The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  You go to watch a smart person talk because they might have things to say to you that would be interesting, not so you can come away thinking, Wow, that’s a smart person! It depresses me for the audience that it would think, Look how much better that person is than me. That doesn’t mean performers can’t be great. In some cases, excellence is a means to an end. A great novelist can create a great book which has value, but that excellence is a means to that end, whereas with something like juggling, that’s all it is: amazement that a person can do that. At a certain level, virtuosity has only one thing to say, and that is: Look at how good I am.

  In improv, being a virtuoso theater improviser involves knowing the conventions in all sorts of different film genres so you can call upon them when needed, and being able to do lots of different accents. Then there’s real virtuosity, which is being able to handle an unexpected turn in a way that’s quick and witty, being able to build a scene out of surprising elements.

  But, ultimately, none of that is really what interests me about improvisation.

  * * *

  I’m interested in improv as an experience for people to have, a thing for people to do, a practice.

  When I was in college, I auditioned for the improv group at school but didn’t get in. I figured the easiest way to be in a group would be to start my own group, so I did that. I wasn’t particularly interested in being the leader of that group. I figured we’d work collaboratively and that out of necessity I would teach them the basics of improv.

  That’s not what happened. What happened was I really liked teaching and they really liked me being the teacher. I let everybody who wanted to join, join. And it was a fucked-up bunch of people; some were very skilled, some were shy. We had three rehearsals a week, and we did a show every week. We did this for three or four years. It was serious, and we did pretty well for a student group.

  After I left school, I kept trying to re-create that experience, but I always hated it, and I hated watching other groups. I think what took me a long time to figure out—and which I only figured out years later—is that the thing we were providing for our audience was not the really valuable part. The really valuable experience was the experience that people in the group were having. The experience that I was providing the group was in fact the experience that I hoped we were providing to the audience, but were not.

  So I started to think about whether I could do theater and art that would consist of getting people to do this improv-type stuff rather than watch it.

  * * *

  Keith Johnstone, who pretty much invented the sort of theater improv I’m interested in, has a book called Impro, which I’ve been reading and rereading for over twenty years and which explains his ideas about improv, and teaching, and everything else. In that book, Johnstone talks about doing all sorts of things in workshops with his students and finding it all hysterically funny. They wanted to take it onstage to test it, to see if it really was as funny as they thought.

  For me, I think, Oh, what an interesting mistake! The way people laugh when they’re taking an improv class together—the quality of laughter is so incredible and deep and real and serious. And it always feels to me that, in a way, comedy shows and funny movies are attempts to create a bottled version of that—of what happens with your friends when you’re laughing and joking around. But to make the mistake of thinking that the bottled version is primary and the interpersonal version is the thing to doubt—to say that it’s only real if you bottle and perform it—means you imagine yourself to be in the making-people-laugh business.

  So one way to think about improv is: we’re going to train improvisers to make the audience laugh, and they’re going to laugh in the same way as people who sit in movies laugh. But I became very excited to think I was in the business of making people laugh by having them joke around with each other. So now people pay me money and they run around. They make the stuff together. And there’s no audience.

  * * *

  So what is true improv?

  I guess the biggest thing is that it’s actually about letting yourself be surprised and letting yourself be off-balance. One approach is to develop as many tools as you can so you’re never off-balance, but the approach I’m interested in is to develop skills so you can respond well to being off-balance, and especially so you can enjoy being off-balance.

  A lot of people are scared to be surprised, I find. And a lot of things I don’t like in improv come down to people’s attempts to avoid that surprise. But a real part of what it means to truly improvise is to really not know where you’re going, to really not know what you’re doing. There’s a feeling I associate with improvising which I think is a really thrilling feeling, which is the feeling of being at once very comfortable and yet having no idea what’s going to happen. That’s thrilling, and it’s a little mysterious, and there’s pleasure in feeling out of control. There’s a real joy in starting a sentence and not knowing how it’s going to finish.

  16. The Crazy Parts

  A lot of contemporary clinical psychology for mental disorders consists of a catalogue of the kinds of intellectual mistakes people make when they’re crazy. I think having an awareness of that catalogue of mistakes is tremendously helpful, in the same way that you teach people the fallacies when you study philosophy.

  So, for instance: Washing your hands regularly is a good thing to do to reduce your risk of catching a cold. Some people wash their hands a thousand times a day because no amount of hand-washing is sufficient to ensure that they won’t get a cold. It’s an intellectual mistake, a logical fallacy: you can’t totally eliminate colds through hours of hand-washing. I think there’s a lot to learn from these kinds of mistakes.

