Randy Fertel on the Power and Peril of Creative Improvisation
Though timely and pitched to the current political moment, Randy Fertel’s new book, Winging It: Improv’s Power & Peril in the Time of Trump, is in many ways the continuation of a decades-long pursuit: studying the art of improvisation as an act of spontaneous creativity and immense cultural force. “It’s been my life’s work,” he says. “How lucky am I? I just stumbled on an idea, a lens to look at cultural innovation and creativity in a fresh way.” In addition to his books on improv, Fertel is also author of The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak, a rollicking memoir about his eccentric New Orleans family. (His mother, a force of nature, founded the Ruth’s Chris Steak House empire.) Recently I met Fertel at his home in New York City, and we talked about the new book, the darker political implications of improvisation, its contrasting glories, and the way forward.
MCP: Martin C. Pedersen
RF: Randy Fertel
How do you get engaged with this subject matter—enough to not just write a book, but perhaps three books, along with hosting a conference, which I attended. What’s the origin story?
It goes back to the ’70s. I’m in a graduate seminar, and we’ve read this obscure pamphlet from the Renaissance, Pierce Penniless by Thomas Nashe, a contemporary of Shakespeare. The professor, just to get the seminar started, said, “I bet you’ve never read anything like this before.” And I thought: Well, no, it’s like Tristram Shandy, and it’s like this, it’s like that. I didn’t say anything. But I was intrigued, and it resonated with a book that I love, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which is about a composer’s longing to break through from his totally intellectual composition into the emotional and spontaneous. From cold art to hot art, art with a beating heart.
I felt these and other books were somehow connected to Nashe, and I finally realized that the first thing that links them was the gesture of spontaneity. That’s what improv says: “I’m not doing this like anything you’ve seen before. I’m not following a rule book, someone’s notion of the right way to do things. It’s utterly fresh, made in the moment.” That idea wouldn’t let me go.
And, so, I found that when I got excited about a book—like, say, James Gleick’s Chaos: The Making of a New Science—I realized: Oh, the reason I’m excited about this is because it helps me explain improv. That’s where my Taste for Chaos title came from. Gleick is writing about an emergent science that describes how order can come out of turbulence. That’s what improv does: shapes chaos.
And did you even have a word for what you were searching for? Improvisation is such a culturally specific word.
Well, I’m writing this in the mid-’70s. Comedic improv is out there, but I’m not aware of it. I’m locked up in the library in Cambridge. There were probably improv clubs in Boston, but I never went to any. What led me to “improvisation” was just this trope of spontaneity, which I thought was crucial. My dissertation was called “Studies in the Rhetoric of Spontaneity” (1981). Out of that, eventually—34 years later!—came The Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation. It was an academic book, my attempt to change how academia looks at improvisation. I wanted to show that it’s central to the Western canon. It’s a disruptive force. John Milton writes Paradise Lost and calls it “my unpremeditated verse.” There’s nothing more crafted than Paradise Lost, and yet he speaks of it as unpremeditated.
I was trying to change the way academia treated spontaneity and the deep European tradition of improvisation, which usually gets dismissed. While I’m proud of the book, as soon as I published it, I thought, God, what was I thinking? Academia’s not gonna change. And then just months later, here comes Trump riding down the golden escalator, and when I heard that first rant I thought: Whoa, I knew there was a dark side to this, but I didn’t know how dark it could be. And the improvisers that I trace in the Western canon are very aware of that dark side. In Paradise Lost, Eve is inspired by the whispering of the snake in her ear. Coleridge celebrates the spontaneous outpouring of the imagination in “Kubla Khan,” but by the end he’s warning:
Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Improvisers have always been aware of the dark side, but who knew it could be this dark?
The new book, Winging It, is an interesting hybrid of cultural examination and political warning. Beyond being engaged, what do you want readers to come away with?
This book has a political angle, but this rhetoric of spontaneity has had power since antiquity. That’s partly my point. It’s been around so long because it has great power. Neuroscientists now are in agreement that we have one brain, but two minds. Two ways of attending to the world. We have Cold Cognition, which is rational, logical, stepwise, and structural. Then we have Hot Cognition, which is impulsive, instinctual, intuitive. Improv cannily feeds on the conflict between our two minds, our two kinds of attention.
Hot Cognition is the evolutionary brain.
Yes, the limbic brain, the lizard brain.
It’s the brain that we were born into a billion years ago.
And we need that. We need that when the saber-tooth tigers come. We need to react, and react quickly. The predictive Cold Cognition brain is saying, “Well, there wasn’t a saber-tooth tiger here yesterday, so that can’t be a saber-tooth tiger.” But Hot Cognition has us running even before the frontal lobe says, Run! We need both brains, working together, but they don’t always do so. Neuroscientists now confirm what has often been attributed to Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift … and the rational mind [is] a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
What I want the reader to come away with is a better understanding of all that, and a skepticism about Cold Cognition’s hyper-rationalism, which is improv’s constant target. But I also want the reader to come away with a skepticism about Hot Cognition. It can go awry. That’s the dark side of improv. Hot Cognition fuels our intuitions and instincts, but it also feeds on fear and anger. It’s all about the region of the brain involved with the experiencing of emotions, the amygdala. That’s Trump’s forte. He knows that it’s all the attention economy, which is entirely about grabbing and holding engagement. And nothing does that like fear and anger. He is great at roiling us up. Social media, another improvisation, is his tool, and he uses it as a keen-edged weapon.
