could be both a general worthy of the uniform and friends with Communists. The publication of that exchange helped the American public to eventually see through McCarthy’s fallacious campaign.

Despite not finding a single Communist spy, McCarthy had enough partisan support among Republicans that he was successful in pushing his agenda for several years, but as early as 4 months after his initial anti-Communist speech, people like GOP Senator Margaret Chase Smith made cracks at him. Smith said,“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism.” She was inferring that important third opinion: that one can be both a loyal American and a Communist. The public gradually tired of his tactics, and McCarthy was censured by the Senate after 4 years of abuse of power.

False dichotomies are an unfair tactic because they are not truthful or provable. In addition, they needlessly alienate people who might otherwise cooperate. This alienation occurs when groups of people don’t completely share the black-or-white opinions of two conflicting groups. This is obvious in US Presidential elections when we see the vote hinging on crucial swing states which are not firmly held by either major political party.

So to bring things back to today, if you are fighting for a cause, you may want to examine the arguments you are using to see if you’re saying the equivalent of “Either you’re with us, or you’re against us.” When we are pushing for a change that we believe in, and we know we need as much help as possible from as many people as possible, it doesn’t make logical sense to push forward false dichotomies because you lose the support of adjacent “swing voters” who aren’t naturally aligned with your way of thinking. However, if you feel that your group can force the issue and win the contest of ideas without the help of “swing voters,” perhaps this doesn’t apply.

As agents for change, maybe we need to ask ourselves at the beginning of a campaign, “How much help do I need to accomplish my goal? Can I get it done by only appealing to people who agree with me 100% or do I need the help of people outside of my own ideological group? If I do need outside help, what is the best way to entice those people to help?”

by Constance Franklin

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Category: Culture

Democratizing Improv

When to Use Dirty Tactics in an Argument