An interview hosted by Maggie and Bailey with Charlie Todd who formed Improv Everywhere, a comedic performance art group based in New York City. They aim to delight strangers through positive pranks. We talked with Charlie about why people participate in these weird, wonderful prank missions and what has kept him energized over 19 years running Improv Everywhere.
“You don't have to have any talent. You just have to come out. I design things that would work for someone who was a lawyer or a school teacher.” - Charlie Todd
In August 2001, Charlie Todd moved to New York City with an interest in acting and comedy. He didn’t have immediate access to a stage, so he started creating in public spaces by staging undercover performances.Â
Charlie documented his first undercover performances on a blog he called Improv Everywhere. Over the past two decades, Charlie has staged hundreds of “missions” involving tens of thousands of undercover performers and shared them on YouTube, garnering millions of views. Highlights include making time stop at Grand Central Terminal, a mass no-pants subway ride, and letting random strangers conduct a world class orchestra in the middle of Manhattan. Do yourself a favor, check out their YouTube.
These pranks are not traditional improv. They require significant logistical work on Charlie’s end. He creates the "sandbox" for participants—first friends from his early comedy career in NYC and now thousands of people who have signed up for the Improv Everywhere mailing list—to play in, exercising their own creativity.Â
We talked with Charlie about crowdsourcing the creativity of strangers to create in his words “a happy mob.”Â
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
👋🏻Say hi to Charlie Todd and see the Improv Everywhere missions in action on YouTube.
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Note: This transcript is automatically generated, and there may be some errors. Timestamps may vary based on episode announcement & commercial placement.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I like the idea of sort of crowdsourcing your creativity a little bit and setting up this template. We're all going to go do the same thing. We're all on the same page. We're going to do this thing for five minutes, but within that, you can make your own choice.
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Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome to Get Together. It's our show about ordinary people, building extraordinary communities. I'm your host Bailey Richardson. I'm a partner at people, a company, and a co-author of get together how to build a community with your people. And I, Maggie sang podcast correspondent dialing in from Atlanta, Georgia, ATL baby. In each episode of this podcast, we interview everyday people who have built extraordinary communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to hundreds more members today
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Speaker 3 (00:48):
We're talking to Charlie Todd founder of improv everywhere. It's a New York city-based comedy collective that stages unexpected performances in public places. They aim to surprise and delight random strangers through positive pranks. Over the past two decades, they have staged hundreds of projects involving tens of thousands of undercover performers. Highlights include making time stop at grand central terminal, a mass, no pants, subway ride, and letting random strangers conduct a world-class orchestra in the middle of Manhattan. Maggie. I'm so glad you brought this interview to us. What's one thing that you learned from our conversation today with Charlie, Charlie shared so many fun stories from his prank. So you'll just have to listen to hear all of his experiences. One thing that I loved was he shared a term called crowdsourcing creativity. And basically what that means is he orchestrates these massive pinks with hundreds or thousands of volunteers.
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Speaker 3 (01:47):
And of course that requires major logistics in terms of getting everyone together. For example, if you watch his videos, you'll see him standing with a giant megaphone, like welcoming the crowd and sharing instructions. But the cool thing is he's not too specific about what he asks from them. So he gives them room to exercise their own creativity. One example is his grand central terminal prank, where he asked 200 strangers to freeze in place in this grand central station. As part of freezing time, these strangers were allowed to freeze. However, they wanted like a couple frozen place kissing another person decided to spill his briefcase of documents. Someone froze while eating an ice cream cone. And it was just the idea of the community coming together to co-create a prank rather than just executing someone else's vision. So I just love that concept. Yeah. That, that right blend between freedom and structure and getting it just right.
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Speaker 3 (02:38):
All right. Should we jump in? We think about community as groups of people who keep coming together over what they care about. And it's just so inspiring to be able to talk about improv everywhere, because you've been able to sustain such a wide community of volunteers to join for your missions. And the cool part is you not only bring people together, but you bring them together to do some pretty crazy things like riding the subway with no pants, ballroom dancing on a busy New York crosswalk, or even suddenly freezing in grand central station. So I wanted to start by asking you, if you could take us back to August, 2001, when you first started improv everywhere. So you moved to New York city with an interest in acting and comedy, but you didn't have access to a stage. And then you decided to create your own in public spaces. So how did you get this idea and what inspired you?
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Speaker 1 (03:28):
Well, thanks for having me on mean, I'm excited to chat with you. So that's exactly right. I moved to New York in the summer of 2001 and I had been a college theater major. So I was used to constantly be directing or acting, expressing myself. I was at an improv troupe in college too. And when you get to New York and you're 22 years old and you don't know anybody and you don't have any context except for your 23 year old friends who graduated the year before, you also don't have any context. There's just not a lot of immediate opportunity. So while I was sort of putting my, my my dues in, at places like the upright citizens, brigade theater and learning and networking and figuring the whole world out, I started expressing myself in public spaces by staging these undercover performances. Very first thing I did was a spur of the moment thing, where I was going out to a bar one night with a college friend. And he remarked that I looked like Ben folds the musician based on a new shirt that I had bought
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Speaker 3 (04:33):
Concert of all time. Oh yeah, that's fine. What's up? Keep going, please.
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Speaker 1 (04:39):
I went to the university of North Carolina chapel Hill, which is where that band got started. So I'd seen them live and was a fan. So just really on a whim, I was like, Hey let's if you think I look like Ben folds and see if we can make other people think I'm Ben folds tonight. So we go to a bar, we enter separately, I sit down at the bar and order a drink and 30 minutes goes by, well, my friends drinking in a booth on the other side of the bar. And then he comes up to me, asked for an autograph and kind of freaks out. And, and, you know, loudly enough says that I've been folds. And then the night just sort of snowballed from there where the people I was sitting next to suddenly wanted to talk to me, the bartender gave me free drinks and wanted to talk to me.
