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.

About 4½ years after the police killing of George Floyd triggered state and federal investigations and protests worldwide, Minneapolis officials have reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice outlining sweeping reforms to address discriminatory policing.

The Minneapolis City Council discussed the consent decree in a closed-door session for nearly seven hours Monday before emerging to vote 12-0 to approve it. (Council Member Michael Rainville inadvertently missed the vote.)

The 170-page document details changes the Minneapolis Police Department must take in the coming years under the supervision of a federal judge, including regulating how police interact with suspects; adopting a new disciplinary scale; following through on investigations into serious misconduct even if an officer leaves the department; requiring that the chief act on discipline recommendations within 60 days; and limiting off-duty work.

The consent decree — a legally binding agreement enforced by an independent monitor — lays out how the Minneapolis Police Department will reform its training, discipline and policies to address systemic problems laid out by the DOJ in 2023. U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at the time that those problems “made what happened to George Floyd possible.”

The DOJ found Minneapolis police used excessive and unjustified deadly force; routinely discriminated against Black and Native American people; violated reporters’ and protesters’ free speech rights; and discriminated against people with behavioral health disabilities.

The two sides now race to get a judge to sign off on the the agreement, filed late Monday afternoon in federal court, before President-elect Donald Trump takes office Jan. 20. Trump’s administration was hostile to such agreements during his first term, scaling them back and calling them a “war on police.” Trump’s re-election this fall put Minneapolis in a race against the clock because formal talks with the feds didn’t begin until nearly a year after the DOJ reported its findings in June 2023.

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, who traveled to Minneapolis to announce the agreement Monday, said the DOJ “swiftly got to the table” to negotiate with the city.

“It was important that we get it right. We owe that to people here in Minneapolis. This was not a race to the finish line,” she said.

Clarke was asked multiple times whether the Trump administration could derail the agreement, but she declined to speculate.

“I can’t predict the future,” she said. “What I can tell you is that the findings we identified in Minneapolis are severe. These are real issues that impact people’s lives. The community wants reform. The city wants reform, the police department wants reform, and the Justice Department stands here today as a full partner in the effort of achieving reform and transformation for this community.”

Mayor Jacob Frey said “change is afoot” in Minneapolis.

“It’s a good agreement, and at the same time, I want to be honest with every resident throughout our city: It is not a panacea. There aren’t any shortcuts, and success is not guaranteed.”

Similar oversight agreements have been instituted in other U.S. cities, such as Baltimore, Cleveland and New Orleans, often after high-profile police killings, but this marks just the second consent decree during President Joe Biden’s administration — despite its launching of a dozen federal investigations into police departments nationwide.

Council Member Robin Wonsley said in an email to her constituents that she has no faith that the Trump administration will be a “serious partner” in supporting implementation of the consent decree.

She noted Minneapolis is already 18 months into a similar court-enforceable agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights it signed in 2023, after the state did its own investigation into MPD. Some of the reforms dictated in the federal agreement are already under way as a result of the state agreement. Both the state and federal agreements call for the same outside group — Effective Law Enforcement for All — to monitor the city’s progress.

Police Chief Brian O’Hara, who was hired two years ago in part because he helped implement a consent decree in Newark, N.J., said the department has “turned a corner.”

“We are not going to just comply with its terms, but we will exceed expectations, and we will make change real for people on the street.”

Lt. Sherral Schmidt, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, told the Star Tribune her union had not yet seen a copy of the consent decree and was not involved in negotiating its terms.

Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, criticized the fact that the decree wasn’t made public before Monday’s vote. “I’m glad they voted in favor of it, but it would surely be nice to know what they actually voted in favor of and I think it was pretty wrong for them not to share that with the community,” she said.

The police force has long been a lightning rod in Minneapolis.

Floyd’s killing sparked a brief movement to defund the police, with nine council members publicly vowing to “begin the process of ending” the police department 13 days after Floyd’s death.

It never happened: Minneapolis voters rejected a 2021 ballot measure that would have replaced the police department with a new kind of public safety agency. And they re-elected Frey, who opposed defunding the police.

Police department funding dipped in 2021 but has steadily increased since then, to a record $229 million this year, which will cover historic pay raises and dozens of new positions to carry out reforms.

Meanwhile, about 500 officers have left the department, with many retiring and claiming disability from post-traumatic stress disorder after the protests and riots that followed Floyd’s murder.

“We have traveled a very, very long and challenging journey,” Council President Elliott Payne said after the vote. “This is marking the end of the beginning on a very long road.”