Today class was frustrating (or, more accurately, the class was frustrated) and tonight the monologist for my last iO Armando was terrible, a second-place winner on American Idol who couldn’t tell a story to save his life. And yet I’m in a good mood. Because I realized that even though we got crossways with the new formats Pat is trying to teach us, we didn’t take it out on each other and in fact still like playing with each other. And because the cast of the Armando (which included my teachers Bill and Pat, Miles Stroth, Joe Bill, Bob Kulhan, Pat Mason, Brett Lyons, and Amber Ruffin) turned it into a giant yes-and to the monologist and definitively proved once again the mind-blowing alchemical power of improv.

And because afterward people stood around and ate pizza and chatted in a way that seemed to indicate they were happy to be there. Little clots of improv students clustered around Bill and Pat, but other than that the feeling is pretty democratic. I was reaching for another piece of pizza when a gnawed-on crust rocketed past me into the box. I looked up to see Joe Bill, who doesn’t know me from Adam, making a highly suspicious who-me face.

There is an actual feeling of camaraderie here that extends beyond Charna’s introductory speech. I have plenty of reservations about how iO is run, but the fact is that people keep coming back to play because they love it, and that fact is communicated in the best shows. I have been told this since I started doing improv, but it’s more obvious to me than ever: the best shows are those that are fueled by confidence and joy.

The format that stymied us was Detours, in which a scene is played and then played again as precisely as possible before being repeatedly altered, edited, and otherwise played with. There were plenty of good scenes, but the main points eluded us. I think it’s hard for Pat to try to teach us a difficult format while avoiding the terms “right” and “wrong,” and it’s hard for us to learn it as well. But I understand why he does that, and I appreciate his commitment to the idea that there are no mistakes, only undiscovered patterns. I have to sleep now.