DARE TO IMPROV: Laughs and lessons from DareDevil Improv class

This is a Big Fish

“This is a big fish,” DareDevil’s Adrian Monte declares to our circle of eight, stretching his hands apart like he’s measuring an ambitious catch. Monte, our guide for six weeks of Improv 101, was full of these prompts. The assignment was always the same: see the thing. Feel it. Commit to it. Smell it—ew.

But most of all, always say, “Yes, and…”

If improv had a coat of arms, that phrase could appear front and center, flanked by two rubber chickens. “Yes, and…” is how you give someone a gift—an offering of trust, of collaboration, of “I’m with you, even if what you just said was unhinged.”

Monte demonstrates:

“Shannon, this is a blue ball!” he calls out from across the all but empty showroom at Dead Crow Comedy Room. Holding up a baseball-sized pocket of air, he tosses it my way.

My hands move to motion for a catch. “Thank you—blue ball,” I confirm, feeling the phantom weight land in my palms. “Chelsea, this is a blue ball,” I say to my friend and classmate, and now it’s her turn to accept this imaginary treasure. Before long we’re passing across the room like we’re training for a softball tournament.

“Steve! This is a black frisbee!” Monte tosses over the “black frisbee” to Steve.

“Thank you—black frisbee,” Steve confirms before calling out his pass to Jason.

“Lillie! This is a red ball,” Monte interjects again and makes an overhead pass above the increasing mix.

“Aden!” Monte immediately calls out again. “This is a brown soccer ball,” and kicks it over. And so on until the room explodes with activity and motion, voices grow louder over each other as we engage with everything and everyone around us (as best we can) to ready ourselves and catch whatever comes our way. Ready with our “Yes, and…”

After each game, Monte often asks, “What was challenging about that?” And we—this roomful of adults with mortgages, degrees, and decades of life experience—giggle like middle schoolers and shrug. How do you admit that play and pretend might be the most difficult thing you’ve done that day?

Big Booty, Little Booty

Each weekly 2-hour session ends in a version of “Big Booty,” another improv game during which we form a circle. Everyone is a number, counting up from 1, with Monte as player 0 or “Big Booty.” Big Booty starts the game by clapping a 4/4 rhythm and chant: 

Ahhh yeah, Big Booty, ah yeah, Big Booty, Big Booty, Big Booty

Big Booty calls out “Big Booty! Number 1!”

Player Number 1 calls back their number followed by another player’s number (“Number 1, Number 2!”) and so it goes until someone loses the rhythm or flubs their response, then is booted to “Little Booty” status. Here’s one version:

These games Monte introduces over the course of six weeks were not often hard on paper, but put into practice, they always offered a lesson we didn’t know we were in for. 

Night one’s lesson hit me hard: being present, most especially for fun, is harder than it’s ever been before. I didn’t realize how many tabs I have open in my head, backed by a soundtrack of songs and random movie quotes triggered by any or no reason at all.

“Is this a problem for a lot of people when they take this course?” I ask Monte during one of our “union-sanctioned bio-breaks.” We had just finished an exercise wherein we named an object and our partner would name a problem that had nothing to do with the object. It took me a painful three tries before I finally didn’t simply name a problem with the object or another object. 

I struggled to understand why instead of “Yes, and…” my brain kept saying, “yes, sure, but also no, or maybe so…”

A lot of these games are sneaky in their simplicity, they expose where your attention lacks focus; or reveal that automatic need for the brain to anticipate, plan, or think of something funny to say or do—which often results in a deer-in-headlights moment—when all we really ever have to do or say is something, anything that comes to us.

“You can’t be wrong,” Monte frequently reminds. 

Nevertheless, the fear of being wrong holds people back all of the time, no matter what the context or setting.

When "Silly" is a Dirty Word

TRAUMA PANCAKES: Adrian Monte describes core memories of performance, which started with tears but ended with laughs. Courtesy photo.

Born in Florida, Monte has been a performer (with comedy at his core) since childhood. I learned over coffee and donuts at Brooklyn Cafe about his first premeditated ad lib in fourth grade. He describes the play performance in which he was a king—wearing a cape with great comedic potential. 

“I was going to shake my finger and tell my young princess daughter not to do something,” he wags his finger in demonstration. “And I got my hand caught in my cape, and that was the first physical bit I was very conscious of doing it intentionally for a laugh.”

However, Monte’s first debut on stage was closer to a waking nightmare. A preschool church performance that he still remembers vividly; he can visualize the room, the long walk up to the stage in tears, looking out at the audience, still in tears, until his mom comes to the rescue. The traumatic event, followed by pancakes at an A&W Restaurant, was a formative moment in resiliency. “It was like, you know what, I'm gonna get back in front of people and not freak out like that,” he says. “So, I spent my whole life trying to do that.” 

We continue to talk a lot about how people, whether for the purpose of stage performance or not, want something very similar that transcends age, profession, and life goals: 

The ability to say or do something with confidence, and not freak out.

“We try to build exercises so people can experience what it's like to trust six or seven different strangers and to not be afraid to make mistakes,” Monte says. “Because what is a mistake? It's an opportunity. That's an opportunity to grow, to learn. That joke didn't work, or I missed my partner's gift on stage, it's okay, there's another opportunity.”

