Minneapolis improv comedy kings bow down to 'Harold'

"Chia Pets!"

The voice rang out above dozens of others as the near-sellout crowd at Huge Improv Theater scrambled to suggest something nostalgic.

Then members of an improv comedy team stepped up to relate anecdotes and associations the phrase brought to mind — like how the shoulder-pad fashion trend of the 1980s made every woman look like a linebacker.

Ten minutes later, the team and the audience were in the thick of three off-kilter narratives, following a quintet of musically inclined fur trappers; a father intent on watching bizarre VHS tapes with his son; and a quest for the secret of Rob Lowe's eternal youth. By the end of a half-hour, all of those seemingly unrelated stories managed to dovetail into something resembling a satisfying conclusion.

Welcome to the Harold. Or at least, one interpretation of the Harold. It's all part of Huge's "Harold Turns 50" celebration of what's arguably the most important cornerstone of long-form improv.

So what exactly is a Harold? Basically, it's a set of guidelines that help an improv team develop a scene. "The simplest explanation is just three story lines, each visited three times," said Huge co-founder Butch Roy.

You can pick out the familiar beats of the Harold in just about every TV sitcom.

"A group of performers will take an audience suggestion and build on that idea in ways that are unpredictable even to the performers," said Molly Chase, director of House of Whimsy, one of three teams that are performing at Huge every Saturday through the end of October. "There will likely be moments of poignancy and humor, and the whole room — audience and improvisers — are in it together.

"It's immediate, it has never happened before, and will never happen again."

The first Harold was performed in 1967 by the Committee, a San Francisco-based comedy group known for experimenting with narrative structures that employed improv games and exercises.

When the group decided that it needed a name for its creation, one member reportedly cracked that "Harold" would be nice. The handle stuck, to the slight chagrin of generations of performers who have had to explain its origin.

Committee member Del Close dedicated much of his career to honing and teaching the Harold. In the 1994 book "Truth in Comedy," generally regarded as the improviser's bible, he and co-authors Charna Halpern and Kim "Howard" Johnson explain that "the Harold is like the space shuttle, incorporating all of the developments and discoveries that have gone before it into one new, superior design."

Close's efforts as an instructor and co-founder of Chicago's iO Theater became the foundation for much of American comedy as we know it.

No local venue feels that influence more acutely than Huge Theater. With "Harold Turns 50," Minnesota's most visible improv venue is paying homage to its roots and giving some of the Twin Cities' top improvisers a chance to get back to the basics.

"There are a lot of improv structures, but there's something magic about the Harold, the way you start with an opening and it brings out a truth," said Drew Kersten, director of the Kempt team.

Kempt assistant director John Gebretatose agreed that it's all about capturing those truths. "It's people playing with confidence … making comment on real-life things. Like women's shoulder pads in the '80s and how they had to look like football players just to get through life. For me, that's what makes it successful: a through-line or a narrative commenting on society."

One of the reasons improv remains a hard sell for some audiences is that it's the ultimate "had to be there" entertainment. It's difficult to explain how the shoulder pad observation might snowball into a scene about Jennifer Aniston devouring the life force of her young fans, but for those watching the performers feed off one another's energy and make connections, the evolution is electrifying.

Those hazy connections are very much by design, Kersten said. "If the opening is about Diet Coke, you don't want to see three scenes about Diet Coke. You want them spread out as far as possible, so when they start to come back together it brings a bit more of that magic."

The laughs in a Harold show seldom come from a standard setup/punchline delivery. In fact, one of the first rules laid out in "Truth in Comedy" is "Don't go for the jokes." Instead, the comedy in a long-form show comes largely from watching relatable situations spiral into unexpected directions.

"The least successful Harolds are when we let our 'I know where this needs to go' take over and steer things instead of discovering all the way through," Roy said. "Because if we know where it needs to go, so does the audience."

The form's flexibility is obvious watching the three teams of five performers in the "Harold Turns 50" showcase.

On opening night, the House of Whimsy team produced a trio of focused, slice-of-life vignettes about crumbling relationships, disillusioned carnival workers and spiteful chess players. While the scenes frequently veered into weirdness, they remained grounded in a way that drew laughs of recognition from the crowd.

The Speficicity team, on the other hand, dove deeper into surreality right off the bat with a scene about two buddies literally riding each other's good vibes like a surfboard. That story line soon intertwined with two bird-watchers who misplaced a baby, and a home brewer crafting a hugely popular beer that smelled of cat urine, all of it building into a crescendo of absurdity that had the audience roaring for very different reasons.

