Improv, Trauma, and Recovering our Agency

What Stephen Colbert can teach us

Stephen Colbert’s commitment to improv sprung from tragedy. At ten years old Colbert lost his father and two brothers in an airplane crash. Colbert grieved by embracing nihilism. If these lives that meant so much to him didn’t matter to the universe, then surely nothing mattered. Colbert’s darkness was so extreme that a theater professor at Northwestern urged him to seek counseling because he feared “you were going to punch me today in class” (Sam Wasson, Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art, 345).

But, one night a friend took Colbert, now a theater and philosophy major, to see his first improv at Second City. Colbert was struck by how improv players did not fear “free fall”—perhaps an echo of that tragic plane crash.

In improv, there are no mistakes. Whatever your stage partner offers, the more off kilter the better, is a new way forward: Yes, and… You provide the “and,” taking it in any direction you want.

Realizing the road forward lay not in denying but in embracing his damage, Colbert found an avenue back to flourishing. For Colbert, improv historian Sam Wasson remarks, “damage... was talent, the precursor of personality. ‘Damaged people are very interesting,’ Colbert said. ‘The way they behave to cover up their damage is usually very entertaining.’”

Marked by trauma, Colbert’s huge personality was unleashed. On Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report he would play a caricature of a televised political pundit, in Colbert’s words, a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot” who spends much ofhis time covering up his damage with hollow political rhetoric.

Behind Colbert’s fear of “free fall” is an anxiety about losing agency. No one wishes to be a passive actor in one’s drama, to whom things just happen. In literal free fall there is no traction, no ground beneath you. Submissive, the only agency lies in the impersonal hands of gravity. In metaphoric free fall, agency lies outside you, in society or some perhaps anonymous authority. Think Kafka’s Trial or Castle, where Josef K., then merely K., doesn’t even merit a full name. Not actors but merely acted upon, think Camus’s The Stranger. Meursault’s only explanation for his acte gratuit, the murder of an unknown and unnamed Arab, absurdly, is the glaring sun.

Improv was Colbert’s solution to the trauma of lost agency. Improv was his Yes, and… Improv was not just the safety net but the springboard to an amazing career, each Yes, and… emphatically an action that he owned.

Like Colbert’s career, improv is rooted in the trauma that has riddled modern history. The roots of Wordsworth’s touchstone for poetry, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility” grew out of the dislocations of the Enclosure Movement (the peasantry’s loss of the right to graze their sheep on the Commons), the Enlightenment (the displacement of traditional authority), and the Industrial Revolution which put an end to traditional cottage industries. All the Modernisms, from High to Dada to Surrealism and beyond, began with the slaughter of World Wars I and II. In their wake, with the Westminster Place Kitchen Rules, comic improv is born in 1957, pushing back on passive suffering, each response to each partner’s call, an expression of agency.

What matters, Colbert learned from Yes, and …, was learning to accept whatever comes your way. To embrace the life you’ve been allotted, is to embrace all of life, improv’s ever filling cornucopia, the horn of plenty. This is the Stoic idea, amor fati, love of one’s fate. Everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, is good or, at the very least, necessary. If you can, be grateful for where you are; after all, it’s what got you here. Nietzsche embraced amor fati as his “formula for greatness in a human being.” More simply, as the saying goes, it is to feel good in your skin.

One can only aspire to such greatness.

Or, like Colbert, embrace a life of Yes, and…

But amor fati does not lead the Stoic to passivity. The Stoic does not forgo agency. Whatever brought you here is your foundation for action. There’s nothing passive about Colbert’s satiric monologues that nightly flay Trump.

One of my touchstones is William Blake’s Milton: A Poem. In it, Blake imagines his predecessor, the Puritan poet John Milton, up in heaven. Blake’s “Milton” suddenly realizes the error he made, that his portrait of Jesus in his great epic Paradise Lost was too passive. It lacked the righteous anger Jesus expressed in throwing the money lenders out of the temple, the righteous anger that drove Milton to support regicide. “Milton” returns to earth to enter Blake’s spirit. Blake writes a new epic celebrating righteous anger.

Blake wrote the poem while facing trial for sedition. John Scofield, a soldier who had some obscure grudge against Blake, charged that he heard Blake say, “Damn the King,” a hanging offense. Blake, by all accounts an incredibly sweet man, wrote his poem to make sense of the anger he felt toward his accuser.

I argue in Winging It: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Time of Trump that we need, through compassion, to overcome the tribalism that roils our nation. But it is also true that we need no excuse for the anger we feel toward Trump and Musk and their champions. We will be dealing with the traumas they create for many years.

Take Action

Yes, … and? What response, what action to take? Here’s one idea: Exercise your agency by downloading Five Calls. The app can help make your voice heard. Every day it recommends a list of issues to weigh in on. Set your location and it gives you the phone numbers of your representatives in Congress. Choose an issue and it offers a script, or make up your own.

The phones have been flooding the Hill since Trump began flooding the zone. Be part of the tsunami that may help save our democracy.

The tsunami of righteous anger should be fueled not by grievance, but by understanding, asserting joy wherever you can find it. As Wasson writes in Improv Nation: “Colbert understood there can be no real unhappiness, ‘because if there can be this much joy at a moment of this much agony and failure, there’s something very healthy about that... You gotta learn to love when you’re failing,’ Colbert explained. ‘The embracing of that, the discomfort of failing in front of an audience, leads you to penetrate through the fear that blinds you.’”

Compare Trump, who never acknowledges a blunder.

Democrats may certainly be failing now, full of unfocussed fear and anger. But we have to embrace the discomfort and continue on, in spite of the fear. We have to learn to “love when we’re failing”—and act, re-embracing our agency.

I join Tim Miller’s call for Democrats “to be genuinely furious,” as he recently said during his podcast episode with Amanda Litman of Run for Something. For Amanda Litman, whose political action committee is dedicated to helping young people run for office by lowering the barriers to entry, that fury should explode in Democrats running for office up and down the ballot: “Chaos is a ladder, climb it.”

Even if you lose you, will have brought your genuine fury into the democratic conversation.

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