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.

The military ties of the man who carried out an attack in New Orleans on New Year's and another who died in an explosion in Las Vegas the same day highlight the increased role of people with military experience in ideologically driven attacks, especially those that seek mass casualties.

In New Orleans, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a veteran of the U.S. Army, was killed by police after a deadly rampage in a pickup truck that left 14 others dead and injured dozens more. It's being investigated as an act of terrorism inspired by the Islamic State group.

In Las Vegas, officials say Matthew Livelsberger, an active duty member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, shot himself in the head in a Tesla Cybertruck packed with firework mortars and camp fuel canisters, shortly before it exploded outside the entrance of the Trump International Hotel, injuring seven people. On Friday, investigators said Livelsberger wrote that the explosion was meant to serve as a ''wake up call'' and that the country was ''terminally ill and headed toward collapse.''

Service members and veterans who radicalize make up a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the millions and millions who have honorably served their country. But an Associated Press investigation published last year found that radicalization among both veterans and active duty service members was on the rise and that hundreds of people with military backgrounds had been arrested for extremist crimes since 2017. The AP found that extremist plots they were involved in during that period had killed or injured nearly 100 people.

The AP also found multiple issues with the Pentagon's efforts to address extremism in the ranks, including that there is still no force-wide system to track it, and that a cornerstone report on the issue contained old data, misleading analyses and ignored evidence of the problem.

Since 2017, both veterans and active duty service members radicalized at a faster rate than people without military backgrounds, according to data from terrorism researchers at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland. Less than 1% of the adult population is currently serving in the U.S. military, but active duty military members make up a disproportionate 3.2% of the extremist cases START researchers found between 2017 and 2022.

While the number of people with military backgrounds involved in violent extremist plots remains small, the participation of active military and veterans gave extremist plots more potential for mass injury or death, according to data collected and analyzed by the AP and START.

More than 480 people with a military background were accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — 18% of those arrested for the attack as of late last year, according to START. The data tracked individuals with military backgrounds, most of whom were veterans, involved in plans to kill, injure or inflict damage for political, social, economic or religious goals.

The AP's analysis found that plots involving people with military backgrounds were more likely to involve mass casualties, weapons training or firearms than plots that didn't include someone with a military background. This held true whether or not the plots were carried out.

The jihadist ideology of the Islamic State group apparently connected to the New Orleans attack would make it an outlier in the motivations of previous attacks involving people with military backgrounds. Only around 9% of such extremists with military backgrounds subscribed to jihadist ideologies, START researchers found. More than 80% identified with far-right, anti-government or white supremacist ideologies, with the rest split among far-left or other motivations.

Still, there have been a number of significant attacks motivated by the Islamic State and jihadist ideology in which the attackers had U.S. military backgrounds. In 2017, a U.S. Army National Guard veteran who'd served in Iraq killed five people in a mass shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport in Florida after radicalizing via jihadist message boards and vowing support for the Islamic State. In 2009, an Army psychiatrist and officer opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, and killed 13 people, wounding dozens more. The shooter had been in contact with a known al-Qaida operative prior to the shooting.

In the shadow of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — led in part by veterans — law enforcement officials said the threat from domestic violent extremists was one of the most persistent and pressing terror threats to the United States. The Pentagon has said it is ''committed to understanding the root causes of extremism and ensuring such behavior is promptly and appropriately addressed and reported to the proper authorities.''

Kristofer Goldsmith, an Army veteran and CEO of Task Force Butler Institute, which trains veterans to research and counter extremism, said the problem of violent extremism in the military cuts across ideological lines. Still, he said, while the Biden administration tried to put in place efforts to address it, Republicans in Congress opposed them for political reasons.

''They threw, you know, every roadblock that they could in saying that all veterans are being called extremists by the Biden administration,'' Goldsmith said. ''And now we're in a situation where we're four years behind where we could have been.''

During their long military careers, both Jabbar and Livelsberger served time at the U.S. Army base formerly known as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, one of the nation's largest military bases. One of the officials who spoke to the AP said there is no overlap in their assignments at the base, now called Fort Liberty.

Goldsmith said he is concerned that the incoming Trump administration will focus on the New Orleans attack and ISIS and ignore that most deadly attacks in the United States in recent history have come from the far right, particularly if Trump's nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is confirmed.

Hegseth has justified the medieval Crusades that pitted Christians against Muslims, criticized the Pentagon's efforts to address extremism in the ranks and ahead of Joe Biden's inauguration in the weeks after the Jan. 6 attack was himself flagged by a fellow National Guard member as a possible ''insider threat.''

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AP reporter Tara Copp contributed from Washington, D.C.

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Contact AP's global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org