Rise of the improv geeks: why London's tech workers are taking comedy classes

When you’re standing in front of a circle of 20 strangers in an improv comedy workshop opposite another stranger (called Rob), and facing the prospect of having to be funny for 30 seconds without any preparation, it’s a mighty relief to be told by the instructor that your assigned routine is to hold a dialogue with your partner that is “as boring as possible”. Yep, boring I can do. Pre-rehearsed puns and borderline-acceptable pub gags at short notice would possibly stretch me, but this is comfortable territory.

Rob, a tall, friendly bloke who has glitter in his hair (don’t ask, because I didn’t, so I don’t know) kicks us off with a really boring opening remark about the range of transport options he had for his journey to the workshop. I follow up with an extremely banal question about the outdoor temperature that night, and off we go.

I’m pleasantly surprised — elated in fact — when a few of our lines elicit some decent laughs from the circle. When our time is up, much applause and whooping rings out in the tiny room we’re using above the Shoreditch Tabernacle Baptist Church on Hackney Road.

This, I tell you, is why the staff at hundreds of London’s tech companies are loving improv at the moment. Unlike stand-up, which is intimidating and lonely and competitive, improv makes people who are only considered funny in quite niche areas (and by their hand-picked circle of easily impressed mates) feel like they could get up in any venue and bring the house down (fear not, patrons of my local The Marksman: I won’t be doing that). It is supportive, collaborative and neatly strips out the expectation and nerves that result from comedic preparation — by not allowing any.

“We are getting loads of tech workers,” says Max Dickins, who runs Hoopla, the comedy company laying on the workshop I’m attending. “We can’t put on enough classes to teach it.” His business partner Steve Roe, who is taking the class, gave up a career at consulting firm Accenture to teach improv and is now tutoring hundreds of people in square jobs like the one he quit how to be funny on the spot. They estimate that they have seen a 50 per cent year-on-year increase in the number of techie workers coming through their doors. And last month’s Wired magazine — handbook of the nerditariat — included improv in its How To pages.

Dickins thinks that it reflects the increasing need for tech workers across the spectrum — from coders at start-ups to data analysts at City firms — to do presentations, speak to clients and partners and present themselves publicly. Or, as he puts it: “They have fantasies of being the next Steve Jobs.”

Is that so, I ask the technology types at the workshop? John Young, a director at Red Elephant Technology who has attended two of Steve’s courses, says the lessons of improv are widely applicable. “There is an idea in improv of listening,” he says. “For a scene to work you have to listen. So often [at work] we don’t listen and we don’t change.”

As Dickins puts it, “In a world where everyone is on broadcast mode screaming what they think and posting photos of their lasagne, we are the antidote.”

I ask Young why improv might appeal particularly to the types who thrive in tech. “For less dominant people it can probably help them find a voice,” he says.

Another John, who is a data scientist at a big internet company, says he started improv because “it was really the opposite of what I was doing”. His work involves little human contact or creativity, “so it is partly an escape”.