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Josh Schachter
Hi, everybody, and welcome to this episode of [Un]churned. I’m Josh Schachter, host of [Un]churned and founder and CEO of UpdateAI. Joining me today I’m incredibly excited about talking to Kelly Leonard. Kelly is the executive director of learning and applied improvisation at Second City in Chicago, which is like the improv and comedy royalty. And Kelly is also the author of a book that I read a couple years ago really inspired me. It’s called yes and how improvisation reverses No, but thinking and improves creativity and collaboration lessons from the second city. So a long title that probably wasn’t the I have

Kelly Leonard
a long title on the book as long title and the book things not my fault because HarperCollins made us do it.

Josh Schachter
Well, you know, clearly there. It’s for SEO purposes. I’m sure everybody is looking for, you know, all the longtail. So anybody who knows anything about improv about comedy about about Legendary comedians know is Second City, right? I mean, it is just the mainstay. The King of Comedy. For anybody who, who you know, has been kind of maybe sheltered or whatever. Tell us, tell us about yourself and tell us about second city to get things started.

Kelly Leonard
Sure. We are celebrating Second City’s birthday today. We were 63 years old, which means we started in 1959, December 16 1959. And we were the first theater of its kind. We do sketch comedy that we write through improvisation we do social satire. So it’s it’s a comedy club, but it’s also a theater where I remember the Actors Equity Association. Often when we’re talking to someone, maybe it was a tourist and it’s just heard and doesn’t know what it is. We say it’s kind of a cross between whose lines Whose Line Is It Anyway, and Saturday Night Live. But we predate Of course, both those things. So I was not alive when it started. I started at Second City in 1988. And it was my first gig out of college and I was a dishwasher. The other fun fact, the other guy who got hired with me that week was a guy named Jon Favreau, who went on to direct a few famous films, and we both had mullets and my wife has evidence of this. She has photographs were taken.

Josh Schachter
So you’re gonna go the direction that your wife also has a mullet. But no,

Kelly Leonard
no, no, decidedly not. And even then, so no, I so I’ve worked on the staff. And I’ve been working in the box office. And then I was the first director of sales at Second City, but in 1992, I got offered the job to produce at Second City. So I basically was in charge of hiring all the talent and overseeing the shows and coming up with new ideas and products and programs and that sort of thing. And I mean, my first cast included Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, I hired people like Jason Sudeikis. Keegan, Michael Key. Tina Fey, Amy Poehler. I mean, this I worked with Seth Meyers. So it was a real golden age at the second city.

Josh Schachter
I want to I want to pause for a second, because for the listeners, I want to promise you, we were going to talk about business, and we’re going to talk about customer relationships, customer success. You know, it’s not something maybe like very obviously, that you’d buy a book of Yes. And that is a business book, but it is a business. Absolutely, totally a business book. So I want to pause because my curiosity is just gonna get the best of me, I’m going to start like packing you with questions about these comedians. And then I want people to know, like the business stuff is coming.

Kelly Leonard
In really In short, the thing you need to know is, is about improvisation. So second city teachers, we have a huge school, here, where we teach all 1000s and 1000s of people how to improvise how to make something out of nothing, because none of us are born with a script. And that serves a variety of purposes. It creates incredibly gifted, funny comedians and actors. But what it also does is create incredible salespeople, incredible leaders, anyone who needs to communicate anyone who needs to navigate uncertainty, anyone who needs to be agile and resilient. That is, so so if you’re hearing those things, it’s like this is the superpower of the future of work is storytelling, and all the other things I talked about. So you know, the book, yes. And it wasn’t business book, it was taking lessons from what we’ve learned on stage, but also offstage. Because in the training center, it’s not just people who want to be on site live there are there too. But what we found was business people were showing up, and people with social anxiety, were showing up all kinds of people who were kind of looking at their life going, I think I can do this better, but I need some help. And a class and improvisation. If you haven’t done it, do it. Even if it’s not Second City go find someplace else. The thing is, it’s all about practicing our human beings skills. And one of the things that we know is we start we start like very creative. Babies and children’s are very creative. Then we go to school, and we often become less creative. Then we get into business and suddenly we’re less creative. And and it doesn’t need to be that way. And it shouldn’t be that way. When you know how to improvise and then you can improvise wisely. You will have an edge. It’s

Josh Schachter
So it actually sounds like you can use this as a way to, you know, reinvigorate your creative juices for your day job for your business. But also, if your business is stifling your creativity, you’re working at Fortune Company X, and there’s no way they’re like, it’s just it’s a, it’s a Yeah, it’s a lost deal. Yeah. Like, this can actually balance you to write even if you don’t, yeah,