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Speaker 1 (05:19):
And all of a sudden the whole bar was buzzing about the fact that it didn't fall. So it was a fray. The whole thing was a hoax. But at the end of the night, when it ended rather than, you know, having some sort of, you got punked moment or any reveal moment I just left. I just, you know, I had talked to some people for about an hour or so and had a nice time and played the character of bed folds. And I, you know, which is somewhat unethical, but I did a good job. And I, I portrayed Ben as a nice friendly guy. And then I left and I liked the idea of giving these stories to other people like creating this weird experience for else where they'll always tell the story of the night they've met Ben folds in a bar, or more likely they went home and Googled Ben folds and saw he was on tour in Australia that night. And didn't quite look like the guy they talked to, but that's an even more spectacular story of somebody talked to me for an hour and then he didn't steal money for me, or, you know, ask me on a date or con me in any way he just slept. So I documented that story on a, on a website that I created and I decided to name it improv everywhere because we had done this sort of improvised prank in an unexpected place.
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Speaker 3 (06:31):
That's awesome. You mentioned weird experience. So what is it about weird that you think made your pink valuable and made your future missions valuable?
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Speaker 1 (06:42):
Well, you know, the slogan of improv everywhere is we cause scenes and we're trying to do something in a public space, whether it's a subway car, whether it's a park or a sidewalk that makes people sort of break out of their everyday routine and notice something. And we're aiming to create a positive experience where we're trying to make people laugh by merrily, we're a comedy group, and we're trying to sort of break them out of the day to day routine. So in order to do that, we have to do something that's extraordinary. And I realized early on that it's very easy to get people's attention through doing something negative. And I think if you see a lot of prank shows that have historically been on television, that sort of the go-to is just to piss somebody off or embarrass someone in some way, anger, someone pretend that you've cheated them out of money or pretend that their dog is missing, or, you know, there's all sorts of things that you know, that you've seen on television.
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Speaker 1 (07:35):
And I wanted to challenge myself to try to make people stop and react to something that was positive to sort of create a great experience. And that's a lot harder because, you know, two people can get into a fake fight on a subway car and everyone will stop and pay attention. And you can, you can command people's attention that way, but to command people's attention with something positive is a lot harder. One of the very, very early things I did in the first few months is I was performing with a friend and we got onto a subway card, separate stops, and then PR pretended that we didn't know each other and then discovered over the course of a conversation that we were long lost brothers, just by revealing information. You know, it was this, you know, improvise play that we did, but it looked real and we had entered separately and there are people in the subway kind of looking, and everybody's starting to listen like, Whoa, this is amazing. These guys are so separated brothers.
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Speaker 3 (08:28):
That's definitely something I would text my friends and family at home about. Like I just witnessed the most Epic reunion ever.
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Speaker 1 (08:35):
Yeah. And it's, you know, it's fake, but at the same time, there's no reason any of the people that are on that subway car, but ever learning was fake. And at that time I couldn't afford a video camera. So it wasn't, it wasn't even filmed. It was just this thing that we did. And then we wrote the story up and put it on our geo cities website.
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Speaker 3 (08:50):
Hm. Yeah. I think it's cool. How, yeah. As you were saying for pranks, usually they're seen as negative things. There's always a victim, someone that you're laughing at, not with. And I think the really cool thing about the improv everywhere missions is that, well, first of all, I find it interesting that you use the word missions instead of pranks. So I'd love to hear a bit about that decision, but also that it's not, these are not pranks where someone feels excluded or someone feels victimized, but these are shared experiences of fun where when people witness them and even if they're not part of the actual group enacting it, they actually get to share in the fun and the laughter and the cool experience. So yeah, that's really positive and meaningful.
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Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I follow the, what I call the golden rule of the Brank, which is that any prank that you're performing should be something you would want people to do to you. It should be as fun for the person who is, you know, so-called getting pranked as the person who is performing the prank. And I think if you follow that, you can't go wrong. Obviously not everybody thinks exactly like you or wants to experience things and the exact same way you want to experience things. And I realized that early on too, there was another subway prank that we did in the first year or so, where I got onto the train with a friend and we were dressed in track suits with big gold necklaces, with dollar signs on them. And we announced that we were called the dollar dudes and we had a boombox like playing music and that this was the dollar car.
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Speaker 1 (10:13):
And everybody in this train gets a dollar. And we had this big home Depot bucket, full of dollar bills. It probably had $50 in it. And we went around and just gave a dollar to every single person on the car while blasting music. It was sort of like, you know, the reverse thing that you'd normally see on the train, where somebody is performing and trying to, you know, ask for money from you. And people loved it and people were smiling, but I'll never forget handing a dollar to one gentleman on the train who ignored me. And I said, sir, here's your dollar a second time. And he looked up and he said, does it look like I want a dollar? And
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Speaker 3 (10:46):
Oh my God, classic new Yorker, anything dizzying.
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Speaker 1 (10:51):
Exactly. And I just, you know, said, okay, this person gets $2. It just gave another dollar to the person next to him and walked away. But I realized in that moment that no matter what you do, even if it's giving somebody free money, there's going to be somebody who's in a bad mood or who just doesn't want to engage with somebody else in public. And that's their right. And that's been something that's been important too, with everything we do is to make it opt in where if you don't want to be a part of it, that's fine. We're going to move on to the next person. We're not going to bother you too much. And you asked about using the phrase mission two. And I think that comes just from the connotations of the word bank. And then a lot of people associate that with practical jokes or fraternity hazing or doing things that are negative in nature. So we liked the idea of being, you know, undercover performers on a, on a secret mission was just the fun terminology we came up with when we were documenting these things and putting them on the internet.
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Speaker 3 (11:41):
How do you come up with these missions? What's that process like? And has the process changed at all since those early days?
