What you're going to hear today is a taping of a lecture Q&A discussion that I did on Saturday

October 17th 2015 at the Upright Citizens Brigades Inter-Sankton Space on Sunset. When I started this

conversation I let people know that I encourage them to ask questions and challenge my points of

view about the subject which was rules versus no rules in improvisation. The way this started was I

was looking up to see how our book the improv manual was doing on Amazon was doing well but as I

looked that up it took me to a review of the book that came out when it was first published and in

that review there was a quote from McNapier's book Improvise and here's what it said in the article

Mr. Napier in his 2004 book Improvise unleashes a broadside against rules arguing that they don't

make for good scenes they are destructive he writes adding later quote they help people think in a

particular way and that way of thinking is often death to good improvisation. Now do I think that

McNapier was specifically going after me or the Upright Citizens Brigade? No. Do I hold anything

personally against McNapier? Nope but do I take strong exception to that opinion? Yes I do. If you

know our book or you know the way we teach improvisation at the Upright Citizens Brigade we have a lot

of rules our book is basically 300 pages full of rules and so if you look at this logically

Mcs says about rules quote they are destructive and then says that they are often death to good

improvisation if you say that and then you say the Upright Citizens Brigade has a rule-based

system then I guess you could say following the logic the Upright Citizens Brigade is destructive

and death to good improvisation I take strong exception to that opinion and that's what sparked

this lecture question and answer in discussion enjoy.

In reference to some quotes that were in the recent LA weekly article about the

nerdest improv school also full disclosure this talk was not meant to have any reference to that

I promise you unless you think I'm a liar and I'm not that I called saying I wanted to do this

...