TJ & Dave Share Insight Into Their Process

If you love to improvise and you’ve never seen TJ & Dave, it’s like loving water and never having seen the ocean.

Beginning improvisers often pattern their playstyle after those they watch: teachers, theater groups, or other students. That’s natural, of course, but it can often lead to a feedback loop where the same style of improvisation is rewarded and promoted. We often go for the laugh or look for quick hits, rather than investing for the long haul. That’s also a function of limited stage time or the form you’re playing or the size of your group. If you have a 10-person Harold team with a 25-minute slot, the experience is different from a TJ & Dave show.

TJ & Dave get an hour to themselves, which could be freeing or terrifying, depending on your skill level. This allows scenes to breathe, and the pace quickens or slows throughout. It’s a special treat when they introduce multiple characters into a scene – the performers shift and take the place of one another whenever an interaction is required. It’s fascinating and fluid.

I’ve previously written about the unique way TJ approaches improv (Lessons From The Masters, Volume 2: TJ Jagodowski and Lessons From The Masters, Volume 2.5: TJ Jagodowski), but after the August 31, 2022 livestreamed performance of their show from The Annoyance Theater, the two men were kind enough to answer audience questions. Here is some of what they shared.

How to Pivot When You’re Stuck

TJ: “First try and see what’s happening right now, that is current, and in the present of what we’re actually doing. And then my mind usually goes to what have we already talked about that maybe didn’t we didn’t entirely flesh out. Usually you have to ‘quiet’ yourself to the answer as opposed to ‘talk’ yourself to the answer. You can’t really explain your way out of it.”

Dave: “I tend to just look here (pointing at TJ) for the answer rather than up here (pointing to his head).”

Yes, even the masters get stuck. The tendency is to “invent” something, but that impulse often takes us away from what the audience really wants to see: the interaction between characters. If you watch TJ & Dave, the story moves based on the desires of the characters. When the characters get bored, the characters leave. Maybe they have an errand they need to run or an event they’re attending. The show usually follows two main characters who end up interacting with many more, but it always feels organic.

In the livestreamed show, it was established the characters were in a hotel. As the two men talked, they ended up looking over the balcony – something that would normally happen in a hotel room – this opened up an interaction with characters in the swimming pool below. When the characters felt like leaving their room, they went to the front desk – another interaction with another character. They caught a shuttle into town and went to a general store. When the characters were enjoying themselves, they stayed in a location, just as you would.

Too often, we play our scenes like the crew of the Enterprise, standing around and waiting for some exterior stimulus to appear on the viewscreen. You’ll make more natural discoveries if you can create an interesting character – someone with opinions and fears and hopes. As you build that person, it will lead you to discoveries in your environment or prompt the next action you’ll take.

Avoiding Narration

TJ: “I think as improvisers, we tend to talk about what we’re looking at and if we’re looking at our invisible object, if we’re looking at our environment, we’ll talk about that object or that environment. If you’re looking at your partner, you say something that has relevance to your partner.”

Although I’ve watched them play for a decade, I never noticed this until TJ mentioned it. We often get so caught up in object work that we stare at the thing we’re touching. When TJ plays with objects, he’s always looking back to his partner, or at least listening intently. (He makes a mean improvised cup of coffee – sugar packets and everything.)

When you watch beginning improvisers, their object work is usually best when the characters are in a car because it’s a situation so familiar that most people don’t loudly announce they’re using the steering wheel or turning on the headlights. A fun game to play with beginning improvisers is to watch them do a cooking scene and see if they can do it without referencing the activity. It’s impossible. The character interaction is almost always discarded in favor of completing the improvised meal.

Remember, object work is there to flesh out the world – it’s not there to override the interaction with the other character.

Plot Threads and Callbacks

In a Harold, we’re taught that “the end is in the beginning.” We want to tie up loose ends and circle back to people or places mentioned in the first beat. There’s something comforting in that. But TJ & Dave don’t intentionally seek to put a perfect button on the story. We’re following the characters, wherever they may lead. Watching the journey is reward enough. The audience isn’t watching improvisation to see you defeat the villain or defuse the bomb or ace the job interview. The outcome of the story does not matter. They want to see you struggle – they want to see you “be.” It’s refreshing to remove the shackles of a plot.

In the livestreamed show, TJ & Dave’s characters left their hotel and went to a small town with a general store and a diner. This meant that they left behind an angry character at the hotel who wanted to beat them up. Most improvisers might feel obligated to close the loop on that. TJ & Dave just let it go and moved forward.

TJ: “Even though the show looks like it runs linearly through time, it probably bends a little bit and that takes you back through a place you’ve been. Or, logically, if you make eight people, they’re all living their lives, there’s a chance that they intersect again with each other. So if we go into town, we’re not going to meet the people who are at the hotel anymore. But the town is only so big. We really try not to force. Invention is ugly. Exploration has a certain prettiness to it.”

Dave: “Yeah. And I think we kind of look at it that way too. It’s like what’s already happening rather than what can we invent?”

If you’d like to catch TJ & Dave live, they occasionally livestream from The Annoyance Theater. They also have eight shows available for viewing on Vimeo.