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Speaker 1 (11:51):
I think in terms of generating ideas, it's, it's just being open to seeing the city in a different way. And it's being open to seeing different situations and through a unique lens. And as over the years, as I've been trying to come up with new ideas for projects, I found that the site-specific projects are the ones that I'm most excited about to give an example, my girlfriend who's done. My wife used to live in third Avenue and 53rd street. So I would take the train over to her apartment and I would have to go up this giant escalator. That's at the six train station there where the six and the meet. And, you know, I once was leaving her apartment. And I was, I was using those that escalator in the morning and the morning commute. And it was just super crowded. It was backed up lines of people waiting to get onto the escalator.
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Speaker 1 (12:40):
And everybody just seemed kind of bummed out and the stairs are so there's so many stairs, no one really wants to use the stairs. So then that moment, as I was writing that escalator, I thought, what could we do here? There's gotta be some way to bring some joy to this sort of dull commuting moment that hundreds, or maybe thousands of people have every single morning. And I came up with this concept called high-five escalator, where we put five performers standing on the stairs next to the escalators with a series of signs that together made a message, which said, Rob wants to give you a high five. And at the very top of the escalator, I had my friend Rob Lathan standing there who's a comedian and somebody else had a side above his head that just said, Rob, with an arrow down to him. And he had his handout. It's also very funny to think about this in terms of our current pandemic world of some one person high five, eight, 2000,
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Speaker 1 (13:34):
But at the time rub, you know, sanitizes hands before and after it, he didn't get sick and hopefully it didn't spread anything. But, you know, there was that simple idea of like, you're riding the escalator at the same escalator you write every single morning, but what happens if you have an opportunity to give a stranger, a high five for this at the top of it, and this is done as most of our early breaks and some of our current pranks it was done without any permission at all, we didn't ask, you know, we would not have been given permission to do that. So we asked for forgiveness rather than permission to those situations, but it was remarkable how, you know, five poster boards and five performers could completely transform that location for an hour. And, you know, at the end of the day, you hope that the smile that you brought to somebody's face getting a high five to a stranger is something that maybe they carry with them for the rest of the day.
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Speaker 3 (14:19):
I love that I saw the video for that, and I thought it was very, very fun. So that was your friend, Rob, who participated in this mission. So in the beginning, was it mostly your friends or people you met at upright citizens brigade that were involved in acting out these missions? Or how did you find the first members?
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Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yeah, it was something that grew very organically and it started just with, you know, myself and whoever I was hanging out with at the time, typically like a college theater friend or college comedy friend. So I would do things which is one other person. And then I started taking classes at the upright citizens brigade, improv theater in New York city. And I would meet 15 other like-minded people in my level, one class, and then the 15 new like-minded people at my level two class. So it was a great way just to find my own community. And, you know, I recommend that to anybody who's in any form of creative field of just find a place like that, where you can train or learn with other like-minded people and, you know, find your own community that way. But they're doing this, you know, I would tell people after class, like, Hey, I do these weird things on the subway or in parks on the weekends, would you ever want to come to one?
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Speaker 1 (15:26):
And I would get their email address. And then all of a sudden I had 10 people who wanted to go do something and then it turned into be 40 people. So it was just sort of a slow growth over many years, the no pants, subway ride project that we've done for 19 years in a row. Is it sort of a good measure of that? The very first year I did it, it was myself and six other guys. So seven people who rode the train in the middle of winter with a winter coat hat, scarf gloves, but no pants you know, just, just underwear and similar setup, getting onset dead, separate stops and acting like we didn't know each other, just this weird, undercover prank that very first year. And then I made them, I think it's a mistake. I made a mistake of doing it a second time.
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Speaker 1 (16:06):
And about 20 people came the second time and then I had an annual event and 40 people came and then the next year a hundred people came and eventually we were doing it with as many as three, 4,000 people in New York city. And it also started happening in about 60 cities around the world. So it's interesting with, with the pandemic, I I'm very skeptical that it's going to happen, but again, I was thinking of stopping it after 20 years, but we might end up having to stop it at 19. We'll say, Oh my, no need to keep this street going. But anyway, it's, it's been this sort of organic growth where it definitely started just with like personal friends. So I went to college with, and then it was be comedy friends. I knew in New York and then sort of friends, still friends.
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Speaker 1 (16:52):
And we were publishing these projects on the internet. So people would find the website. And we just had an open door policy from the beginning where it was very clear on the website, join our mailing list, be a part of the next one. And just always inviting having that open door where anybody can be a part of it. You don't have to be a comedian. You don't have to have any talent you come out. And I would design things that would work for someone who was a lawyer or a school teacher, you know, who was not necessarily a performer. Anybody can go to grand central terminal and freeze in place for five minutes. It doesn't actually require any talent or creativity, but if 200 people do that at the same time, then you've had a huge impact.
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Speaker 4 (17:29):
I feel like some community leaders that we speak to are producers like event organizers, and one of their biggest challenges is giving up control. So if they host one event trying to allow someone else to host another one or shape that event can be really challenging. And I'm hearing you put on events that may have a few thousand people there and you're able to make it open and inclusive and malleable. And I know you have a background in improv and theater, but can you tell me a little bit about what it takes to be successful at bringing so many people together for essentially an event and to do it well with that many folks, or to be able to put something on that youth you don't feel like you need to control?
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Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah. I mean, it, it really is event planning in many ways, and it I've always kind of regretted the name I chose for the group of improv everywhere because people sort of assume that everything is a hundred percent improvised and completely spontaneous. And maybe the first few things I did 20 years ago were, but obviously if you're going to do something that involves thousands of people, there's quite a bit of logistical planning that goes into it ahead of time. And even for our no band, somebody ride, which is unauthorized, I don't get any permission from the city or the subway system to do it, but you can't have 2000 people crowd onto one subway card or even one train. So as the crowds have gotten bigger, it's been all this logistical work of we're going to now have 10 meeting points around the city, and we're going to use 10 different trains and divide people up into 10 cars in each train and make sure it's sort of manageable and a fun experience for everyone involved.
