Chris Duffy

Now we can talk a little bit about your teaching experience.

After you graduated college, you moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began teaching fifth graders in an inner-city Boston elementary school.

Why?

The short answer is my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, had got a job in Boston.

And I thought, well, if I'm going to teach, I can teach anywhere.

So let me apply for every job I could.

And this was the one that I got.

But the bigger reason of why I wanted to teach fifth graders and why I wanted to teach at all is I had done some volunteering like after school programs and just really liked that age group and felt like.

Similar to the improv, there was this nature of play with elementary school students where you could, you know, you could go into a character or make-believe thing and they would go along with you.

And fifth grade was nice for me because it was kind of like the end of that.

So they were at the most mature where they would still go along with you and playing imagination games or make-believe.

And actually like halfway through the year, you would feel the switch into like these are middle schoolers now.

Interesting.

I read that you feel as if everyone has the potential to be funny, everyone has the potential to be creative, but something does happen in that fifth grade year that does move you into perhaps more practical thinking.

Were you trying to stave that off and keep them as creative and as engaged in creativity? humor as possible

definitely for them and myself i mean partly it's you know you are you become what you're surrounded by and i was i want to be surrounded by that kind of energy there are some studies that i've read that say that like fifth grade for many people is kind of the peak of totally uninhibited creativity and that that's partly because we we become more social creatures right like middle school and high school are so much about where do i fit into the group and how do i manage social dynamics and a lot of that is really painful and awkward but some of it is just necessary for living in a society.

And before that, kids are less aware of those dynamics.

And so they're so creative because they have no thought of what are other people going to think of this idea.

And that's something that I really want in myself is as much of that as possible.

How do I forget about what other people think? What do I think? And what's the most fun?

You were also teaching adults improv comedy at a local theater on the weekends, and you described the experience in this way.

This was a group of retired folks, graduate students, and semi-successful business people who were paying money to spend their Saturday mornings in an unventilated basement with me.

And most of the exercises that we were doing together were to get them to let go of the self-critical part of their brain, to release the idea that there was a right answer to find, and to instead be more comfortable with their honest, creative, idiosyncratic thoughts.

Chris, how do you go about doing that?

OK, this is I actually want to do it with you.