Chapter 5Secret #5:Go withthe Thought
In the mid-1980s, I took an improvisational theater course, hoping to hone what I considered my most bankable gifts, wit and joke cracking. At the time, I fancied myself something of a Woody Allen in training, and I figured an improv course would give me a wide, well-lit platform for showing off. Boy, was I mistaken.
The teacher of the course was an old-school improv troupe member, and he frowned on his students’ attempts to be conspicuously funny on stage. Humor, he preached, must flow naturally from the situation being portrayed and should never be forced into it by Borscht Belt wannabes. So class after class, he would toss a few students on stage, yell out our fictional identities (“Mark, you’re a homeless ...
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