After years of gravitating toward theatre and comedy troupes throughout high school and college—plus copious amounts of  “Who’s Line is it Anyway?” and British comedies like Monty Python and “Are you being served?”—a comedy festival drew him to Chicago, "ground zero for American comedy and American improvised comedy,” where he studied, performed, and lived for about 9-10 years. There, he trained at Improv Olympic (now IO), Annoyance Theater, and Second City, well-known for many talented writers, actors, and performers.

Throughout his tenure, Monte says he's known improv as the ultimate “low commitment, low entry fee” into the world of comedy that makes it so accessible to everyone—even when silliness almost feels derogatory as an adult. Somewhere along the road from childhood to mortgages and rent, saying or doing something silly starts to have a negative connotation. 

“So we grow up curbing our behavior and our instincts to not be seen as silly, or not to do something silly, but silliness is just inspired play, it's just the purest moment,” he explains. “Like, as a parent, you had years of that with your child, those formative infant, toddler years, all we are is silly with our children, because we are teaching them. And then kids grow up, and they start playing. Then somewhere around 7, 8 to 10, we start putting on all these rules. And somewhere in there, it kind of kills that [play] in all of us. Silliness gets tempered and redirected. … And then everything gets compartmentalized, and we lose so much ourselves.”

Say “Yes, and…”

DareDevil’s first class kicked off back in 2017 and they will celebrate eight years in September 2026. As a small business that spans pre- and post-pandemic times, and despite those hardest of times, DareDevil’s improv community continues to grow. 

Improv 101 is a six-week introduction to a lot of the aforementioned games, skills and techniques to build improvisational confidence. The 202 class, also six weeks, finishes the course with a live show at the Dead Crow Wednesday night improv set. These first two levels help build and reinforce the foundations of quality scene work; playing games with rules that often require new ways to speak and communicate.

“Then in the 300-level class, it's taking those guardrails [or rules] off and we're just doing scenes where we really explore the characters and their relationship,” Monte continues, “we're going to find ways to connect ideas from scene to scene. We start to build the kind of framework of a narrative based improvisation.”

In the 400-level course improvisers focus on The Harold improv structure, a long-form format that discovers patterns and themes as a group. It starts with a suggestion from the audience and builds throughout First, Second and Third "beats" that encompasses group games and other components. So even though it’s still improvising for 25 minutes, this helps avoid chaos and create a story. 

“The audience goes on a little journey with us. We don't know what that story is, and actually, the audience is gonna tell us; because whatever they laugh at the most, we're probably gonna do more of that,” Monte explains. “Sometimes it doesn't work that way. Sometimes the improvisers are like, You know what? We're just having fun, and the audience can enjoy that as well.”

“Soft Skills” Hard to Come By

Monte also takes these games and practices to professional landscapes, such as UNCW’s executive MBA program or corporate offices. However, there’s still a tendency to separate the humanities and arts from science, corporate, and other “professional” sectors. While studies continue to demonstrate that humor and laughter (especially in leadership) foster better communication, creativity, and culture, Monte says it’s still a struggle to convince someone with a business or corporate mindset of that value. 

“It's part re-educating and kind of transforming the way corporate and business hierarchies work,” he says. “Because if you do have a unit of people, the best motivation is by empowering them, having them engaged. And we do that in improvisation. We create ensemble work that's A) experiential, that's B) unquantifiable, and C) is a transformative experience. People just have to take a chance on that, because I can't give you numbers, because I can't hook up an MRI to every participant’s brain to show you how much you're activating a dormant part of their brain that’s creative and more confident.” 

Mental agility, resiliency, and the ability to pivot through difficult and stressful situations can be hard skills to develop. Improv works those muscles with low-stake challenges that require your humor and humanity, but always done through support and agreement. “Even when you have to disagree,” Monte notes. “It's done in positivity, so that things don't fall apart. Your foundation never gets broken because you're connected as a team.”

Neverthless, words like comedy, artist, and play can feel scary or unnecessary to adults who haven’t let themselves be silly since the days of recess. And as adults, we often pursue control over joy.

“We think control means safety,” Monte suggests, “and it does for our primal brain, but it also prohibits growth, connection, creativity and joy sometimes because you get wrapped up in fear.”

Problem-solvers, high performers, people who want all the details first sometimes struggle most in improv classes and workshops. There’s this tendency to resist letting go of the need for all the information, letting go of control, letting go of having the perfect answer. In improv, of course, the whole point is to wade in the unknown. You say yes to whatever shows up, step into the moment, and then figure out what to do. The destination isn’t predetermined and the laughs happen because you take the risk.

“With this one group, just getting them to play was the real challenge,” Monte remembers. “They were so rigid, so focused on having a solution and a predictable outcome. Two hours with them was less about comedy and more about softening that armor.”

These workshops are designed to “break you down a little,” loosen defenses, and reveal where people are tense, guarded, or convinced they’re not creative. “And once you see everyone else in the room—eight, 10, 100 people—doing the same vulnerable, ridiculous stuff, you build trust,” Monte says. “Because everybody is creative. Everybody is fearless. You just need a low-stakes place to practice, so you can take that fearlessness into the rest of your life. You don’t have to be closed off. You just say ‘yes.’”

Visit daredevilimprov.com for more details about DareDevil Improv and class offerings. The next 101 class begins January 5 on Mondays at 7 p.m., and each class is 2 hours of laughs.

Not ready for a class, but interested in the laughs? Check out these upcoming events on DareDevil's website as well: