An Evening of Improv

Learning to disagree through comedy

With Tane Danger (courtesy of McCarthy Center)

When I first met Tane Danger, he told me he worries about people who can’t laugh at themselves.

In 2011, Tane and his friend Brandon Boat co-founded the Theater of Public Policy. The group uses improv comedy to engage in politically charged issues, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune has described their performances as “C-SPAN being suddenly swarmed by the cast of SNL.”

To my good fortune, Professor Matt Lindstrom, the director of The Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement at Saint John’s University, had the idea to pair my discussion of Learning to Disagree with Tane’s group as the eighteenth annual McCarthy Lecture held in Minnesota.

Tane and I began the evening dialoguing for about 30 minutes about themes from my book. The Theater of Public Policy followed up our discussion with improv, bringing the concepts we discussed to life. I then answered some questions from the audience, and the improv team closed out the evening with a final round of comedic portrayals.

I am a professor and a lawyer. I try to throw in a humorous story or self-deprecating joke where I can, but my content is not usually mistaken as uproariously funny. That means any effort to translate it into a humorous register has to be really good. The Theater of Public Policy was really good.

Tane and I covered a lot of ground in our first segment. At one point, I emphasized the importance of attaching empathy to people not abstractions. The improv team satirized the absurdity of empathizing with a symptom (stomach pain) rather seeking to understand the underlying cause in the person experiencing pain:

During my next session with Tane, I referred back to the stomach pain scene and its illustration of performative empathy:

It strikes me that in the summer of 2020, the George Floyd moment led to a lot of performative empathy, and you saw institutions and people saying things because they saw the stomach pains and thought “Oh well, that’s all can I do.” But often if you want to respond to something with empathy it’s going to cost you something. So rather than just doing the performative empathy, figure out what it’s going to cost you and what you're going to do long-term to change the things that you don’t like.

Toward the end of our second dialogue, I noted that I sometimes like to remind my students that professors are people, too: “Sometimes we’re just having a bad day or our minds are elsewhere and we screw things up.” I shared a specific example from early in my teaching career:

The first year I taught criminal law, I didn’t really know criminal law so I was kind of learning it a day before the students. And one day I taught myself exactly backwards. So when I got in front of the class of 80 students, I taught them exactly the wrong doctrine and they all knew it within five minutes. And this was a 90-minute class, and I had nowhere to go because I’d planned the entire lesson around the opposite of the real doctrine.

Some of you remember Ross Perot, the third party presidential candidate in the early 1990s who on brought Admiral Stockdale as his running mate. Stockdale was a little past his prime by then, and during the vice-presidential debate, he said, “Who am I? Why am I here?” And that’s kind of what I said to my class.

You can’t do that over and over again or you’re just going to lose credibility. But once in a while it’s okay to make a mistake, own the mistake, and move on.

The improv team picked up on my teaching reflection, humorously portraying an overwhelmed medical school professor who is so worn-down that he breaks into song in front of his students:

We hit quite a few other important and controversial topics through the evening: family differences, the political climate, campus protests, and more. Tane was a great moderator, and the Theatre of Public Policy is incredibly talented. You can watch the entire event here.

Tane is right—we all need to be able to laugh at ourselves, even when we’re tackling serious matters. That, in fact, was part of my goal of using personal narrative throughout Learning to Disagree.

A fun coda to our evening of improv

After our event at Saint John’s, Matt Linstrom, Tane Danger, and I made our way to the downtown stretch of the nearby town of Saint Joseph to grab a bite to eat. There aren’t a lot of options, but one of them happens to be a New York Times profiled Cajun-Creole restaurant called Krewe. As we walked up, it was clear that the place had just closed, with chairs stacked on tables and the floor already mopped. But Matt (who, as the New York Times piece notes, knows the owner) told us it wouldn’t hurt to ask. The next thing we knew, we were having a late-night private dinner of crab cakes and jambalaya in rural Minnesota. And this combination of incredible food, great conversation, and the perfect environment led to one of my more memorable evenings in recent months. Thanks to Ana, Amanda, and Dan at Krewe for making it happen.