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Speaker 1 (19:05):
I mean, I think it is important to give your participants the freedom to make their own choices and express themselves. I mean, sort of within the boundaries of, of safety and boundaries of everyone sort of working together for a common goal. And I think the frozen grand central project is a good example. It wasn't something that I micromanaged. I, I got 200 people together, you know, of those 200 people. I probably knew 20 of them personally, and everyone else were just people from our mailing list who came out and told everyone the plan. And, and the idea was, you're going to go, and you're going to pick the way that you would like to freeze in place for five minutes, rather than saying, you know, giving 50 examples or trying to assign 200 people, 200 different things to do. I just let people make their own choices.
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Speaker 1 (19:47):
And I think it really made the project a lot better than if I tried to come up with it. You know, one couple decided to freeze in place kissing. One guy happened to have a briefcase. He spilled his, his documents onto the floor with his briefcase open, right? When it was time to freeze one person bought an ice cream cone and froze looking at ice cream, God, which is funny as the ice cream cone would get to start dripping down during the freeze. But I liked the idea of sort of crowdsourcing your creativity a little bit and setting up this template. We're all going to go do the same thing. We're all on the same page. We're going to do this thing for five minutes, but within that, you can make your own choice. We do a participatory event every summer called the MP3 experiment, where people are using a smartphone app.
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Speaker 1 (20:29):
We developed that synchronizes playback of audio, and it involves people listening to music and following these instructions that are piped into their headphones. But with that, there's some instructions of what to bring in what to wear, but we always leave it a little bit. Open-Ended a couple of years ago, we asked people to bring something made of cardboard. Something made a plastic, something made of metal and to bring spoons. And then what we ended up having, having them do as part of this event was to create their own drum kit out of their recyclables and, you know, bang on the plastic and the cardboard on the metal object with, with their spoons. But it was so interesting and it created such a diversity of noise. Having people make their own decision of exactly what they were going to bring, rather than saying, everybody's got to bring a Cheerio's box and two liter bottle of Coke or whatever. So I think having that flexibility and letting people sort of crowdsource what they're bringing to it both literally with props that they might bring and creative as well is important.
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Speaker 3 (21:26):
Wow. Love that. Crowdsourcing creativity, two commons one. Wow. I had no idea that the freezing grand central prank was also all volunteers. I thought that was originally just all of your improv friends, because I felt like the acting was so good. And the fact that people could stay still for so long was I know you had to be professionally trained to be able to do that so
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Speaker 1 (21:47):
You can freeze it in place. I mean, th that video went particularly viral on YouTube, but I think the today maybe has around 40 million views, but what was interesting, God, that is so many views. Wow. It was really a lot of views in 2000, 2008 when it happened. And it probably got 30 million of those views in 2008. That was a lot of back then. That was a lot of use. I mean, I think now that our lady Gaga video probably has billions of views, but, but at the, at the time when YouTube was first taking off, that was a big head. It was on their front page. But what was interesting is that it started happening in cities around the world. So, you know, some people would email me and say, I'm going to do this on my campus in Chicago, or I'm going to do this on a train station and Belgium.
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Speaker 1 (22:27):
And I would say, great, go for it. You know, let me know and credit us if you can, but go have fun. And then on top of that, I traveled the world for, for about a year going to festivals and getting people to freeze in place, which was which was ludicrous. But it was, it was so much fun the whole year, but I probably went to 10 different cities in Europe, you know, because art festival wanted me to get people to freeze in place, which was a great gig. It required no shipping, no props, you know, just show up and explain how to freeze in place, which is pretty easy. But what I found in doing that is that, you know, anybody can do this. If you design something that anyone can do, then it has the potential to sort of become a meme and for, for it to spread like that.
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Speaker 3 (23:10):
Yeah. How do you feel when people replicate these missions?
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Speaker 1 (23:15):
You know, if it's for a non-commercial use and it's for people just going out and having fun that it's something that we've, we've always been supportive of. The best things to me is when someone takes an idea that we've created and is inspired to go do something, that's remixes it a little bit, or is maybe entirely new, but it has its roots in what we did, but you know, people going out and doing the exact same thing we did is also awesome. Like why not have somebody getting high-fives every escalator in the world. It's great. And you know, it's, it's great when, when people say, Hey, we this idea from this group and like, back to us, it's always appreciated, but there've been a few times over the years where I've seen someone use it for commercial purposes. So we had a, a, a musical that we did.
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Speaker 1 (23:55):
We also do this series called spontaneous musicals or, or musicals in real life where people just break into song and an unexpected place, like in a grocery store. And for the people who were just buying their produce, all of a sudden, they find themselves in the middle of a Broadway musical where, you know, the guy with the grocery store apron, who's working their breaks on the song. And then the customer starts singing and, you know, kind of making that Broadway moment happened in the real world. The first one we did was called the food court musical that we did in a, in a food court, out in Los Angeles. And he, about a year after that went viral on the internet. There was a company in Portugal was a napkin company which is important because the song is all about someone in the food court, reading the napkin. But a napkin company had just straight up, translated it into Portuguese and made it into a television commercial. And you know, that kind of thing. It's like, all right, well, some creative director got paid to come up with this idea and you know, everyone got paid on a tantrum herself.
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Speaker 3 (24:54):
That's the idea to look for someone else with a good idea.
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Speaker 1 (24:57):
Exactly. So, you know, that kind of thing, then you have to send the angry email and be like, Hey what's going on here? But in general, I think it's just flattering to come up with things that, you know, that spread around. It's, it's, it's exciting.
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Speaker 3 (25:14):
So a comment you made earlier that I thought was interesting was you don't wait for permission. You apologize afterward, but usually just do your mission. So have there ever been situations where, for example, for the no pants, subway ride, the city actually said something or in grand central, did someone actually like intervene? Has there ever been moments like that?
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Speaker 1 (25:35):
Yeah, we've gotten in trouble several times over the years, the, the grand central project, actually, we did have permission to be there and, and worked with the terminal on that particular day. And a lot of the things that we do that are, you know, large scale or have any sort of budget behind them because they're being supported, whether by a sponsor or by a festival, we know how to do things the right way and, and get our insurance and permits and all of that. In fact, we just spent the last year making a television show for Disney plus called Pixar in real life that was fully permitted to all of Disney's many, many requirements all over the city, but it was a ton of fun, but yeah, in our, in our early days, because I was 22 and most of the people are performing with were, you know, young people working on a non-existent budget and doing things just for the fun of it.
