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What If Improv Were Good?
The Middleditch & Schwartz specials suggest a future where the form belongs to performers, not theaters.
By Jesse David Fox
It was the 28th day of quarantine in New York City. Or was it the 16th? Or the 43rd? On my daily ration of one “going outside,” I saw a squat, grumpy dog — one of those dogs that look like a guy who played football in high school but wasn’t tall enough to play in college and is now a personal trainer at a Gold’s Gym in the town you grew up in — try to bite a couple on their daily walk. At the last second, the owner pulled her dog back. There was a pause. And then the owner looked at the couple … and screamed at them for not wearing masks. At this point, I decided I was done with the world for the day. Home, I turned on Netflix to watch the second of three Middleditch & Schwartz specials, and something funny happened. Not funny haha — though there is a ton of haha — but funny unusual. Or, to use a word that is déclassé, something nice happened.
Middleditch & Schwartz, named after its stars — Thomas Middleditch, who looks like Seth Meyers if he didn’t have to be presentable every night, and Ben Schwartz, who looks like Andrew Garfield if he were 100 percent Jewish — is a two-man longform improv show in which every part is improvised by the performers, including the structure of the show and the scenarios within it. At the start of the program, instead of just asking for suggestions from the audience, they interview one randomly selected member about “something coming up in the future that [they] are either excited for or dreading.” In this case, it was a story about a working mother going to law school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a town in which some believe aliens exist (a detail that delights Schwartz, knowing he’ll get to bring it up in the set).
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