The Comedy Improv Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to University Improvisational Comedy in Theatre and Performance is a one-stop resource for both improv teachers and students, covering improv history, theory, maxims, exercises, games, and structures. You will learn the necessary skills and techniques needed to become a successful improviser, developing a basic understanding of the history of improvisation and its major influences, structures, and theories. This book also addresses issues associated with being a college improviser – like auditions, rehearsals, performances, and the dynamics of improv groups.

Provides a curriculum consisting of twenty-four lessons, explaining what improvisation is, techniques, and how to start an improvisation team.

Furnishes a comprehensive guide to improvisational techniques as used in stand-up comedy

The Improv Handbook is the most comprehensive, smart, helpful and inspiring guide to improv available today. Applicable to comedians, actors, public speakers and anyone who needs to think on their toes, it features a range of games, interviews, descriptions and exercises that illuminate and illustrate the exciting world of improvised performance. First published in 2008, this second edition features a new foreword by comedian Mike McShane, as well as new exercises on endings, managing blind offers and master-servant games, plus new and expanded interviews with Keith Johnstone, Neil Mullarkey, Jeffrey Sweet and Paul Rogan. The Improv Handbook is a one-stop guide to the exciting world of improvisation. Whether you're a beginner, an expert, or would just love to try it if you weren't too scared, The Improv Handbook will guide you every step of the way.

Advice for performing long-form improv from a longtime teacher and performer.

A comedian and Moth veteran lays out useful tips and tricks for maximizing the impact of your stories—so you can nail it every time Do you ever wish you could tell a story that leaves others spellbound? Comedian, Upright Citizens Brigade storytelling program founder, and Moth champion Margot Leitman will show you how in this practical guide to storytelling. Using a fun, irreverent, and infographic approach, Long Story Short breaks a story into concrete components. From content and structure to emotional impact and delivery, Leitman guides you through the entire storytelling process, providing personal anecdotes, relatable examples, and practical exercises along the way. Using a fun, irreverent, and infographic approach, Long Story Short breaks a story into concrete components. From content and structure to emotional impact and delivery, Leitman guides you through the entire storytelling process, providing personal anecdotes, relatable examples, and practical exercises along the way.

A sweeping yet intimate--and often hilarious--history of a uniquely American art form that has never been more popular

"Ensemble Theatre Making: A Practical Guide is the first comprehensive diagnostic handbook for building, caring for and maintaining ensemble. Successful ensembles don't happen by chance: they can be created, nurtured and maintained through specific actions taken by ensemble leaders and members. Ensemble Theatre Making provides a thorough step-by-step process to consistently achieve the collaborative dynamic that leads to the group trust, commitment and sacrifice necessary for the success of a common goal.Through planning and preparation, investigating the essential building blocks of ensemble, identifying ensemble behaviours and techniques of responding to those behaviours, Ensemble Theatre Making gives tools, techniques and recipes for bringing ensemblefrom the realm of luck into a grounded practice. This conversational, straight-forward guide gives clarity and practical guidance to the sometimes mystifying questions of what creates ensemble bonds, how to fix them when they start to break, and how to strengthen and protect them"--

As an improv comedian: are you a pirate, robot or ninja? Know your type so you can appreciate your strengths while also focusing on what you have left to learn. This book is 200 pages of lessons, exercises and metaphors designed by two teachers and performers from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatres in New York and Los Angeles. Also, it's written as a fable where you are an "improv seeker" in an mysterious dojo hidden in the mountains. That's pretty fun! "Billy and Will love to do the 'make'em ups' and they're quite good at it as well. I would read this book...if I could read." - Rob Riggle (Daily Show, US Marine Corps)

The description of a method for the notation and analysis of the creative process in design, drawing on insights from design practice and cognitive psychology. This book presents linkography, a method for the notation and analysis of the design process. Developed by Gabriela Goldschmidt in an attempt to clarify designing, linkography documents how designers think, generate ideas, put them to the test, and combine them into something meaningful. With linkography, Goldschmidt shows that there is a logic to the creative process—that it is not, as is often supposed, pure magic. Linkography draws on design practice, protocol analysis, and insights from cognitive psychology. Goldschmidt argues that the generation of ideas (and their inspection and adjustment) evolves over a large number of small steps, which she terms design moves. These combine in a network of moves, and the patterns of links in the networks manifest a “good fit,” or congruence, among the ideas. Goldschmidt explains what parts of the design process can be observed and measured in a linkograph, describing its features and notation conventions. The most significant elements in a linkograph are critical moves, which are particularly rich in links. Goldschmidt presents studies that show the importance of critical moves in design thinking; describes cases that demonstrate linkography's effectiveness in studying the creative process in design (focusing on the good fit); and offers thirteen linkographic studies conducted by other researchers that show the potential of linkography in design thinking research and beyond. Linkography is the first book-length treatment of an approach to design thinking that has already proved influential in the field.