As much reverence as the local improv community has for the Harold, the form represents something different in the Twin Cities than it does in improv hotbeds such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where making it onto a high-profile Harold team can be a major career steppingstone. Many performers move to those cities for that reason.

"In Minnesota it's a strong part of the tradition, but at Huge Theater, Harold is only one of the forms that gets done," Kersten said.

While Close did some work with Minnesota comedy godfather Dudley Riggs and his Brave New Workshop, Huge encourages experimentation and focuses more on building strong teams of performers, regardless of form.

"Team first, format second: That's what differentiates us from the coasts," Gebretatose said. "We're better anyway," he added with a laugh.

Ira Brooker is a St. Paul-based freelance writer and editor.

WASHINGTON — An ex-sister-in-law of Pete Hegseth’s submitted a sworn statement to senators on Tuesday that accused Hegseth, President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, of being so “abusive” toward his second wife that she once hid in a closet from him and had a safe word to call for help if she needed to get away from him.

In a Capitol Hill office on Tuesday afternoon, senators were reviewing the affidavit from Danielle Diettrich Hegseth, the former wife of Hegseth’s brother, which describes “erratic and aggressive” behavior by Pete Hegseth that caused his second wife to fear for her safety. According to a copy obtained by the New York Times, it also asserts that he frequently drank to excess both in public and private, including on one occasion she witnessed when he was wearing his military uniform.

The allegations, which Hegseth denied through his lawyer, surfaced as Republicans were working to speed him to confirmation, and could imperil that push. About a half-dozen Republicans who have learned of the accusations in recent days have privately raised serious concerns about them, according to people familiar with the conversations, suggesting that the new information could potentially sap the necessary support for his approval by the Senate.

In her affidavit, reported earlier by NBC News, Danielle Hegseth said she had spoken with the FBI about Pete Hegseth, and had come forward to Congress in the hopes that her account would persuade enough Republicans to block him. She said she was submitting her account at the request of Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

“I have been assured that making this public statement will ensure that certain senators who are still on the fence will vote against Hegseth’s confirmation,” she wrote.

Reed said the account describes behavior that is disqualifying, and “confirms my fears” that the FBI background check on Hegseth had been incomplete.

“The alleged pattern of abuse and misconduct by Mr. Hegseth is disturbing,” he said. “This behavior would disqualify any service member from holding any leadership position in the military, much less being confirmed as the secretary of defense.”

In the affidavit, sent Tuesday to the Armed Services panel, Danielle Hegseth wrote that Pete Hegseth’s second wife, Samantha Hegseth, on one occasion between 2014 and 2016 “hid in her closet from Hegseth because she feared for her personal safety.”

She also said that Samantha Hegseth had given her a code word, shared with Danielle Hegseth and another person, that she would use if she needed help. According to the sworn statement, Samantha Hegseth texted Danielle Hegseth the code word once in either 2015 or 2016, and Danielle contacted the other person to put the plan into motion.

Danielle Hegseth said that she “did not personally witness physical or sexual abuse by Hegseth,” but that she saw what she described as “erratic and aggressive behavior” by him over many years. She also recounted a number of instances in 2008 or 2009, as well as around 2013 in which she had witnessed Pete Hegseth being intoxicated to the point of passing out.

The new allegations are strikingly similar to a raft of accusations that had already surfaced since Trump chose him to lead the Pentagon. Hegseth has adamantly denied the allegations and dismissed them as politically motivated smears from anonymous sources.

Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Pete Hegseth, denied Danielle Hegseth’s charges in a statement.

“Sam has never alleged that there was any abuse, she signed court documents acknowledging that there was no abuse and recently reaffirmed the same during her FBI interview,” Parlatore said, accusing Danielle Hegseth of being “an anti-Trump far-left Democrat” who “had an ax to grind against the entire Hegseth family.”

Samantha Hegseth shares custody of three children with Pete Hegseth. She was interviewed by the FBI as part of her ex-husband’s background check. In that interview, she told investigators that Hegseth abused and continues to abuse alcohol, according to a person with knowledge of the findings. The FBI had no comment.

Samantha Hegseth could not be reached for comment Tuesday. In a statement to NBC News on Monday, before Danielle Hegseth filed her detailed affidavit, she said “there was no physical abuse in my marriage” and that she would not speak further about her marriage.

