Breaking The Fourth Wall In Improv

Last Modified: Sep 1, 2024

Originally written 23rd December 2018

I’ve been out of university for a week and I’m already going insane. Having talked about this topic in great detail with several people, I thought I would write down, in a very, very un-academic and subjective way about breaking the fourth wall in improvised comedy and why it can be a brilliant, if dangerous, tool. I’ll talk about why breaking the fourth wall is particularly powerful in improv theatre as opposed to traditional theatre, some of the arguments against breaking the fourth wall, and some technical suggestions for breaking the fourth wall in practice.

NOTE: I’m mainly a montage/Armando improviser, and my experience is almost exclusively in sketch-show style formats, so not all of this applies to more narrative driven forms, because I don’t know enough about them.

So, what do I mean by ‘breaking the fourth wall’? For the purposes of this, I define it as ‘when improvisers acknowledge in the show that they’re doing a show’. This does NOT include the act of addressing the audience to introduce the show, or the act of generating source material for the show, as can be seen in formats that start with a conversation or a monologue to inspire the team, and might return to this device throughout the performance with a new monologue each time, e.g The Armando.

In practice, I’ve seen this done at its most mild when, in a musical improv show, an improviser playing a teacher who kept talking about a list of rules, was told by another improviser to ‘remember’ all these rules, at which point, the improv musician started playing music, forcing her to come up with a list that rhymed and had a tune (something both scene players knew she could actually do). More extreme examples I can think of is when I broke character in the middle of the emotional climax of a scene to shout at my scene partner for misremembering some small narrative detail. Another example is when another member of the team initiated a scene where we were all playing ourselves, reading a review of the current show. All three of these were met with laughter and enthusiasm from the audience.

Why do I think we should break the fourth wall in this way? In Bill Arnett’s book, ‘The Complete Improviser’, he says how he thinks that improv is two shows at the same time. The story of the characters and situations, and the story of the adults on a stage hopping about pretending to be courgettes. Improv is a form of theatre so pared down that half of what we see is in the collective imagination of the audience and the performers. As an audience, we accept everything in an improv show without the help of costume, props, make-up, script, etc. For me, the scale of improv’s suspension of disbelief is completely absurd, and magical.

So why should we damage this beautiful illusion? Well, because it’s so human, and so funny. The humanity I’m talking about comes from the age old ritual of telling stories and conjuring up new worlds and creatures with only our imaginations. It’s almost a shame to laugh at an improv show, but never realise that even though we’re a bunch of strangers, we’re all playing pretend together, and that it’s so much fun. That’s why I think breaking the fourth wall in improv is particularly potent and separate in comparison to scripted theatre. Improv is theatre taken back to its simplest and most improbable illusion.

That’s all very well, but what are the arguments against fourth wall breakage? Firstly, breaking the fourth wall can totally invalidate a believable story. I know I’ve just gone on about how great it is to break the fourth wall, but my golden rule is USE SPARINGLY. Ben Macpherson, the director of the troupe I’m in (The Vox Pops) calls breaking the fourth wall ‘a nuclear weapon’. I absolutely agree with this. Why should we care about these characters if we remember a bunch of people made them up just now? It can be very destructive and disrespectful to the character work and stories created by the rest of the team.

For me, the heart of an improv show is a team working together to portray believable relationships and dynamics. It is not about everyone being terribly ironic and emotionally distanced to mask the fact they have no understanding of comedy beyond a tepid Facebook post. Fourth wall breaks, like any other improv move, should be for the show, not for the ego. The effect of a fourth wall break should not be to invalidate what has been created, but to make us appreciate the magic of make-believe. To take the example from earlier where an improviser playing a teacher was forced to actually come up with the list of rules she kept referring to, the fun of the fourth-wall break comes from the audience realising the improviser has a difficult task, but one which is still related to the scene and the established teacher character.

Another issue with breaking the fourth wall is that it can overcomplicate the show. This argument is absolutely true at the top of a show, but especially so for people new to improv. If someone comes to an improv show, and they’ve never seen improv in their life,(very common in the Midlands), and then everyone on stage starts talking about how ‘we’re all people in an improv show’, how is that audience member supposed to engage when they don’t even know what improv is? Improv already has a scarce audience in most of the UK anyway, without us being all elitist about it!

Here is the counter argument: Once the audience understands that improv is essentially just stories, I think there’s no problem breaking the fourth wall. We get it in Shakespeare, How To Get Away With Murder, Miranda, and countless other forms of media with no fuss. Audiences will go anywhere you like if they’re on your side. In individual scenes, it’s useful to set up the who, what, where, to make it clear what the story is. This principle can zoom out and apply to the presentation of a show. We set up the who, what, where, by showing the audience a scene, then showing them that when someone runs across the front, that means the next scene is going to start, and that establishes how the show is supposed to work, and what it means to be ‘an improviser’. After that is established, you can subvert it, and break character in the middle of a scene to shout at your partner for being a bad improviser, and it’s surprising, but makes sense.

All of this theory seems really complicated, but if you experiment with breaking the fourth wall, with a group who are ok with it, you get a sense of what will yank out the rug and kill a show, and what will be fun for everyone. I’m still developing this sense, so I might have a totally different view on all this in a few years’ time. Eventually, you get to a point where you kind of know how to do it without being a twat, and even then, it can be a leap of faith. Here follows some of my own practice.

Break the fourth wall very, very SPARINGLY! My personal rule is to only do it once, somewhere in the last third of the show. This builds on the things I have said about letting the audience understand what the show is supposed to be, before you subvert it. If you break the illusion early, it can devalue everything else that follows.

It is also a fun alternative to the ‘mercy edit’. A ‘mercy edit’ is when a scene is ended not because it has come to a satisfying conclusion, but because its players have fucked up beyond the point of no return and need rescuing from further embarrassment. If you use the fourth wall break in this way, you acknowledge that the last scene was terrible, so ONLY do it with a team who are cool with that sort of thing, and ideally if you played a major role in the scene, or they’ll think you’re a massive twat.

One of the core aspects of Clowning, is that fucking up is a great comedy gift. This is because trying to do something well and fucking up is really relatable to an audience, and striding on and owning the fact you fucked up and you know it was embarrassing is really funny, and also requires a lot of courage. It can help a bad scene fit in with the show again, even if it was genuinely incredibly awful. This links back to the idea that everything that happens in improv is make-believe and a big lie, and yet we all attach such high emotional stakes to it, which is one of the most beautiful things about it.

In conclusion: breaking the fourth wall is a great improv tool because improv is one of the best art forms to do it in. Breaking the fourth wall can be used to subvert the audience’s expectations in a grander way by playing with an established form, not just content, and can also expose the ridiculousness and humanity behind the whole concept of theatre. It can be a volatile and risky tool because it can destroy narrative and the work of a group when used egotistically, but a hilarious and daring device when used with a constructive attitude. Above all, don’t use it in a show unless you’ve practiced it with other people, who can tell you to stop being a twat.