Improv Everywhere (often abbreviated IE) is a comedic

performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

group based in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, formed in 2001 by Charlie Todd. Its slogan is "We Cause Scenes". The group carries out

prank A practical joke, or prank, is a mischievous trick played on someone, generally causing the victim to experience embarrassment, perplexity, confusion, or discomfort.Marsh, Moira. 2015. ''Practically Joking''. Logan: Utah State University Press. ...

s, which they call "missions", in public places. The stated goal of these missions is to cause scenes of "chaos and joy." Some of the group's missions use hundreds or even thousands of performers and are similar to

flash mob A flash mob (or flashmob) is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform for a brief time, then quickly disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression. Flash mobs may be organized via t ...

s, while other missions utilize only a handful of performers. Improv Everywhere has stated that they do not identify their work with the term flash mob, in part because the group was created two years prior to the flash mob trend, and the group has an apolitical nature. While Improv Everywhere was created years before

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

, the group has grown in notoriety since joining the site in April 2006. To date, Improv Everywhere's videos have been viewed over 470 million times on YouTube. They have over 1.9 million YouTube subscribers. In 2007, the group shot a television pilot for

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters are l ...

. In May 2009,

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News C ...

released a book about Improv Everywhere, ''Causing a Scene'' The book, written by founder Charlie Todd and senior agent Alex Scordelis, is a behind-the-scenes look at some of the group's stunts. In 2013, a feature-length documentary about Improv Everywhere premiered at the

South By Southwest South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, ...

Festival in Austin, Texas. The film, titled ''We Cause Scenes'', was released digitally on

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and other platforms in 2014. In 2019, Improv Everywhere produced the

Disney+ Disney+ is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service owned and operated by the Media and Entertainment Distribution division of The Walt Disney Company. The service primarily distributes films and television se ...

live-action series ''Pixar In Real Life'', which premiered on 12 November 2019, with twelve episodes set to release monthly.

Background

After graduating from the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United State ...

, Todd started the group in August 2001 after playing a prank in a Manhattan bar with some friends that involved him pretending to be musician

Ben Folds Benjamin Scott Folds (born September 12, 1966) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and composer, who is the first artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., since May 2017. Folds was ...

. Later that year Todd started taking classes at the

Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (shorter UCB Theatre) is an American improvisational theatre company and training center founded by the Upright Citizens Brigade troupe members Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh. Prior to ...

in New York City where he first met most of the "Senior Agents" of Improv Everywhere. The owners of the theatre, The

Upright Citizens Brigade The Upright Citizens Brigade is an improvisational and sketch comedy group that emerged from Chicago's ImprovOlympic in 1990. The original incarnation of the group consisted of Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh, Adam McKa ...

(UCB), had a television series from 1998–2000 on Comedy Central. While primarily a

sketch comedy Sketch comedy comprises a series of short, amusing scenes or vignettes, called "sketches", commonly between one and ten minutes long, performed by a group of comic actors or comedians. The form developed and became popular in vaudeville, and ...

show, the UCB often filmed their characters in public places with hidden cameras and showed the footage under the end credits. Both the UCB's show and their teachings on improv have been influential to Improv Everywhere. Todd currently performs on a house team at the UCBT in New York, where he also taught for many years.

Missions / events

All the missions share a certain ''

modus operandi A ''modus operandi'' (often shortened to M.O.) is someone's habits of working, particularly in the context of business or criminal investigations, but also more generally. It is a Latin phrase, approximately translated as "mode (or manner) of o ...

'': Members ("agents") play their roles entirely straight, not breaking character or betraying that they are acting. IE claims the missions are benevolent, aiming to give the observers a laugh and a positive experience.

Frozen Grand Central

Improv Everywhere's most popular YouTube video is "Frozen Grand Central", which has received over 35 million views. The two-minute video depicts 207 IE Agents freezing in place simultaneously for five minutes in New York's

Grand Central Terminal Grand Central Terminal (GCT; also referred to as Grand Central Station or simply as Grand Central) is a commuter rail terminal located at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Grand Central is the southern terminus ...

. The video was listed as number 49 in Urlesque's 100 Most Iconic Internet Videos.

Martin Bashir Martin Henry Bashir (born 19 January 1963) is a British journalist. He was a presenter on British and American television and for the BBC's ''Panorama'' programme, for which he interviewed Diana, Princess of Wales in 1995. Although the intervie ...

declared on

Nightline ''Nightline'' (or ''ABC News Nightline'') is ABC News' late-night television news program broadcast on ABC in the United States with a franchised formula to other networks and stations elsewhere in the world. Created by Roone Arledge, the prog ...

that the video was "one of the funniest moments ever captured on tape." According to Charlie Todd, the prank has been recreated by fans in 100 cities around the world.

Fake U2 Concert

On 21 May 2005, IE staged a fake U2

street concert Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

on a rooftop in New York hours before the real U2 were scheduled to perform at

Madison Square Garden Madison Square Garden, colloquially known as The Garden or by its initials MSG, is a multi-purpose indoor arena in New York City. It is located in Midtown Manhattan between Seventh and Eighth avenues from 31st to 33rd Street, above Pennsylv ...

. Just like at the filming of the band's ''

Where the Streets Have No Name "Where the Streets Have No Name" is a song by Irish rock music, rock band U2. It is the opening track from their 1987 album ''The Joshua Tree'' and was released as the album's third single (music), single in August 1987. The song's hook (music) ...

'' video in 1987, the police eventually shut the performance down, but not before IE was able to exhaust their four-song repertoire and get most of the way through an encore repeat of "

Vertigo Vertigo is a condition where a person has the sensation of movement or of surrounding objects moving when they are not. Often it feels like a spinning or swaying movement. This may be associated with nausea, vomiting, sweating, or difficulties w ...

". The crowd, even those who had realized that this was a prank, shouted "one more song!", and then "let them play!" when the police officers arrived. This mission was number 23 on the VH1 countdown of the "40 Greatest Pranks."

References

External links