In a 2021 order, dealing with the appointment of a parenting coordinator, a Minnesota family court judge said neither of the Hegseths claimed to be a victim of domestic abuse. The judge also said that there was no determination by the court that there was probable cause to believe that one parent “has been physically abused or threatened with physical abuse by the other parent.”

It is still unclear whether the new allegations will sway any Republicans to oppose Hegseth, whose nomination was advanced behind closed doors Monday along party lines. He can afford to lose only three Republican votes given that Democrats have signaled they are ready to vote against him en masse. For now, it is the sister-in-law’s word against Hegseth’s, since a corroborating witness — who would likely have to be Samantha Hegseth — has not yet stepped forward.

Hegseth’s nomination had already been dogged by an allegation of sexual assault, and accusations of public intoxication and financial mismanagement. He paid a settlement to a woman who accused him of raping her in 2017. He denied the woman’s allegations and was never charged with a crime.

Danielle Hegseth’s sworn statement is the first time that a former member of Pete Hegseth’s family circle has publicly described personal conduct they argue renders him unfit to lead the Pentagon. Hegseth’s mother said in a 2018 email to him that he had mistreated women for years, but has since disavowed those sentiments.

Samantha Hegseth treated Danielle Hegseth as a confidante, according to people familiar with their relationship. She was married to Pete Hegseth’s brother Nathaniel from 2011 to 2019; Samantha and Pete Hegseth were married from 2010 to 2018.

During his confirmation hearing, Hegseth emphatically denied having physically harmed any of his ex-wives.

“Did you ever engage in any acts of physical violence against any of your wives?” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., asked Hegseth during his confirmation hearing last week.

“Senator, absolutely not,” Hegseth replied. When then asked twice if physical violence toward a spouse ought to disqualify a nominee, he demurred, again insisting on his innocence and calling Kaine’s question a hypothetical.

Hegseth described the other allegations as “anonymous smears.” Although he never admitted to specific ill behavior, he spoke emphatically about being a changed man.

“I’m not a perfect person, but redemption is real,” he told senators. He also credited his current wife, Jennifer Rauchet, with having “changed my life.”

Many of the allegations in Danielle Hegseth’s affidavit detailed episodes of Pete Hegseth’s apparent drunkenness, and in some, she said, he made racial statements she found offensive.

“He drunkenly yelled in my face one night in 2009,” she wrote, recalling that Pete Hegseth had become upset after she walked out of a room when he was telling a story “with a racial slant that bothered me.”

“He was very aggressive, in my face, dressed in his military uniform,” she added.

In 2013, she said, Pete Hegseth drank so much at a family dinner at a Minneapolis restaurant that afterward an Uber driver had to pull over on an interstate highway so he could vomit. At another bar that same year, she said, Hegseth danced drunk with a glass of gin and tonic in each hand, dropped the glasses on the dance floor and had to be dragged out of the bar.

She said that she recounted to the FBI another episode that occurred in 2009, but said she did not have firsthand knowledge of it. She said she was told that after a drill with the National Guard, Hegseth was found at a nearby strip club, drunk and in uniform, getting lap dances.

She said the person who told her about the episode said that was a violation of military rules. That person’s name was redacted in the affidavit obtained by the Times.

A spokesperson for Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who chairs the Armed Services Committee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. On Monday, before the affidavit was sent to the committee, Wicker said in an interview that he was aware that new allegations were being raised, and that “if they were substantiated and taken seriously, we’d look at them.”

A spokesperson for Sen. John Thune, R-R.S.D., the majority leader, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Democrats who reviewed Danielle Hegseth’s affidavit on Tuesday said they were stunned by the litany of allegations. Several of them said that the FBI had not done a thorough enough job.

“It’s clear that the FBI has not followed up on the leads that it’s been given and has rushed through a report that is incomplete,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told reporters Tuesday.

The FBI said a week ago that background checks focus on character and conduct. Once the bureau “has taken the requested investigative steps,” the statement said, its report is given to the transition team or the White House for officials to use as they see fit.

As the clients, presidential transition teams are often able to set the terms of such investigations, potentially including which witnesses were interviewed and which questions were asked. It is not clear what the transition team’s directions to the FBI were.

Maya C. Miller and Devlin Barrett contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Julie Tate contributed research.