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In this episode, Jimmy interviews Judy Fabjance, a well-known improv teacher at Second City, who recently created a two-person sketch show called "Tales Of A Stage 4 Cancer" with her wife, Kelly Beeman.
Accepting other people's success is not easy. Sooner or later it will happen to all of us: One of our friends will get ahead while we are left behind. It’s always hardest with the people we are closest to. You may start out in improv classes with people, and some of them will end up […]
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Will Hines is a legendary teacher and improviser at the UCB. He has been performing there since 2000 and he headed up the training center in New York for years. Jimmy talked to him about how he was first exposed to improv in New York back in the late '90s, what the UCB was like when he first started, and what "the game of the scene" means to him.
A little over a month ago, Will Hines, a well-known teacher from the UCB, and I started a new segment on our blogs where we decided we would each solicit questions from the improv community and share our answers with you. (By the way, check out Will's great improv blog, too: http://improvnonsense.tumblr.com/) We had such fun […]
The one thing that the improv community has taught me over the years is how to chase the carrot at the end of the stick. Whenever I do this, the result is always the same: I end up eating a lot more shit than carrot. It's rarely worth it. I always end up sacrificing a piece of myself, and I never really get ahead. As I […]
By far the thing I hear most from improv students when they first start working with me is: "I want to do characters. Teach me how to do characters. My last teacher said I need to do more characters." I get it. I have struggled with this myself. There was even a time when I […]
Improv is a family, and when a member dies, regardless of whether or not he had a direct impact on you, you are affected by it. This was the case when I heard that Jason Chin died last week at the age of 46. I was in the back of an airport shuttle getting thrown […]
Beware of the buzz kill. That person who is in your group or in your class who takes a perfectly good show or class and shits all over it. They do it with their words. They do it with their negativity. Have pity on them; they don't know any better. I should know, I am […]
I’ve had a great year, and the thing that I am most grateful for is that I am still learning. Can you believe it at my age? Though at times bumpy and ego bruising, I've learned a ton from doing Improv Nerd -- from my guests, from my staff and from the fans. Here are […]
One of the fun things about writing an improv blog is that I often get questions from people all over the world asking for my advice. They often want to know what their next step should be in their career, whether they should move to New York or Los Angeles, or how to deal with […]