  I guess I think it’s normal for people to be a little bit crazy in a million different ways. We all go through spells when we really irrationally berate or underevaluate ourselves, which is what people with depression do. It’s natural for everyone, at times, to get a thought stuck in their head, or to have a hard time stopping working on something far past the point when it’s useful, which is what happens to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s normal, too, for our minds to overascribe meaning to random or meaningless occurrences, which is what happens much more dramatically in people with schizophrenia.

  Sometimes we can tell what our slightly crazy parts are. By definition, a phobia is actually a phobia only insofar as you recognize it as irrational—otherwise it’s a psychotic delusion. So, for instance, if the sight of a rubber duck makes you very uncomfortable every time you see one, and you think that’s nuts, that’s a phobia. If, however, you think it’s going to hurt you, then it’s a delusion.

  The challenge is to figure out what parts of your thoughts and feelings are irrational. Sometimes it’s not obvious, so you have to pay close attention to what you’re thinking. That’s a skill, and you need to step back from these thoughts at a time when you’re not emotionally engaged with them.

  So, for instance, I really don’t think I have obsessive-compulsive disorder as a medical or psychological condition, but I certainly think there are elements of my personality that resemble some of the traits of that condition sometimes. I’m definitely sometimes inclined to put more energy than is necessary into attaining certainty when certainty is actually impossible, or when the benefit of extra certainty would be quite low.

  It’s a funny paradox that one of the main things I do is teach people to improvise. I teach people, specifically, not to plan ahead, to be okay with not knowing what’s coming next, to hope to be surprised—but in the grand scheme of my life, I’m not very good at any of those things. Compared with most people, I think I worry a fair bit. I’m inclined to need control. I structure my time very carefully in a calendar.

  I don’t think there’s a contradiction there. If I were really good at being spontaneous in my day-to-day life, that sort of spontaneity wouldn’t seem so remarkable to me. I likely wouldn’t feel inclined to think about it so much. I probably wouldn’t find i
t such an interesting thing to try to teach it to people in the context of improvisation.

  17. Charging for My Classes

  I keep changing how I price my classes because the things I want are sort of contradictory. On the one hand, I want to make money. On the other hand, I want lots of people to come, and I want to have a nice mix of people. I don’t want the classes to be only for people who can afford a really expensive leisure activity. I used to have a sliding scale where I would charge less for students or artists, or I would have a regular rate and then have a reduced rate for people in financial need. But now I just name a price: “$360 or whatever you want.” And I let people choose whatever price they want to pay. It’s not a great socialist or antimaterialist gesture or anything. It’s just a lot less hassle and headache for me.

  A lot of the people who do have money who take my classes specifically like the idea of taking a class where there are artists and writers, so I try to explain to them that if they’re paying a little more, then they’re subsidizing that experience. It works out pretty well. Everyone’s usually pretty comfortable with what they pay, and a surprising number of people choose to pay the full amount. Occasionally but infrequently people choose to pay more than the asking price. Sometimes people are unemployed when they start taking the class and then they find a job and then they’ll pay me extra money at the end of the class.

  Amid all this, though, I’m also a real stickler about payments. If people drop out of the class, I usually won’t refund their money. People are allowed to pay in installments, but they have to give me postdated checks up front. So there is a contract and the contract is binding, it’s just up to that person to choose what the terms of the contract are.

  People drop out of the classes for different reasons. Sometimes people drop out after the first class because they hate it, and sometimes I’ll refund their money in those cases, though I do not advertise the fact. Sometimes people drop out because their lives get too busy. This often happens with people who have chosen to pay the full amount, probably because there’s some correlation between having money and having a busy schedule. In those cases I don’t refund.

  18. What Is a Game?

  A game has rules, it has goals, it has at least one player and a beginning and an end, there are elements of it that are arbitrary, and there has to be something about it that’s not real.

  What I often do when I get frustrated is I think of something as a game. With neighborhood activism, I might think to myself, It’s a video game. There are patterns on my screen—in this case emails—and I’m trying to get certain patterns to come about and certain patterns to not come about.

  Looking at it that way means you don’t need to get as upset if you fail. You can approach challenges in a happier spirit. You can be more effective—in part because you’re more effective when you’re not upset. You don’t need to feel angry toward your opponent, because in a sport or a game, the other person is necessarily trying to do the opposite thing from you. That doesn’t make them a bad person.

  19. Spam

  I spend more time than I care to admit thinking about spam. I’ve had the same email address for well over ten years and have never been careful about publishing it, so it’s on websites and in newsgroups and I use it to sign up for things, so it’s on pretty much every spam list in the world. But it’s a cool email address so I like to keep it. It’s [email protected]. I worry that if I use a new email address people who used to know me won’t be able to reach me anymore.