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Speaker 1 (26:24):
It was, it was all, you know, completely unauthorized. And you have to be careful when you're doing something without permission. You have to be respectful. If you know, someone who has the authority to tell you to stop, tells you to stop, and you have to be smart about it. And also, I think it's also very important for me to say that I'm a white man and being white man, performing something unauthorized in New York city. There's a definite amount of privilege in that, that, you know, I've been able to get away with some things that maybe not everyone could get away with. So I do want to recognize that, but most of the problems we've, we've run into have been in projects that we've done in retail stores, which are not public spaces. They're sort of these quasi public spaces where they're open to the public, but at the end of the day, if best buy wants to ask you to leave, you gotta leave. And we we've famously did a project in best buy where we had about 80 people wear blue polo shirts and khaki pants to the best, also known as the best in uniform. And we had people enter the best buy, you know, one by one over the course of about 15 minutes and just sort of walk around the store and they called nine one one, which was not, well, I really did not think that would happen. Oh, wow. They're like this, isn't our first
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Speaker 3 (27:30):
Rodeo. This happens all the time. You know what
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Speaker 1 (27:32):
To do. I think the managers or the security guards, they thought it was some sort of mass heist, which was like, one of those security guards is literally screaming, Thomas crown affair and to her walkie talkie. And that's a movie where a bunch of people dress alike to steal a painting. So, I mean, I guess, but if you, if you took a second and slowed down and you saw that there was like a nine-year-old girl participating in a 60 year old man, and you know, just like these people are probably not all part of a heist, it'd be the Mo the greatest heist of all time, I guess. But you know, that kind of thing he just said, when they ask you to leave you leave. And that's what we did, but they had called the cops. So the police showed up before we had, we had all left, but, you know, obviously the police took a look at the situation and said, we're not gonna arrest anybody today for wearing a blue polo shirt. There's nothing for us to do here.
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Speaker 3 (28:23):
Nice. That is such a good story. So I want to talk more about the people who are part of this improv, everywhere community. So I have two questions about that. The first is for the people you met through upright citizens brigade, the people who already are doing improv, what do you think it was about these missions in public spaces? Why was the stage not enough? Why do you think people wanted to also go beyond the stage and try this out in like a central square or a sidewalk? Just out there. And then my second question is for the people who were not involved in improv, for example, like the thousands of people who will show up for the subway rides, what do you think is in it for them? Why are they so excited to join? I've seen those videos where you're like having that megaphone, speaking to crowds of people listening to your instruction. So, yeah. I just love to understand what you think the motivations are.
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Speaker 1 (29:16):
Well, I think early on the motivations of other people who are comedians and improvisers like myself, who I knew through the New York improv community were just people who were performers and they like to perform, and they like to do unusual things. And, you know, I've always just equated with a fun weekend activity. I mean, they, they events were almost always like Saturdays at 3:00 PM. And for somebody that's 25 years old and their friends are gonna go get together and go do something weird. You know, you could throw the Frisbee in the park or go on a bike ride, or you could go, you know, take over some rowboats in central park and claim that offshore gambling is legal and play blackjack on the books. So those are just the kinds of things that we did. And I always just made, made it very easy for participants because I did value the fact that people were volunteering their time.
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Speaker 1 (30:02):
And in these early days, you know, I was not making a penny off of any of these projects. So everybody was just doing it for the fun of it. But I would make sure that I did all the heavy lifting of buying the props and buying the poker chips, who we're going to use on the boats and making the sign and really just left the participation up to people to, to contribute as much as they wanted to, if they just wanted to come up, come out and participate in. That's all they do. Great. I would love to have you, Oh, you're really good at drawing. And you want to draw some signs and make some signs scores. Great. I would love for you to do that, you know, and just empowering people and delegating things to people and letting them take on responsibility if they expressed interest was, was something that I always did.
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Speaker 1 (30:39):
But ultimately in the day, these were people who were performers and they, they wanted to go perform and they wanted to meet other people. And, and you know, just socially have a, have a fun weekend activity as things started growing. And all of a sudden people, I didn't know, personally, and people who were not in the entertainment field at all were showing up. It definitely surprised me at first, you know, for me getting onto the New York city, subway car and winter with my pants off, you know, in my boxer shorts is, is not that much of a thrill. I mean, maybe the very first time I did it, it was, it was a little bit of a thrill because I was just like, Oh, I don't know what's going to happen. There's just, so we're going to get in trouble. How are people gonna react?
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Speaker 1 (31:17):
But you know, now I've done it 19 years in a row, but I just have to keep reminding myself that for some people, this one is the first time they're doing it. And two, they never thought they would do something like this. You know, this is a grandmother who's showing up with her granddaughter cause her granddaughters loves YouTube and has watched all my videos. And the granddaughter's going to do it. Granted the grandmother's going to participate too. And she's never would never, in a million years, I considered priding a train with her pants off. So, and people have told me, it's like a confidence boost. It's, you know, it's something that sort of, you know, gets them, gets the adrenaline rushing a little bit. It takes them out of their comfort zone. And that's a specific example because it involves taking your pants off in public.
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Speaker 1 (31:54):
But I are other things that are even easier to participate in. I think it is still just giving people an opportunity to step out of their comfort zone, try something new, be a part of something that's bigger than yourself. Feel like you're a part of a team. I mean, I'm not a really big sports fan, but I do like going to the, you know, to see a basketball game or a baseball game. And I love being a part of a crowd. I mean, I like that even more than like watching the game, I'm more interested in just being a part of the crowd and being part of that energy when the home team's winning and everyone starts going crazy or even more exciting for me is, you know, during halftime when like the six year olds are trying to make a three-pointer to win a car or something, you know, the crowd is getting behind them.
