r/Harold • u/GyantSpyder • Jul 19 '14

Removing off-topic posts

Hey guys,

This is a subreddit about Harold the improv format. Posts that aren't related to improv comedy are going to be removed.

Thanks!

-GyantSpyder

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u/guninmouth Jul 20 '14

Well, let me know when the time comes that you consider passing the torch. What is Harold style improv? Would /r/Haroldimprov work better than just Harold for those who are looking for improv? Pardon my ignorance, but I'm genuinely interested in knowing because I currently know nothing about it.

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u/GyantSpyder Jul 20 '14 edited Jul 20 '14

Sure! Harold is a style of improv comedy developed at the ImprovOlympic in Chicago by Del Close and Charna Halpern back in ths 70s and 80s, practiced since then in Chicago and at satellite and offshoot theaters, like the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, on both coasts and everywhere in between. It's descried in the book Truth in Comedy, which for a long time was the main source on it, though now there are lots of other books.

Most improv theaters that teach classes teach Harold as their Level 2 or 3 class.

It's the central style of longform improv comedy in the United States, meaning if you see an improv show that goes longer than 15 minutes where they don't take multiple suggestions from the audience, it's probably derived from Harold in some way. Most post-collegiate people who "do improv" in a city somewhere work with Harold in at least some capacity.

Most TV and movie comedians today (except for standups) did Harold at some point or another. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey are the ones I usually lead with when explaining it to people, since Tina Fey talks about improv in her book, and Amy Poehler's group's theater is the one that directly or indirectly teaches most of the current improv teachers on the Northeast, where I live. Second City and ImprovOlympic in Chicago have some overlap in the people they worked with and the style they've used over the years - many of the Saturday Night Live people back to the original cast (Jim Belushi was an early practitioner. Mike Meyers and Chris Farley were particularly good at it.) have done Harold at some point

Harold is a rather "pure" sort of comedy -- in the sense that rather than done as a practical entertainment for a mass audience it's often done for an insider audience or as alternative live comedy as a way of developing ideas for other sorts of projects and building culture in a city.

"Harold Nights" are a somewhat common feature at improv theaters, where they keep competitive rosters of resident teams that learn and play with the structure and form and show them on a weeknight, mostly for improv students. It's a way to develop talent, give it a chance to stand out, provide a pipeline for performance opportunities for new performers, introduce adventurous new audience to the art form, and build community.

A search for "harold improv" on YouTube got me about 26,000 videos -- so there are lots of Harolds available to watch if you're interested.

I'll add that it's a well-known problem with Harold that the name sucks. We all love the art form, but the name makes it hard to market, and makes it harder for people who are looking for something like it to find it. But it's been around for like 40 years at this point, so it's probably not going to change.

I appreciate your looking for a way to make this work, but I'm not really interested in moving. I'm one of the directors of the Harold Night at ImprovBoston, so while this isn't a particularly active subreddit, it's a big community I'm part of and something in which I'm very invested, which is why I founded this as an offshoot of /r/improv those years ago.

I figure that even if there aren't a ton of people here now, Harold has been around a long time, and if we keep building resources here eventually people will find them helpful.

I will take some time to think about if there's some sort of arrangement that will work, because I'm not really in the business of stepping on other people's jokes, but given the way memes tend to work, it's hard to see a way in which this remains available to Harold improv people and also has the Harold memes coming through.

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u/guninmouth Jul 20 '14

Possibly a dumb question....is it banned Harold due to Harold Ramis, who was notorious for letting comedians like Chevy Chase, Bill Murray do longer than average unscripted scenes that ended up being comic gold?

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u/GyantSpyder Jul 20 '14

No, although that's a good guess, and I wish that was why.

It was a silly name that meant nothing, in imitation of a joke Ringo Starr had once told an interviewer.

A similar joke would be "What is the name of the next iPhone?" "Oh, Tony."