Crowdsourcing scenes 🤣 Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere
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EPISODE AT A GLANCE:
GUEST: Charlie Todd
COMMUNITY: Improv Everywhere
HOSTS: Bailey Richardson & Maggie Zhang
“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
Show Notes
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.
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 there 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.
We talked to Charlie on the podcast about crowdsourcing the creativity of strangers to create in his words “a happy mob.”
Lessons from three of Improv Everywhere missions.
Frozen Grand Central: Giving up control
Charlie gathered 200 people in Grand Central terminal and together they stopped time, freezing in place for five minutes.
Charlie could have assigned everyone a position to take but insead left it up to the participants. One couple decided to kiss in place. A woman bought an ice cream cone just before the freeze which melted over the five minutes. A man spilled his briefcase all over the floor.
While working towards the common goal, Charlie gives people the freedom to make the mission their own. His role is to create a “sandbox” for people to play in. “I like the idea of sort of crowdsourcing 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,” he shares.
Best Buy Uniform Storm: Let spectators “opt in”
Usually pranks are seen as a negative, there is someone at the butt of the joke. But Charlie follows the “Golden Rule of the Prank” which is, “any prank that you’re performing should be something that you would want people to do to you. It should be as fun for the person who is getting pranked as the person who is performing the prank.”
However, some of his pranks didn’t meet that standard. When hundreds of people flooded a Best Buy in royal blue polos and khaki pants to match the employees, the alarm bells sounded for managers. The employees thought the prank was a heist. When the cops showed up, everyone cooperated and quietly went on their way.
In each mission that Improv Everywhere runs, it is important that they create an experience that is “opt-in” for the spectator. Charlie explains, “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.”
The Invisible Dog Leash: More participants isn’t always better
Over the years, Charlie has collected a mailing list of thousands of New Yorkers eager to join in missions. For some projects, like the MP3 Experiment, it’s great to have thousands of people show up.
But for others, a small team will do the trick.
Charlie learned about managing the number of participants the hard way. A few years ago, the new owner of a factory building in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, called Charlie and told him he had 2,000 invisible dog leashes on hand. A mission was put in place to take thousands of invisible dogs for a walk through the neighborhood on a Saturday morning.
Charlie put the idea up on his mailing list. When more than 3,000 people showed up so they had to turn away 1,000 people.
These public events with a numbers cap are a tightrope to walk. “If I want to get 10 people to do something well, that’s easy. I’ll ask 10 friends to do it,” Charlie explains. “If I want to get 2000 people, that’s no problem. I’ll just put it up on the mailing list and about that number of people might come out. But, if I wanted to get two hundred people, then it gets really tricky. I don’t have 200 friends who are going to do me a favor and come show up and do something. How do I open it up to the public?”
Now he tailors his invites to the event. If he needs a certain number of people to show up, he adds something like a Google Form as a form of buy in and a signal that folks will show up.
👋🏻SAY HI TO Charlie & LEARN MORE ABOUT Improv EVERYWHERE
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