Improv often comes in handy when an actor needs to quickly work around a lack of scripted material, but some comedians take it further, building entire shows with no scripts. Pulling off improv comedy requires patience, adaptability, good timing, and quick thinking. Unfortunately, not every comedian has these things, as much as they'd like to believe they do — and fiction loves to take advantage of this to make out improv comedians as exceedingly lowbrow.
Your typical improv group in fiction will have a Punny Name and an overly cheery nature that the audience may or may not find endearing. They'll often be set in Chicago due to that city's particularly large improv scene (usually through The Second City). Due to the lack of structure in improv comedy, your average performance is stereotyped as self-absorbed amateur actors (some of whom might be brand new to any form of acting) stuck in Ham-to-Ham Combat, jumping onto each other's bits and throwing around random invisible props until the scene is no longer comprehensible. They may miss the point of improv by trying to do the bits they want to do without actually adapting to their fellow actors or try to push the exact same bit over and over again. When stuck for a scene idea, they'll hastily invoke Chandler's Law. Expect remarks about how these actors spend hundreds of dollars on improv classes only to learn nothing useful about comedy. Some works may parody the flash mob approach popularized by Improv Everywhere, with onlookers being confused and annoyed. At its most unflattering, these improv groups may be depicted as creepy or even cult-like despite their chummy exterior.
While the comedians usually take scene suggestions from the audience, they're more likely to awkwardly shoehorn the suggestion into the story idea they already had, or beg the audience to give them a different prompt. On the flip side, the audience members may be the problem by suggesting prompts that are difficult to work into comedy, usually of the offensive or vulgar variety.
This trope often shows up in scripted comedies, which may indicate that comedy writers look down on this other genre. However, many comedians get their start in improv comedy, so this can actually be a form of Self-Deprecation.
Compare Everyone Hates Mimes, Disco Sucks, and Rap Is Crap. Remember that this is about works making fun of improv comedy, not a place for tropers to make fun of improv comedy, so In-Universe Examples Only, please.
Examples:
- Ted 2: Ted and John love to go to improv comedy clubs, but only to heckle the comedians by asking them to act out situations that are obscenely unfunny, such as 9/11 and Bill Cosby.
- Broad City: In "Stolen Phone", Ilana dates a very attractive guy named Tyler and is surprised at his lack of faults. However, when she attends his improv comedy show, she realizes how obnoxious he is, jumping into scenes with weird new ideas and trying to take attention away from the other actors. This convinces her to finally dump him.
- Galavant: In "Two Balls", it's revealed that hours of public, unscripted theatre around the elder-tree was a national pastime in the Kingdom of Valencia, something both Galavant and King Richard remark as sounding like a miserable time.
- The Good Place: In "...Someone Like Me as a Member" "college improv" is one of the Faux Horrific things listed in Eleanor's personal hell.
- In Living Color!: In a sketch of HBO's Tired Comedy Nite, one of the featured comics is named "the stupid improv guy" who isn't too liked by the crowd until does a "trick" where he hangs himself onstage which earns him a standing ovation.
- Life's Too Short: Liam Neeson insists on trying improv comedy, but keeps reusing the same bit about contracting AIDS from an African prostitute, with his one funny joke not actually being intended as a joke.
- Lucifer: In "My Little Monkey," Lucifer decides to try and be more like Dan, even dressing like him and imitating his accent. Dan, not unreasonably, assumes he's mocking him and avoids Lucifer as much as possible. This ends with Lucifer following Dan to whatever it is he does in his time off, which he discovers — to his horror — is an improv club. Lucifer follows him in just in time to see Dan do an improvised scene imitating Lucifer, and the two have a confrontation that becomes a heart-to-heart where they realise neither of them has it as figured out as the other assumed.
- The Office (US): "Email Surveillance" has Michael join an improv class and annoy his fellow actors by only ever adding to the scene by playing his Author Avatar and pulling out a fake gun.
- Saturday Night Live:
- One of the high school theater sketches incorporates some improv into the show, with the students asking for suggestions from the audience. An audience member gives "basketball." The students then put on a clearly pre-rehearsed scene about a mother comforting her son after kids are homophobic to him in school, then announcing they're going to have basketball for dinner at the end.
- One sketch parodies Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D. with Chicago Improv, a gritty drama full of obscure references to the Chicago improv scene played as Serious Business. The reviews are very confused.
"Too much improv," says Improv Magazine.