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Speaker 1 (32:36):
So I think it's being a part of a happy crowd and there's a whole re a subreddit called happy mobs, which I've discovered because they linked to me every now and then people who just specifically loved not even participating necessarily, but just seeing videos of happy mops of people. And, you know, you see, you see a lot of angry mobs and angry mobs are good too. And we've had a lot of angry mobs as summer for great causes and great reason, but it, it, it a very different way. It's special to see a happy mob of people.
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Speaker 3 (33:03):
Oh, really. So I am curious about this scale and numbers, do you think that that large scale, huge crowds really helps add a lot more to the missions? Or do you feel like sometimes intimacy helps? How do you think about that balance?
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Speaker 1 (33:20):
It's very idea specific and it became a problem for me because we did the grand central thing, which had a big crowd of 200 people. And that video went viral and we sort of, that was our calling guard. And we were known for that and I had this open door policy and this open mailing list. And I, I started, you know, feeling like, well, I need to do more things that are open to everybody. But 200 people pretty quickly turned into 2000 people. And it's, it's not always the best for the project creatively to have thousands of people participating in something. There was a, an opportunity I had a couple of years after the grand central video where this art studio had opened up in this, this old factory in cobble Hill, Brooklyn called the invisible dog. And it was this belt factory where they invented the invisible dog toy that you would see at like Disney world in the starting in like the sixties or seventies, but just the classic kids toy of like the, the rigid leash that looks like there's an invisible dog on it.
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Speaker 1 (34:15):
And I got an email from this guy who had taken over this building to build this art collective. And he said, we have 2000 invisible dog leashes, would you want to do something with it? And I was like, that's perfect because I have 2000 people that really want to do something. So the idea was we would just flood the neighborhood of cobble Hill in Carroll gardens with people walking around with invisible dogs and just make it completely bizarre for people, you know, brunching on the street. And we had this giant warehouse and we had this demeaning point and everybody showed up and I'm handing out these invisible dogs and it was packed and I was very happy about it. And then somebody told me that there were another thousand people waiting in line outside on the street who couldn't get in. And a lot of whom went home or we, we ran out of the dog toys and I just realized that, you know, it's going to be, I have to, you have to be really careful when you're planning an open to the public event.
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Speaker 1 (35:02):
It can get bigger than you anticipate it. And you have to think about space and you probably can't ever meet indoors. And you definitely have to have a megaphone. You might have to have multiple megaphones. And there are a lot of considerations. And ultimately, I mean, we still occasionally like to do these big everybody's involved things. And we do our annual MP3 experiment is one example where that's designed to scale to however many thousand show up. It'll be fine. And we find spaces like giant meadow and prospect park to do those things. But a lot of times an idea just needs one person or it needs five people. And I think it's really specific on, you know, what number of people is going to be the most effective to make something as funny as possible and interesting as possible for those that witness. It.
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Speaker 3 (35:46):
It's interesting because I feel like a lot of community organizers, when they plan events, they can have RSVPs. They can know who's going to show up how many are going to show up. But I imagine from what it sounds like you just send out an email and then people could forward that email to as many people as they want. They can even post it on Reddit or anywhere. So I feel like in a way you don't really have control over how many people show up, right?
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Speaker 1 (36:08):
Yeah, no. I mean, at the end of the day, no, if you're opening something to the public, it can be hard. I have used a lot of different tactics over the years because I had this problem where if I want to get 10 people to do something well, that's easy. I'll ask 10 friends to do it, or are 10 people who performed with improv everywhere for 15 years, who I know and trust. And that's, that's no problem. And if I want to get 2000 people, that's no problem. I'll just, you know, put it up, put it over our mailing list and about that number of people might come out. But if I wanted to get, you know, a hundred people or 200 people for something, then it got really tricky because I don't have 200 friends who are going to do me a favor and come show up and do something.
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Speaker 1 (36:44):
But if I open it to the public, it'd be too many. So I would try different methods of just having people RSVP. So I would send out an email and it would be a link to a Google doc. And, you know, the first a hundred people would get the next email with, with the information. But then that's tricky because, you know, just because a hundred people say they're going to come doesn't mean they're actually going to come. So typically if I wanted a hundred people to be there, I would let 200 people. And then, you know, half of the people would be no shows or get sick on the day or for any number of reasons, you know, be late and miss it or whatever. So yeah, it is a little bit of a, a tricky science of trying to get the right number of people to be there.
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Speaker 1 (37:21):
And, you know, there's other metrics you can use. I mean, for open to the public events, we have a Facebook event typically, and that changes wildly from year to year. Like it used to be, you could click maybe on Facebook and now you just click interested. But what does that mean? You know, for the no pants, subway ride, it's like, well, there's 10,000 RSVPs. It's 5,000 people that are definitely coming and, you know, 5,000 people are interested and then 2000 show up. And it's just, you know, it's, it's, it's very hard to, to know,
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Speaker 3 (37:50):
So improv everywhere. It has roots in New York city. And a lot of the first versions of the missions have happened in New York city. Although I know they have scaled around the world and people have tried to everywhere, but do you think there is something about New York city that adds to this willingness to share absurdity together and this willingness to do something new? Or do you feel any connection to the fact that a lot of missions are held in New York city?
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Speaker 1 (38:14):
Yeah. I mean, almost everything we've done. I mean, I've, I've toured to festivals or colleges and other cities. And, and I have, I mean, I've, I've staged these types of things around the world, but almost everything has been in New York. At least it started in New York and maybe we've toured it somewhere else. But I will say that having, you know, gone and done something like our MP3 experiment project in cities around the world, that generally they're received the same. And it's very funny to me cause I'll, I'll be in a new city. I remember being in like Bilbao Spain and the organizers and those two places were like, it's not going to be the same here. People are very shy. People in this part of Spain are shy or just people in Norway are shyer. So don't expect it to be the same. And then it's exactly the same.
