Impro is a handbook for running a cult

Here’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro:

1. Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed adults by Western culture and education
2. The process of becoming more creative and expressive is largely a process of unlearning these habits of repression
3. Improv — improvisational comedy — is thus not just the skeleton key for learning to act, but for unlocking a more authentically human way of life

This take doesn’t sound particularly original, but references to Impro pop up in all kinds of places: in influential tech blogs, as part of the initial process of onboarding for Palantir, and on the reading list of multiple big-tech founders. Impro is part of the secret canon of Silicon Valley, right alongside books like Seeing Like a State and The Power Broker. Why is that? For two reasons: first, because Johnstone’s outsider critique of established institutions is appealing; and second, because Impro is a handbook for running a cult.

Defense mechanisms and status

The part of Impro that is most obviously useful to software engineers is Johnstone’s chapter on status.

According to him, status games pervade all social interactions. Even innocuous, friendly conversations operate in terms of status. When you apologize or downplay something to “be nice”, that’s performing low status; when you reassure somebody, that’s performing high status; when you and a friend are comparing stories, you’re making friendly bids for status from each other. In the workplace, these status games are conditioned by the formal status of your role: you must allow your boss the high status position most of the time, or you’ll be (correctly) perceived as insubordinate. This is understood in some cultures, where it’s often called “face”, but in Western cultures it’s taboo to openly discuss status games.

The core social skill is the ability to deliberately alter your status. Someone who can only perform low status is a weak person, pitiable, annoying. Someone who can only perform high status is a braggart, a posturer, dangerous. To be effective socially, you must be able to switch between high and low status when appropriate, sometimes from sentence to sentence. I wrote about this exact point at the end of Big tech engineers need big egos: effective senior+ software engineers must be able to present as high status in order to be useful authorities, but also to switch to low status in order to take direction from the company leaders.

As an example, Johnstone describes in detail how he manipulates status in the classroom. He begins by sitting on the floor (deliberately assuming low status), and explaining that if his students fail, it’s his fault not theirs, since he’s the expert. The initial low status puts the class at ease, but in his words, ”[my] actual status is going up, since only a very confident and experienced person would put the blame for failure on himself.” These skills are not just useful for improv comedy.

Improvisation as a lifestyle choice

Impro is not just a book about improvising well. It’s a book about how you should live your life. In other words, Johnstone thinks that everyone would be better off if they became more spontaneous and ditched their shells of over-analysis. He criticizes the culture of Western thought in a number of different areas. According to him:

• Everyone is more or less equivalently mentally ill, but “sane” people simply have better coping mechanisms
• Cities and “taking pills” (read: antidepressants) are obscene, but you should be able to make sexual jokes in the workplace and generally be uninhibited
• If we were free from the puritanical shackles of Western culture, childbirth would not be painful¹

Johnstone didn’t come up with these ideas — they’re standard counterculture positions from the 1960s and 1970s — but it goes to show how he connected improvisational comedy to this general anti-establishment political program. Johnstone ran his classes and theatre troupe like a revolutionary cadre. Here are some quotes from Something Like a Drug: An Unauthorized Oral History of Theatresports:

So of course when I was invited to join Loose Moose Theatre and train at improvisational games late at night in an abandoned garage in a run-down portion of the city, I was thrilled. I remember thinking, This is a revolutionary act.

Keith [Johnstone] got a group of his more talented students together to start improvising outside of school hours. Usually in his basement.

The Secret Impro group—it’s very strange. It was very much that Keith said we were going to do this, and we’d just do it. It was like we were sheep. Keith would say when we were going to do a show, and we’d just do it, blindly. Like I said, if we had the videotapes now, we’d be very embarrassed and probably never go on stage again. We became a group of people who would follow Keith. There was always that sort of “tag” put on those people who were with Keith and those people who were against Keith. We were the people, basically, that if he said something, we believed it.

To some extent, it’s plausible that teaching acting or improvisation requires a high level of trust in your teacher. When Johnstone says things like “Students need a ‘guru’ who ‘gives permission’ to allow forbidden thoughts into their consciousness.”, I can believe that it’s just how you have to teach acting. But the more I read of Impro (and particularly when I read Something Like a Drug and Johnstone’s biography Keith Johnstone), the less it sounded like an ordinary book on acting.