- The sketch "Improv Show" from season 40 has an improv troupe named "Prince Charmin" who enter the scene doing corny dance moves and are overly expressive with every single sentence they say. When they interview audience member Robert Durst as a prompt for a scene, he says they have "too much energy" and once the team starts the scene, they end up laughing at all their own jokes.
- MAD: A section about fake propositions included one threatening to arrest anybody who was a suspected member of Improv Everywhere.
- The Muppet Show: Fozzie tries to incorporate improv into his act, bragging that he can make a joke out of any word suggested by the audience. His backstage rehearsals fall flat, and when he comes onstage, Statler and Waldorf stump him by suggesting "amoeba". ("No foreign words, please.")
- Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me: Improv comedy is a recurring subject of disdain by panelists and guests on the show, despite most of them having done improv comedy and ad-libs comprising at least 2/3 of any given episode's laugh lines.
- Homestar Runner did a special episode of Strong Bad Email for a fundraising event for a real-life improv group Dad's Garage and Friends. It revolved around Strong Bad making fun of all the things he hates about improv.
- Internet Historian: Steve the Improv Dude is an improv comedian who's too insecure to actually pull off a good bit, begging people to tell him he's funny.
- Animaniacs (2020): In "Yakko's Big Idea", Yakko brags he could come up with a good business idea off the top of his head, adding, "And improv is the weakest of my comedic disciplines." Dot snarks back that improv is the weakest of all comedic disciplines, so Yakko's attempt should be terrible.
- Bob's Burgers:
- In "The Itty Bitty Ditty Committee", Jocelyn is hesitant to join the titular band because she mistakes it for an improv group, and an improv group kidnapped her cousin.
- In "The Millie-churian Candidate," Millie freaks out over Louise potentially not being her bestie but tries to save her campaign by claiming it was just practice for when she starts an improv club. Tina remarks, "I think Millie just lost," but Gene insists the only losers in improv are the audience.
- In "Sheshank Redemption," Teddy joins an improv group and gets very invested. However, he insists before the show that Bob gives "underpants" as a suggestion, indicating he isn't actually willing to improvise. Even more oddly, he ends up choosing a different suggestion at the show.
- BoJack Horseman: Near the end of Season 2, Todd gets sucked into an improv cult that is treated as analogous to the Church of Happyology. They use the "yes, and" rule to encourage blind loyalty and punish their critics by subjecting them to menial labor and physical violence. On top of that, their comedy is depicted as pretty random and juvenile, and part of their approach involves shocking random people on the street with improvised bits (though the people don't seem to mind).
- Clone High: In "Grave Mistakes: The Virgin Homicides," one of Joan's prying questions to ensure that Abe really loves Mary is, "Would you sit with her parents at her beginners' improv show?"
- Family Guy: In "Spies Reminiscent of Us," Peter, Quagmire, and Joe decide to form an improv comedy group called Room for Improv-ment since improv is "the most consistently funny form of comedy." Quagmire, having been a member of several improv groups in college, quickly becomes domineering at their rehearsals. At their first performance, Quagmire's attempts at conventional improv fall flat with the audience, while Peter easily wins them over with a bad John Wayne impression and lame puns.
- Monsters at Work: In "Bad Hair Day," Mike claims to be a master of improv comedy, but can only do scenes where he pretends to be a ball, and panics when his students suggest a scene about a cube.
- The Simpsons:
- In "The Road to Cincinnati", Principal Skinner is driving Superintendent Chalmers to a convention when he picks up a Shakespeare-theme improv troupe. Their act drives Chalmers crazy, causing an accident that totals the car. In The Stinger, the Simpsons end up going to a performance of the troupe, and everyone except Marge hates it.
- In "He Loves to Fly and He D'ohs", Homer and Mr. Burns fly to Chicago together, where they catch an improv show at the famous Second City Theater and feed the performers the premise of "a drunken billionaire at a Starbucks in Siberia." The ensuing scene plays out in two lines.
Male Performer: [acting drunk] Uh, excuse me, I need a (hic) I need a coffee. Can you change a billion-dollar bill?Female Performer: Our coffee COSTS a billion dollars. This is Starbucks... in Siberia!
- Steven Universe: In "Letters to Lars", would-be actor Jamie the mailman starts an improv comedy troupe, the Beach City Laugh-Guards. Jamie and Mr. Smiley are the only members of the troupe with any professional acting experience (the others being Barb Miller, Bill Dewey, Amethyst, and Peridot), so the results are somewhat lacking. To hammer home the point that the Laugh-Guards aren't very funny or very popular, the only people in the audience are Pearl and Steven.
