Who's Harold?

The improv theater I’m involved with does shows every Saturday. The house teams (including mine, After School Special) perform on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays. The Executive Director’s two-prov team, Big Jabroni, performs on the 2nd Saturday. The Student Teams (including The Playground, which I coach) perform and host a ‘Community Jam’ on the last Saturday of the month. Usually that covers the entire month but sometimes we have 5 Saturdays, which means there isn’t regularly scheduled programming for the 4th weekend.

Well, it’s May 2026 and we don’t have a show for the night of the 23rd. We put out an open call for ideas and volunteers to produce the show, and I was selected.

My idea is not incredibly innovative, but it’s what we are doing - a Harold Night. Exciting! 🥳

What is a Harold?

The Harold is a long-form improv format that dates back to a group called The Committee in the late 60s and later adapted by Del Close and Charna Halpern at The iO in Chicago. More recently the form was championed by The Upright Citizens Brigade, and was covered extensively in their book Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual, which is a great book I recommend to any improviser.

The general form is 3 beats of 3 scenes each, with ‘Group Games’ after the 1st and 2nd beats. We commonly would refer to the structure as such:

The way it works is that in the first beat the scenes are disconnected from each other and premise, ‘game,’ and characters are extracted from the opening or otherwise established (a Harold can be done without a formal opening). In the second beat the game of each beat is really locked-in and heightened. In the third beat, ideally you have a single scene that combines the game and/or characters from the the A, B, and C games - sometimes this does take 2 scenes, however. The group games involve all of the ensemble and are typically just something short and funny involving physicality or a quick discussion leading to a button line.

Of course there are many different variations on this form and, like with all improv, the rules are more guidelines and can definitely be broken if done with intelligent intention for the interest of a better set.

Oh yeah, the name “Harold” apparently comes from a discussion after the first performance of the format:

On the way home in a Volkswagen bus, [The Committee] were discussing the performance, when one of them asked what they should call it. Allaudin (Bill) Mathieu (W.A. Mathieu) called out “Harold”, which was a joking reference to a line from A Hard Day’s Night where a reporter asks George Harrison what he calls his haircut and he answers “Arthur”.

I don’t know, that’s the story. Doesn’t seem like that great of a “joking reference” to me but I don’t really like the Beatles and I wasn’t around in 1967, so… Perhaps you had to be there. 🤷‍♂️

The Show

Right so the show itself. Three or four teams composed of various members of the SFI House and Student teams. Each will perform a Harold, ideally one with some sort of interesting variation, opening, or way to involve the audience. My job is to herd the cats - I mean organize the performers, get staff for FoH and tech, create and post social media collateral, and likely MC the night. Oh yeah and I will also be performing on one of the teams. This is my first time doing anything like this, so I am pretty nervous/excited. We will see how it goes! 🤞🏻