  This address receives around eight hundred spam messages a day on average, so spam filtering is very important to me. I’ve spent lots of time configuring different systems, and I frequent the forums of my email provider, to look for tips on spam filtering but more often to answer questions that other people have about it.

  The best spam filtering software available, as far as I know, is SpamAssassin. It’s open source, it gets updated a lot, people can add their own rules. But the best thing about SpamAssassin is that it tries to use as many different methods as possible to determine whether a message is spam. It does a gazillion different tests on a message, and each of those tests has a score, and then all the scores are added up, and then SpamAssassin will do something subtle like put a little header in the message that says, This message got a 7.3 spam score. Then you can decide what to do with the messages based on that score. That’s really, really important for me.

  No spam-sorting method is completely perfect, and that means that any method will either determine that some legitimate messages are spam or will determine that some spam messages are legitimate or usually both. That’s why places like Hotmail or Gmail, rather than deleting spam altogether, put messages in a spam folder. The idea is that you ought to check your spam folder occasionally to make sure that no legitimate messages found their way in there.

  But if there are eight hundred messages a day in your spam folder, you can’t really do that. So I sort my email into a few different levels. Messages that look like they’re pretty much definitely spam all go into their own “almost definitely spam” folder. I never look in that folder unless there’s a specific message that I fear might have gone missing and I know what I’m looking for. In two years, I think there’s been one legitimate message that’s ever ended up in there, and it wasn’t a very important one.

  Messages that are pretty much definitely not spam go straight into my inbox. And messages that look like they might be spam go into my inbox but with a tag next to them, which makes it really easy to sort and find them. The number per day varies a lot, because spam is a constant arms race between the methods the spammers use and the updates to spam software, so depending on the season, I’ll get anywhere from one or two a day to maybe twenty when things are really bad, but I can deal with twenty identified potential spam messages. It’s a system that works pretty well for me.

  With computer security, there are all sorts of measures taken to minimize the risks of different kinds of damage, but the damage that’s often overlooked is the damage caused by the measures themselves. So, for instance, when you get locked out of your email because you forgot your password or because your email service is worried that someone else got your password and locks you out—that’s real damage. All the time one wastes keeping track of passwords and forgetting them and losing them and getting locked out of accounts and all that—those are real security costs.

  People talk about trying to find the solution that blocks the most spam, but the trick isn’t to block the most spam, it’s to block the most spam while blocking the fewest legitimate messages. I mean, it’s easy to make a filter that blocks all your spam and just won’t let any of your messages through at all. In fact, with my email—and I think this is true for most people—the spam filter isn’t blocking spam, it’s actually doing the opposite. It’s looking at the thousand or so messages a day that come into my email inbox, 90 percent of which are garbage, and trying to pluck out the small minority that are actually legitimate email. So you really have to think about it that way.

  On all the discussion forums for FastMail, people are always suggesting new rules. For instance, they notice that a lot of their spam is in Russian, so they figure if they block all the emails with Russian characters, they’ll block more spam. But every new rule that you add introduces a very real possibility of blocking more legitimate mail.

  This actually had very real consequences for me with the Residents’ Association, working on some really political and time-sensitive emails. After a couple of days, it turned out I was completely out of the loop. An overzealous system administrator had instituted a new spam filter. The bar we were talking about was called the Cock and Tail, and every email with cock in the subject line was silently being deleted.

  By far the coolest part of SpamAssassin—and it’s used in a lot of other spam filters, too—is something called Bayesian filtering. Bayesian filtering is a kind of deal you strike with your spam filter, because as a user you have some responsibility. Your re
sponsibility is that you have to tell your spam filter which of your incoming messages are legitimate mail and which ones are spam. There are lots of things that make that easy to do, say, by designating folders for spam and legitimate mail, but one way or another you have to let the server know.

  Then the server can do this awesome thing: it can statistically analyze the messages you get and look for patterns that distinguish the spam from legitimate messages. The more mail you train it on, the more accurate it becomes. The really fantastic thing about this is that it learns. A lot of people understand this as meaning that the filter can keep up with the latest techniques spammers use, which is true to some degree, but more important, it learns what your email looks like. So the classic example is that if you’re, say, a pharmacist, the word Viagra might actually appear in your legitimate mail and the Bayesian filter would learn that, so even though Viagra is a spam trigger for most people, it wouldn’t be for you.

  The Bayesian filter points out that mail to me should look like my mail. My mail usually includes the names of some of my friends or coworkers. It often includes the names of streets and places in Toronto, the names of projects that I’m working on, and words associated with them. The Bayesian filter will learn all of these words automatically, and the really great thing is that spammers, no matter how smart they get—unless they actually start hacking into my account or the accounts of my friends—though they might be able to know the features that distinguish spam from legitimate mail in general, they can’t really learn the features that make my mail look like my mail.