Sage match

Improv mainstay TJ Jagodowski has a goal. For two years, he’s been coaching Fart City, which appears Friday 23 at the Chicago Improv Festival (CIF), and he’s got just one wish for the local troupe. “My private dream is to try and help Fart City stay so good that at some point a William F. Buckley type has to do an interview and say, ‘Well, my life was changed when I saw Fart City.’”

For an improv troupe to gain a neocon fan base (or any, for that matter), it takes more than just six talented improvisers jumping onstage. As with any good play or film, a director is crucial. But what does direction mean when both coach and actor are without a script? “[You’re] basically teaching and directing at the same time, ideally,” Jagodowski says. Jagodowski, one half of legendary iO fixture TJ & Dave, has coached many teams, including long-running group the Reckoning. “The role of a director is to create a safe environment for the ensemble so I can just feel free to push them artistically.” Coaching improv can also entail bringing exercises to rehearsal, offering an outside eye to appraise performers’ work, interrupting scene work, creating form, giving postshow notes—and working the lights during the performance.

Of the fast-paced, quick-witted octet making its CIF debut, Jagodowski says, “Fart City is ready to go. You could point them in any direction and they’d run right into that wall if you wanted. I’m lucky to have been riding in a sled with some real mushers. These dogs want to run.”

Craig Uhlir, who plays weekly as part of the high-energy two-man show Middle Age Comeback at iO, currently coaches Eleanor (also making its CIF debut Friday 23) as well as the Album, 98.6, Old Dogs and others. “The first thing I’m doing when I meet with a team is diagnostics,” Uhlir says. “I tell them I’ll never be able to teach them how to be funny, but I can teach them how to improvise.”

With a young group like Eleanor, an all-female septet, Uhlir says his objective is to boost confidence, teach actors how to stay in the moment and persuade them not to work too hard impressing one another. Which isn’t always easy. “Not demoralizing someone as you’re trying to tell them they’re pretending wrong” is difficult, Uhlir says. “You can only browbeat so much before you just cripple someone.” He describes Eleanor as “an atypical team in that every player brings something completely unique to the table and it all works together. It’s almost fate that they found each other.”

A key part of directing improv is helping a group find its form, the structure of its set. Jagodowski helped Fart City develop a high-tempo, high-energy form it’s calling the Pfarty: Ensemble members hang with the audience, then improvise scenes based on those conversations, which lead to roughly 30 rapid-fire scenes within a half hour. For Eleanor, Uhlir fell back on an old form he devised a decade ago called the Bevy: Two performers deliver monologues around which other ensemble members create scenes.

And it helps if your director is a working actor and celebrated pro like Uhlir and Jagodowski (we wouldn’t be surprised if even the late Buckley has seen one of Jagodowski’s ubiquitous Sonic burger commercials). “The cool thing about TJ and me is that we play a ton,” Uhlir says. “We’re not that director that just stays behind the camera all day. We’re in the trenches, then coming back out and teaching all the soldiers how to jump in.”

Fart City and Eleanor perform Friday 23.

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