The Other Improv Tradition Was Invented by a Man Who Hated School
While Chicago was building improv out of Viola Spolin's theatre games, a Devon-born teacher at the Royal Court was building a rival system by systematically reversing everything his own teachers had told him — and then turned it into a competitive sport.
Improv is usually told as one story with a Chicago address. It is two stories. The second one starts in Devon, runs through the Royal Court, and ends in Calgary — and its founding method was pure negation.
Reversing the syllabus
Donald Keith Johnstone was born in Brixham, Devon, on 21 February 1933. The record of his life is unusually direct about the motivating grievance: he grew up hating school, finding that it blunted his imagination and made him self-conscious and shy.
After St Luke's College Exeter he taught at a working-class school in Battersea in the early 1950s. In 1956 the Royal Court Theatre commissioned a play from him, and he stayed on as a play-reader, director and drama teacher. It was there that he made the decision his entire system rests on: he chose to reverse everything his own teachers had told him, in order to produce more spontaneous actors.
That is a method, and it is the opposite of Viola Spolin's. Spolin built exercises to *give* players a capability they lacked. Johnstone assumed the capability was already there and had been trained out, and built exercises to *remove* the training.
Mark Ravenhill, writing in *The Guardian* in 2009, summarised the inversion neatly: where Johnstone's teachers told him to think more, he tells his students to think less; where he was advised to plan a story before writing it, he now says to listen to an audience and let the tale tell itself.
Theatresports
From 1973 to 1975 Johnstone was a professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1975 he moved to Calgary to teach at the University of Calgary, where he stayed until retiring in 1995. He developed his training system at the Loose Moose Theatre, which he co-founded in 1977, serving as artistic director until 1998 and continuing to teach until 2018.
His two books are *Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre* (1979) and *Impro For Storytellers* (1998).
The innovation with the widest reach is Theatresports — improvisation staged as a competition between teams, with judges and scoring. It is worth being precise about why that is clever rather than gimmicky. Improv's hardest commercial problem is that an audience with no stake watches a form with no plot. Competition manufactures the stake. It gives the audience a reason to care about the next scene that has nothing to do with whether the scene is any good, and it gives performers a permission structure for failing in public.
That format has since travelled further than almost any other comedy invention of the period, into formats and leagues worldwide, largely without Johnstone's name attached.
Failure as curriculum
The slogans he is remembered for are teaching instruments rather than aphorisms. Two of them: that you cannot learn anything without failing, and — his best — the instruction not to do your best, because trying to do your best is itself the thing that stops you.
He is a strange figure to place in comedy history because he did not primarily set out to be funny. He set out to make performers spontaneous, and comedy is what a room does when a performer is genuinely unprepared and not frightened. The laugh was a symptom of the pedagogy working.
Johnstone died at Rockyview General Hospital in Calgary on 11 March 2023, aged ninety.
Two men and one woman, in Chicago and Calgary and Battersea, built the entire teaching apparatus that modern comedy runs on — and every one of them arrived at it while trying to solve a problem that was not about comedy at all.