Instead, it began to sound like a charismatic man who had found a way to gather a group of disciples that would let him mold their psyches. In other words, it began to sound like a cult.

Masks, cults and theatre groups

Impro was first introduced to the software world by Venkatesh Rao (of Gervais Principle fame), who wrote a brief review. Rao gives a detailed account of the first three-quarters of Impro, but glosses right over the last chapter, called “Masks and Trance”, simply saying “despite the disturbing raw material, the ideas and concepts are not particularly difficult to grasp and accept”. What ideas and concepts?

Johnstone’s discussion of masks (or “Masks”, in his language — he always capitalizes the word) is as explicitly cult-like as Impro gets. In brief, Johnstone has a box of literal, physical prop masks. He introduces the box with great ceremony to his students², warning them seriously about the dangers of possession and reassuring them that he is a skilled and competent spirit guide. Through various hypnosis-adjacent techniques³ (Johnstone draws the parallel quite explicitly) he conditions his students to be in a trance state when wearing a mask, and believes this produces more authentic emotional states in their acting and improvisation.

Here are some quotes from the book:

A high-status person whom you accept as dominant can easily propel you into unusual states of being. You’re likely to respond to his suggestion…

Once you understand that you’re no longer held responsible for your actions, then there’s no need to maintain a ‘personality’.

One famous French teacher of the Mask—who won’t approve of this essay⁴—divides students immediately into those who can work Masks and those who can’t.

I don’t cast an actor to play a Masked role until I know he has the ability to become ‘possessed’.

It’s true that an actor can wear a Mask casually, and just pretend to be another person, but Gaskill and myself were absolutely clear that we were trying to induce trance states.

Johnstone has a long and painful explanation of how new mask-wearers seem to mentally regress to the point where they don’t know how to open umbrellas or interact with chairs. He describes one student always going to the bathroom before putting on a mask, because she’s worried she might wet herself. New mask-wearers are non-verbal must be taught to speak again.

If this were at the beginning of the book, I think it would turn a lot of people off. But by the time you get to it, I suspect most readers are already warmed up enough to say “sure, why not, it seems weird but I guess it works”. Not me!

Johnstone attempts to defuse the obvious weirdness by arguing that trance states are very common (e.g. being lost in a book). More unconvincingly, he says this in response to the worry that vulnerable people are going to get mentally harmed:

As for the fear of madness, I would answer that the ability to become possessed is a sign of correct social adjustment, and that really disturbed people censor themselves out. Either they can’t do it, or they’re afraid to even try. People who feel themselves at risk avoid situations where they feel likely to ‘go to pieces’.

Does this convince anyone? Mentally vulnerable people fall into dangerous situations all the time: ayahuasca trips, cults, GPT-4o, and so on. It’s such a weak argument.

In general, I’m struck by the sheer power Johnstone held over his disciples. He has them yell slurs at each other, encourages them to feel deep emotions in quick succession, relax any mental defenses and regress to a childhood state, and literally hypnotizes them. He explicitly lays out his procedure for breaking down their sense of self:

The stages I try to take students through involve the realisation (1) that we struggle against our imaginations, especially when we try to be imaginative; (2) that we are not responsible for the content of our imaginations; and (3) that we are not, as we are taught to think, our ‘personalities’, but that the imagination is our true self.

If your imagination is your true self, and you’re not responsible for its content, you’re not ultimately responsible for anything: you’re in the safe hands of the guru, who can mold you as he wishes. Later on, Johnstone walks it back a bit:

In the end they learn how to abandon control while at the same time they exercise control. … You have to misdirect people to absolve them of responsibility. Then, much later, they become strong enough to resume the responsibility themselves.

So the explicit idea is that (much later), the guru hands autonomy back to his disciples, when they’re ready to take it. This does not exactly reassure me, particularly against the background noise of everyone in Johnstone’s circle saying “boy I sure love being part of this cult!”

What kind of cult leader was Johnstone?