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Speaker 1 (38:56):
It's like always exactly the same, like humans laugh at the same things. And, and, you know, I mean, there are obviously there are cultural differences at different parts of the world, but generally whether we're in South Africa or Australia or Canada, like the, the comedy kind of works in the same way. But I think dance your question that New York is, is definitely the best place in the world to do what we do. And it's mostly just because it's a city, it's, it's a dense urban city with tons of foot traffic with good public transportation and with lots and lots of public spaces. A lot of my friends from the comedy world had moved to Los Angeles over the years to be comedy writers. And I've been tempted to move to Los Angeles, but there's like three public spaces in the whole area. You know, it's like, you can go to the Santa Monica pier or the third street promenade, or you can go to some outdoor malls or maybe a Hollywood Boulevard
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Speaker 3 (39:48):
And so hard to get around. So hard to form critical mass,
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Speaker 1 (39:52):
Where are 2000 people can have parked their cars? You know, first of all, if I have, if, you know, if I was doing a giant event, I'd have to have parking rather than people arriving on, on bikes and foot and public transportation. So definitely the density and being in a real city like New York, I think is important and having lots of public space. And I think there is something unique about New York. I mean, there's the only in New York cliche. I think the fact that, you know, new Yorkers are allegedly jaded or are, you know, have, have seen it all. And you have, I mean, I've lived in New York for 20 years now, and there is something unusual that you're going to see every time you walk in New York, you know, whether it's, someone's screaming on the street because they're mentally unstable or because there are performance artists and you don't know the difference between the two sometimes, you know, you're going to run into things like that. But I think it challenged me early on to come up with things that were really spectacular. That may be in my hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, this would get attention, but in New York you kind of have to go to the next level because they've already had three people try to get their attention on this subway car in the last 30 minutes. So you better do something special,
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Speaker 3 (40:56):
Lots of competition for attention. So for people who can't join your missions in real life, they're touchpoint with improv everywhere is through your YouTube channel. So you have over 1.9 million subscribers, people around the world are discovering these really fun missions and laughing at their computers at home. So how do you use the power of the internet to bring your work to a wider community? And what were your goals with a YouTube channel or non goals that unintentionally happened?
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Speaker 1 (41:24):
Yeah, a lot of it was unintentional. I mean, when YouTube was created, really just solved a problem for me. Which is, you know, I started the group in 2001. I joined YouTube in April of 2006, which was in the first, maybe six months or so that YouTube existed. But at that time I just had a shoe box full of mini DV tapes from our camp quarters of these, you know, videos of the projects that we'd done and no way to really share them to anybody unless they came over to my apartment. I connected my camera to my TV and made you watch something. So there was no streaming video. Now there was like real video or windows, media streaming. It was just not reliable, not good and costly for the bandwidth. And when YouTube existed, it was like, Oh, this is incredible.
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Speaker 1 (42:06):
I can take everything I've ever done and I can upload it and host it on this website for free and share it with everyone. So it really changed everything for us. And eventually YouTube had the partner program where they shared advertising revenue with the creators. And then all of a sudden I had a budget where a video might make a few thousand dollars. So I could invest in spend a few thousand dollars and props or talent or, you know, whatever it was. It was very exciting. And I think the fact YouTube is what led to me being able to go around the world and, you know, introduce this project to art festivals and college campuses everywhere. And it's led to all of the professional success that I've had and, and a longtime producers I work with have had 3m pro everywhere where we, you know, as I said, we spent last year making a show for Disney, and that's definitely a direct result of the development people at Disney, having seen improv everywhere videos, so documenting and, and, you know, sharing the work has been, been really important, but it is also a trade off where you have to get really smart about how you're documenting things, because it's becomes increasingly important that the video is great, but you have to make sure you're not making decisions for the video that are sacrificing the in-person experience.
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Speaker 1 (43:17):
And that's something that was really top of mind for our Pixar show, where we had a budget and we were able to do things with, you know, huge set pieces. We had a remote controlled, full scale Wall-E robot running around New York city, surprising people. So it was, you know, sort of next level stuff that we were dealing with, but we had to make sure that our cameras were sufficiently hidden and that everything felt authentic and that we were genuinely surprising people because those surprise reactions are what makes the video great. So if you're too focused on making a good video, then you're going to feel like they're walking through the set of a movie and not a new York's regular New York city street. So over the years, we've learned a lot of techniques of hiding our cameras of hiding our production footprint of making it really seem like life is normal until something spectacular happens.
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Speaker 4 (44:05):
It's such a crazy journey you've been on from dressing up as Ben folds and being a young, new, new Yorker, looking for a stage and deciding to use the street and the subway. I have never done anything consistently for 19 years. The way that you have stuck with this for 19 years, how was your relationship like personally to improv everywhere or your motivations or driving force behind why you do this shifted or changed since you first started to today?
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Speaker 1 (44:36):
I think it's changed a lot over the years. I mean, when I first started, I was primarily interested in being in front of the camera and, you know, being an actor and being a comedian. And while I've, you know, continued to perform at the uprisings brigade theater up until closing, due to the pandemic acting and sort of performing in front of a crowd or performing on camera, mostly just became a fun activity for me. And I got more passionate and interested in writing and directing and producing and really being the person who's coming up with these ideas and producing these events and then directing the video. And maybe there was an opportunity for me to be on camera because I was the right person for the job, but more and more over the last many years, you know, I'm, I'm entirely behind the scenes. So that focus of, of how I'm getting creatively fulfilled through the project definitely changed over the years. Just overall things have changed just being someone who's, you know, now 41 years old and has two children. And it's been fun to watch some of the old videos again with my six year old and sort of seeing it through his eyes, ideas have changed. And, you know, my, my sort of tolerance for being in handcuffs as has changed, which happened a couple of times over the years for a dentist.
