President Bartlet: You got a best friend? Roger Tribbey: Yes, sir. Bartlet: Is he smarter than you? Roger Tribbey: [chuckles] Yes, sir. Bartlet: Would you trust him with your life? Roger Tribbey: Yes, sir. Bartlet: That’s your chief of staff.

— “He Shall, from Time to Time…”, The West Wing, Season 1, Episode 12

When I found improv I experienced a visceral rush of strange thoughts and powerful emotions as I watched my first show.

How are they doing this? Is this real? This can’t be real. It’s a trick. I want to do this. I want to be on stage with them right now. I didn’t know human beings could do this. How are they so funny and clever? I haven’t laughed like this at the theatre in … wait, I’ve never laughed like this in a theatre. I want to do this so much. If I concentrate, I’ll see how it works. Perhaps they have ear pieces? Ok, I’m going to run away to Chicago. Maybe I could fit in one of their suitcases?

It was a lot.

But the overwhelming, overriding thought, that kept coming back to me again and again, was this:

Finally …

Finally I’d found something I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. Finally after chasing the secondhand smoke of scripted theatre, stand-up and sketch comedy I’d discovered the thing that lit me up from the inside.

Finally, finally, finally I’d found an art form that felt like home.

And the interesting thing is, speaking to other improvisers over this subsequent decade of learning, performing and eventually teaching improv, is that my story is in no way unique. Again and again I hear the same thing — It clicked almost immediately. I knew I had to do it. It was inevitable.

The polymathematically brilliant Craig Cackowski once asked my class to remember the first improv show we’d ever seen. His question was

What attracted you to it?

And almost universally we answered the same way — They were having such fun. They seemed to like each other so much. I wanted to be a part of that.

Now, in my mind’s eye, Craig smiles and steeples his fingers knowingly (although this might be an embellishment on the part of my mind’s eye)