I don’t think Johnstone was preying on his students. The strongest evidence against this is that he did marry a student⁵, Ingrid Brind. That’s not great! On the other hand, it was fairly standard for professors back then — when I was in grad school for philosophy, several of my older male⁶ professors had wives that they’d taught decades ago — so I don’t think it proves Johnstone was that kind of cult leader.

I even read Ann Jellicoe’s play The Knack to get a better picture of Johnstone’s character. Jellicoe had an affair with Johnstone for several years, and his official biography claims⁷ that the character of Tom in The Knack is directly based on Johnstone. The Knack is a rather unpleasant play about sexual assault, but Tom’s character is largely asexual: he’s certainly no feminist, but is much more interested in impressing people with his intelligence than with getting laid.

In Something Like a Drug, two women who were part of Loose Moose, Johnstone’s Canadian improv group, describe their experiences:

You know, it brings around the other question: Why do the guys get laid after the show and not the chicks? You know, I can remember those days when Tony [Totino] and Dave [Duncan] and all those guys … the women would swarm around them. Those were the days, my friend.

In Loose Moose I think there are fewer women not only because of the training, but because of the guys in Loose Moose. When I came up with Joanne and Laura, there was a real initiation that was going on, and there was a group of guys at that time who were all single. And they would hit on you to the point where one night Joanne, Laura and I, who really didn’t know each other, were in a show together, started talking and realized that we were getting the same pickup lines from the same guys. And that’s when you realize what’s going on, and I think that’s intimidating. Or if a woman gets into a relationship with a senior improvisor and it doesn’t work out or something bad happens. I think that’s one reason.

This dynamic doesn’t sound great, but it doesn’t mention Johnstone, and it doesn’t sound particularly unusual: I’ve heard versions of this story about all kinds of ordinary male-dominated nerd spaces.

In fact, reading through the anecdotes in Something Like a Drug is a good antidote to the cultish atmosphere in Impro. Johnstone’s argument goes something like: “if we could only throw away the restrictive chains of Western culture and permit ourselves to be as obscene and free as children, we would be transported to a better, more beautiful world”. Well, you tried that, and the women in the group are still relegated to playing bimbos and housewives, there are still petty personal fights, and the guru is out here union-busting⁸. What was enlightenment supposed to look like?

I think the most generous defense of Johnstone is that his group was not unusually cult-like, and that any similar account from one of his peer improv teachers would raise the same red flags. Maybe improv classes and groups (particularly in the 70s and 80s) were just cultish in general? Having now read four books on Johnstone, I’m reluctant to go and read more to prove or disprove this theory, but it’s at least plausible.

Cults and startups

To anyone familiar with San Francisco software engineering culture, it should be pretty clear why Impro is so popular. The line between a startup and a cult is very thin indeed.

In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel famously says that good startups are “slightly less extreme kinds of cults”. If you believe that, it makes total sense to assign Impro as mandatory reading for new Palantir hires. It tells them what kind of cult you’re trying to run: one where you’ll disregard existing cultural norms, learn to play status games well, think on your feet, and generally be molded by the guru into a more persuasive, more effective engineer.

Read critically, Impro also serves as a handbook for engineers who are trying to recognize if the environment they’re in is cult-like. Is your company telling you to reinvent your personality in order to be better at your job? Are you under the spell of a charismatic, high-status leader? Is your company trying to keep you in an unquestioning flow trance state?

Conclusion

In the great battle between the shackles of restrictive culture and the glorious freedom of the guru, I am always and forever on the side of the shackles of restrictive culture. In general, I think most boring and stupid social norms (such as not hypnotizing and marrying your students) serve an important purpose and shouldn’t just be cut down in the name of freedom.

Impro is still a good book. There’s a lot to learn from Johnstone’s analysis of power dynamics, of education, and of creativity in general. By all accounts he was excellent at teaching students how to improvise. But I wouldn’t recommend adopting it as your life philosophy, and I’d recommend being a bit suspicious of anyone pushing this book too hard. Getting rid of the existing social structures might benefit confident, wildly charismatic gurus like Johnstone, but most of us are just ordinary animals who do better in a group governed by norms.