What I Learned Leaving the Ivory Tower

And a reflection on 6 months of Winging It in the world.

Leaving the Ivory Tower

What always made me uncomfortable about my obsession with improv was that it seemed so ivory tower, just part of the worlds of ideas and of the arts. Fuzzy headed? Maybe. Yes, I loved ideas and the arts but was I living in a cloud?

Then I saw Trump come down the golden escalator and give that free-associative rant about American carnage. I knew instantly that the ivory tower had been breached by political realities. To my surprise, what had long seemed stuck in the clouds also had a role—albeit, a dark role—in the political world down below. What had seemed only an idle, artsy fascination now clearly had political consequence. It could affect our daily lives and political realities.

And it did. Witness the worst presidential record of corruption in history: two impeachments; 34 felony convictions and perhaps more coming in Georgia and Florida; eight Trump allies imprisoned; and January 6.

Long before all that, the day Trump launched his campaign, I decided to write a general audience book to convey the dark side of this otherwise delightful trope, my gut knows more than many brains. Once the powerful trope that fuels improv had entered the political realm, it became too important to leave to the academy.

I’m sure I owed my discomfort with the ivy tower to my Mom, a down-to-earth and hard-working businesswoman. She was proud of my fancy degrees, I guess, but my love and commitment to the arts for her was largely terra incognita. Mom was a math-science prodigy who entered LSU at 15. When I was teaching English at UNO, her right-hand VP, Ralph Giardina, would often ask, when are you going to leave that silly job and come work for your mother? Ralph, who did not attend college after his service in WW2, clearly thought I was a cloud-dweller. When one night around Mom’s dinner table I announced I would leave teaching and join them in the business, Ralph almost fell off his chair. Suddenly there was another Fertel in the chain of command. He didn’t make my life easy.

One thing I learned from those five long, hard years working for Mom and Ralph, is that everything is sales. In the ivory tower what you’re selling is not some interpretation of this or that, but rather the act of interpreting, the value in a certain kind of attention.

Even in academia, which prides itself on not stooping to conquer, let alone to persuade, nonetheless at bottom everything is sales. Scientists “think they are merely stating facts, not making audiences,” writes Deirdre McCloskey, a member of the late Milton Friedman’s deeply conservative University of Chicago Economics Department. McCloskey’s book’s title—The Rhetoric of Economics—throws a gauntlet down to economists everywhere. Economics is a matter of persuasion? Modeling themselves on 19th-century physical sciences, economists and social scientists prize objectivity—raw data—and deny the rhetorical, persuasive, nature of their discourse.

Romantic poets pushed back against Newton’s rainbow and the new science, and yet sometimes poets, too, buy into science’s quest for objectivity. In his great Modernist manifesto “Ars Poetica,” Archibald MacLeish persuades us that “A poem should be equal to: /Not true…. A poem should not mean/ But be.” But, as Stanley Fish, literary critic and public intellectual, points out, “the ‘motor’ by which science moves is not verification or falsification, but persuasion.” Arts for art’s sake promotes something? Well, yes, it promotes arts for art’s sake, a freedom from utility.

Everything is persuasion. Which is to say we are all salesmen and always selling. Scientists’ “objectivity”—in itself a will-o’-the-wisp—just sells that they are not selling, a proposition that self-implodes.

What to Sell?

Count yourself lucky if what you’re selling is something you believe in. Better, that it’s something you love. That’s what I learned from leaving academia and those five long years with Mom.

I believed in my mother’s steaks. I grew up with the restaurant, eating there with the family long before she bought it. Then bored with high school I helped Mom bus tables and butcher short loins on the band saw. And, of course, I got fat on those terrific steaks drenched in butter. Her steaks are, I suppose, literally part of me.

Yes, and… there’s another part of me that always has, and always will, believe in ideas and literature. The key revelation was that the ivory tower’s assumption that it was a superior approach to life was flawed. No approach to life is better than another. The key is, which is right for you?

Improv’s Yes, and…

Improv presents a similar yes, and…. It’s selling a life committed to freedom not rules, intuition not reason. And of course it’s just for fun. It has no purpose. It isn’t selling anything. But what it is selling is disruption: knowing the world not just through reason and logic, as the mainstream does, but though intuition, instinct, embodied emotions—hot cognition—which is how improvisers work their magic.

A Nibble or a Swallow?

Yet, when push comes to shove improvisers are prepared to accept the world of reason and purpose. As I argue in my first book on improv, A Taste for Chaos, improvisers since antiquity show a taste for chaos. They nibble at chaos. But they rarely swallow it whole. They know that when you seek inspiration, from some muse or some intuition, you never know where the inspiration comes from. As Coleridge writes at the end of his famous celebration of inspiration, “Kubla Khan”:

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.

Intuition is grand till you realize it’s your lizard brain whispering in your ear. As the straight-talking Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman points out, “the correlation between confidence and accuracy is not high. It turns out,” he explains, “you can have intuitions for bad reasons. All it takes is a thought that comes to your mind automatically and with high confidence, and you’ll think that it’s an intuition, and you’ll trust it.” There’s a part of us that mindlessly lends credence to intuition. It’s the part of us that improv appeals to and exploits. It’s what Trump appeals to and exploits in his base. Yes, our guts sometimes know more than many brains. But we must check whose gut is doing the selling. If it’s a gut filled with Big Macs and Mar-a-Lago chocolate cake, and making decisions about the rights of American citizens, watch your freedoms.

The Lens

I stumbled on this lens in 1975 and have been exploring and refining it ever since. I am continually humbled and excited by its explanatory reach and power. Reaching back to our bioevolutionary development—Hot and Cold Cognition—it seems to play out in everything human. My ultimate hope and goal is that my listeners and readers will look through this lens and see how widely it clarifies some aspect of the world around them.

I am deeply gratified by the many emails and social media posts readers send my way that point out this or that “improvised” phenomenon, many that I hadn’t yet encountered. Thanks for those. Please keep them coming.

And deep thanks those who have bought and read the book, attended events, shared my posts, or read my blog or Substack. One of the things my lens reveals is that improv builds community. Six months of selling Winging It confirms it.

Visit fertel.com to learn more about my work or to purchase Winging It: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Time of Trump.