Podcast: Neil Mullarkey | The Business of Improvisation

02/23/2017

Neil Mullarkey is one of the founding members of the Comedy Store players and probably one of the most recognisable faces in the world of improv.

He has a string of well known movie and television credits appearing with other improv alumini. Just as impressive is the list of companies he's worked with, where he has brought improv theatre techniques into businesses like Barclays and Google.

In this interview we talk about Second City and the early days of the comedy store players. We also dig into Neil's work applying improvisation and performance in his workshops. How he encourages people to enjoy uncertainty and identify offers, and re-frame a 'yes but' into a 'yes and'.

We cover a lot of ground in our conversation:
Structure in improv, the 7 stories.
'Get on with it', introducing improvisation into a workshop.
L Vaughn Spencer, costume disguise in character comedy.
Agile workflow for teams.
VUCA: Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

The show notes for this episode are pretty extensive. Neil has an encyclopedic knowledge of improv and I've tried to capture most of the reference's that came out during our conversation below.