Improv Everywhere & the NFL

Posted by Maximum Fun on 14th January 2010

From the New York Times Q&A with Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere

Question:

Instead of organizing thousands of people to take off their pants, how about organizing them to, say, work a day in a soup kitchen, or help Habitat for Humanity put up houses, or something useful? I like fun as much as the next guy, but this is just rampant stupidity.

— Posted by JP
Answer:

I’m always amazed at how frequently this comes up. There’s a certain type of person who sees our videos of large numbers of people having fun together and immediately feels the need to scold us for not working in a soup kitchen instead (and for whatever reason it’s always a soup kitchen that is referenced.) To me this makes about as much sense as someone angrily writing the N.F.L. and saying, “Why do you waste your time getting hundreds of thousands of people to assemble in stadiums every Sunday when they could be out working in soup kitchens?”

Participation in Improv Everywhere events is just a way to have fun for a couple of hours on a weekend afternoon. While some people might choose to go to a sporting event, movie, or stay at home and type angry Internet comments, our participants choose to, say, shop in slow motion at a Home Depot with 200 other people. Whether or not that is “stupid” is a matter of opinion, but it definitely doesn’t preclude anyone from volunteering with a charitable organization the other 166 hours of the week.

Yes, I have a large army of people that I can easily organize to do unusual things in public spaces, but that doesn’t mean I have the ability to harness it for volunteerism. My participants didn’t sign up for my mailing list to learn about service opportunities, just like people who sign up for season tickets to the Giants games aren’t expecting to travel out to the Meadowlands to build houses for the less fortunate. There are plenty of service organizations people can get involved with, and I’m sure there is plenty of overlap in membership between those groups and ours.