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Speaker 1 (45:48):
I remember I was in handcuffs after a project once when my wife was pregnant with my oldest child. And she was stoked on that. My producer, Andrew had to call her and say, everything's okay, he's going to be fine, but he is currently in handcuffs. Things have changed, but at the same time, you know, we still go out and do these things without permission when we have a great idea. And when we know that we can pull it off. And I think the pandemic itself is a huge gut check. I mean, obviously there's not a big market right now for big crowds of people in public spaces. I'm hoping that there's going to be a vaccine real soon and you know, maybe, maybe next summer we can blow off some steam and have a huge giant MP3 experiment party in a public space in New York would be great, but there's, there's a lot of uncertainty with that, but I I'm hoping that, you know, new York's gonna change big time.
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Speaker 1 (46:38):
So in some good ways, in some really bad ways, I think due to what's happening to the city right now with a lot of local businesses closing and, you know, people not being able to afford rent. So and, and theaters closing, and a lot of our entertainment industry is having a real hard time. And when we're very much on pause. So I think it's sad, but hopefully there's, there's a lot of opportunity when things start to get back to normal. And I think there there'll be a lot of opportunity for creativity. And I think there's going to be a lot of people who are 22 years old, you know, next year who are going to create the next great thing. And I hope to, I hope to cure, keep creating and keep finding a way to you know, entertain myself and, and come up with fun ideas that hopefully make others laugh.
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Speaker 4 (47:21):
That's a great perspective. I know you mentioned improv everywhere is on pause, but do you think there's ever a potential for that to be a virtual event? Or do you think the in-person is really
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Speaker 3 (47:30):
What's crucial to hold onto?
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Speaker 1 (47:32):
Yeah, that's been interesting. I've definitely had a lot of people email me and sort of suggest like, Oh, are you going to do a big flash mob on zoom? Or, you know, what is sort of the, the digital improv everywhere project, or more recently, what's the socially distance and prep everywhere project. And I, I'm less interested in doing something that's virtual and, and is online only because really one of the greatest things about improv everywhere is it gets people to leave the internet and goes out and to go out to public and being near each other. And I've always been proud of the fact that we use the tools of the internet of email lists and social media and our YouTube channel to sort of inspire people, to get offline, go out in the real world, express themselves in public space and sort of bring life and excitement to our city.
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Speaker 1 (48:18):
So I'm less excited about people listening to the same instructions while they're, you know, in a zoom meeting together. I love that people are doing things like that. And I, and I think there are people who are, are just starting out who are probably going to create incredible things virtually and, and already are in terms of, you know, doing something that's like socially distanced. I am interested in, you know, well, what is the thing that we could be doing this fall or next spring that involves a crowd of people or a group of people that are six feet apart and wearing a mask, or what are the sort of like smaller, more street art style things that we can do that maybe just involve one performer or just creating some sort of art in the city. I'm not going to be able to to, to just sit on my hands and, and not go out and create. So I know that there will be stuff that we'll do. You know, whether it's making another TV series or getting back out there and, you know, doing something low budget with no permission, we're ready to do it all when it's safe to do so.
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Speaker 3 (49:12):
Just to wrap up, I wanted to ask you about playfulness because we talked about weirdness earlier about how that helps with the storytelling element and catching people's attention. But playfulness is such a central theme in your work and in your Ted talk, you mentioned how, as kids, you don't need permission to do anything, you don't need to think about what the purpose is. You just do it, you just play and adults tend to be lacking in that spirit. So I'd love to just hear your thoughts about why playfulness is so important to you in your work.
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Speaker 1 (49:43):
I personally just, I love games. I love an opportunity to be silly. I love what I refer to as organized fun of just, you know, getting a big group of people together and all working on the same thing. No matter how silly it might be. I think the idea of going out and bringing fun and joy to public spaces in particular is particularly important. I think public space is not activated enough personally. I'm a, I'm a safe streets advocate, and really believe that New York city has given way too much of its real estate to cars. Whether it's private vehicles being parked for free on our sidewalks, taking up like 70% of the real estate between the for, with everything that cars have. And I think that we need to, you know, the public space that we have been given that has not been by cars and traffic.
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Speaker 1 (50:28):
I think we need to celebrate it and we need to go out and enjoy our parks and enjoy our plazas and make fun things happen in our public transit as well and express ourselves because if we allow public space to just be for sanctioned, permitted, official events, and for advertising kiosks all over the city then we're not really hearing the voice to people. So the protest movement has, has been inspiring to me. And I hope to be able to join some protests when I returned to New York and a, in a few weeks in general. I think, you know, whether it's, whether it's for play or having your voice heard on an issue or, you know, a protest, I think the streets are for everybody. I think that's really important. So I think lifelong play is very important. I think if we, you know, sort of only allow ourselves to be passively entertained with movies and television, we're selling yourself short. I think there's a way for us to get out there and be a part of our own entertainment. And I think the boom in immersive theater over the last five, 10 years as has really shown, there's an appetite for that, between things like escape rooms or sleep no more in New York. People want something a little bit more than just sitting down in a theater in watching something.
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Speaker 2 (51:41):
Yes, love that. That was so inspiring. Thank you so much for making time for us. This was so much fun. I felt like I was just hearing you tell cool stories at a bar or something. So really, really enjoyed this time together. Thank you, Charlie. Well, thank you. It's my pleasure. If you want to learn more about improv everywhere, visit improv everywhere.com. You should also look up their previous pranks on YouTube because voice does not do it. Justice visit YouTube slash improv everywhere, and a big thank you to our team that made this podcast possible. Thank you to Rosanna coupon for engineering. This episode, Greg David, for his design work and Katie O'Connell for marketing to find out more about the work Kevin Kai and I do as people in company, helping organizations get clear on who their most important communities are and how to build with those people, head to our website, people and.company. Also, if you want to start your own community or supercharge one, you're already a part of our handbook is here for you. Visit get together book.com to grab your coffee. It's full of stories and learnings from conversations with community leaders like this one with Charlie. Oh, and last thing you know what it is. If you don't mind review us in your Apple store and your Google play store or wherever you're listening to your podcasts and click subscribe, it helps more people hear stories like this. Thank you. Bye bye.