The book’s subtitle is “Improv’s Power & Peril in the Time of Trump.” I get the political argument, but the power of creative improvisation is pretty profound as well.
I’m in love with improv. The challenge to Trump’s dark improv is preceded by three-quarters of the book, in which I celebrate improv’s positive, innovative side. For this book, I jumped into comic improv. I took a class.
Oh, really?
Enough to say that I’ve done it. There’s another really great book by Sam Wasson, called Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art. I don’t think we invented improv, but we did refine it, and then create the rule book, the yes, and, and the basic rules of comic improv called the Westminster Place Kitchen Rules.
America tends not to invent as much as refine. We don’t invent the car, we figure out how to mass produce it. We don’t invent improv, we took it to a different level.
That’s true: we refine. That’s what improv’s “yes, and” does. It says, “Yes, and what if we add this …” Improv is all about hybridizing, weaving together. I was once reading an essay by a professor in Jungian studies, talking about the nine archetypal creation myths: God who creates out of nothing, which is basically the romantic notion, the genius. God the potter, who shapes the universe. Anyway, the ninth one, which is to say the least of them, was God the weaver. S/he takes the woof and warp of things that already exist and stitches them together. And that’s one interesting thing about this lens of improv. It helps you see that innovation is never really new. It’s just a new weaving. It’s what the French call bricolage, tinkering. But creative nonetheless. That little essay helped me embrace what I’m good at. I don’t create from scratch. I weave together things already there. I had my website guy create an image to express this. And I embraced the slogan Weaving people and ideas to make a difference.
Trump’s improvisational method comes out of this weird place—it’s just all id.
That’s what I argue: who’s more in touch with their id, where archetypes live, than Trump? People push back and say, “How can you say he’s an improviser? How can you lend that lovely act, that lovely word, to that idiot? He hasn’t done the work good improv takes.” And I say: Listen, he’s been practicing it in his own way. He’s been the Lord of Liars for a long time. Virtually every new lie is an improvisation, something you’ve never seen before, a figment of his imagination.
Mark Wuerker (c) 2019, via POLITICO.
He’s definitely making a lot of it up as he goes along.
He makes it up as he goes along, though there’s a real shtick quality to it. It’s oft-repeated but always with the impression of spontaneity. And for me, the epigraph to the whole book, the Oscar Wilde quote, is really important: “Spontaneity is meticulously prepared art.” That is key. People want to push back and ask, “Is it really improv?” It doesn’t matter. It’s the gesture that matters. And it’s a rhetorically powerful gesture.
We started with the origin story, but when Trump came down the escalator in December 2015, I thought, I’ve gotta write a new book for a general audience. And so I started the New Orleans improv conference to find the voice. Because it’s not my natural voice. I’m academic—I live up in my head. I had written a couple pieces for the Washington Monthly about Trump as improviser, and so in 2020, on Mardi Gras morning, I woke up and thought, Well, that’s the voice, that journalistic voice I used there. So, do I stay home and get this started? Or do I go to the St. Anne Parade and look for Mardi Gras Indians?
I stayed home. That was the first superspreader event: 80,000 infections. So, as far as I’m concerned, the book saved my life. If it instills some skepticism about Trump’s spontaneity and the authority it lends to his voice—and authenticity, of all things, to attribute to a man with an orange tan and a difficulty with truth-telling—maybe I’ll save a few of my readers from the trouble he can cause.
To spin it somewhat positively for our audience, how can we use improvisation to help solve problems like climate change? How do we use it for methods of authentic public engagement?
Improv is an element of AI, something I explore in a late chapter along with social media, which also has improv in its DNA. There’s talk of AI solving climate change. But that’s way past my pay grade, and I also harbor doubts about letting this autonomous monster loose on the world.
What I can speak to is the power of yes, and, improv’s first and most powerful rule. It’s called the rule of agreement, something we don’t have much of in our too, too tribalized social and political life. Today in America, it’s all no, but. We need more yes, and. American democracy is built on the notion that every voice should be heard, that the way forward is built on efforts to persuade one another, which, by yes, and-ing leads eventually to compromises that both parties can live with. But the era of congressional compromise is long gone. The tribes don’t hear one another.
You’ve given us a warning about the dark power of“meticulously planned art.” Is there a way forward, a way to improvise our way out of the darkness?
Every creative writing teacher will tell you that there is no story without conflict. Improv comes along and builds story on the rule of agreement. There is an element of conflict in yes, and. My response to your call agrees with it, but builds on it, swerves from it, takes it in a new direction. Ultimately, though, it’s an effort to start a conversation. There are hundreds of self-help books offering the power of yes, and in any number of settings, from boardrooms to church groups, to move us from conflict to conversation. That’s the creative power of improvisation. The power it can exert over us, when used for good instead of being used for political gain.
Featured image via Wikipedia.