Kelly Leonard
absolutely. Look, I work a lot with behavioral scientists and with neuroscientists so so after I stepped down from producing, after I wrote the book, yes, and basically shifted into working with all these academics, too, and mostly in business schools, sort of say, what’s the evidence behind this work? And we started a program called the second science project at the Booth School of Business. And Richard Thaler was running the decision for decision research at UFC. Thaler, of course, you know, won the Nobel Prize in economics. And he had a book called nudge. And when my wife and libera co Tata exec ed class with him, and introduced him to this idea of Yes, and so so for your listeners who might not know, the exercise, basically pairs up to people, and you’re pitching to the other person, personally, is pitching the Person B idea for a reunion party. And they do that for about a minute. And there’s just one roll person be asked to say no to every initiation in as many different ways as they want to. And then we have to switch roles in Person B pitches to person A, and they have to say yes, but to every initiation. And it’s funny, because when we do that, and we debrief half the people in the room thought was a better experience. And other half, it gets worse. And we’re like, well, it makes me may sound or feel better. But in fact, it’s just no with a top hat. That’s what you’re getting with a yes. But is your you’re not getting a yes, even though they’re actually yes. In that sense. It’s actually worse. Yes, I think so. And then the third part is where you Yes, and, and this is in Thalers vernacular a nudge, because what we know from behavioral economics, is that people’s default position is to do nothing or say no. And so having people practice this idea of Yes, and, and recognizing that you’re looking for the Yes, and inside any conversation, which also means you’re actually listening to people, but you’re, you’re listening for what is the opportunity, that’s a different way to walk through the world. That is not the way most of us exist in any given time. Danny Kahneman, who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, seminal book, behavioral science says we have a system one and system two brain. And you know, one of those is taking shortcuts. And that is the way we’ve mostly we have to live like that there’s too much noise coming in. But the system too, is is deliberative. And that’s where we are making decisions, and we’re mulling things over when you improvise, you are rapidly shifting between your system on your system to brain. So it’s really you’re practicing what psychologists called divergent thinking, which is at its roots, where creativity and innovation lies.

Josh Schachter
And it’s strenuous. At first. I mean, like, you feel like the cogs in motion. Yeah, like, yeah, you feel that strain. So So I think what you’re saying is where we’re wired to really look for

Kelly Leonard
pushback, yeah, we’re wired to be in our tribes, and look to either look at threats from and so you know, we’ve been running on the savanna, you know, far longer than we’ve been running for buses. And that is just an evolutionary thing that’s going to be around for a while. So behavioral scientists have, you know, discovered all these heuristics, the confirmation bias, and, you know, the, all these different sort of things that we do, and improvisation, broadly speaking. And then and then my nuclear inside these exercises are practicing ways of embodying ways to fight that by those biases, again, looking for a phrase I often use is we’re always looking to replace blame with curiosity. So I find it you know, I produced for over two decades here, and I’ve worked with Fortune 500 businesses, and we still do a Second City’s corporate division second city works. That’s what we do. We do learning and development programs for big companies. But we also create a lot of content, internal and external messaging. So because the comedy is very sticky, but the improv stuff is always the thing, especially today that we’re getting hired a lot for that they’re finding value. Because there’s so many generations in the workplace, and they don’t know how to talk to each other.

Josh Schachter
Yeah, like I mentioned earlier, this, this program is speaking to a lot of folks who talk to customers, day in day out. And we can go through a few scenarios, but one that comes to mind immediately. I had I had a script here questions, but we’re throwing the order out the window. I’m improvising. Let’s improvise. But one thing that came to mind is you’re constantly getting requests from customers, whether you’re in sales, or whether you’re in customer success, post sales. And, you know, oftentimes, maybe, maybe that requests like you can’t fulfill immediately, or there’s reasons behind the scenes that like, No, I could never get that done. We have a backlog or my manager would say this, whatever. And so how do you I don’t know how do people naturally Yes, and when the situation where you can’t? Yeah, when you can Okay,

Kelly Leonard
yeah, I actually have an answer for that. When we first started this project. At University of Chicago, a small group of our top sort of performer, teachers, directors, were meeting with a handful of professors. And these are sort of major figures in the field. And we took them through that, yes, and exercise. And they were like, This is great. We already have the evidence to that, that can prove why this works. And they asked the question, what do you do when you can’t Yes, and the person but you need to stay inside the conversation. And we didn’t know they didn’t know. But they went looked at research that existed and look around, we went back and sort of practice some stuff out on stage. And when we came together, we had an idea. And we took this idea, turned it into this exercise. And there’s a paper coming out next year. And basically, the the idea is thank you, because so when you are in a disagreement, or a situation where you can’t agree with the person, but you need this thing to keep going, you first thank them, which sets off the gratitude part of the brain, everyone loves that there’s no threat. And the because it’s crucial, you find something, anything, no matter how small that you can agree with, with what they said, Thank you, because you just brought something to my attention that I don’t know how to solve. And I’d like to figure out how to solve it. And it can be used in a variety of different ways. And I think this will resonate for anyone who lives in America right now. Yeah, you know, that we are all about the canceling, we are all about the you know, not listening and not talking. And guess what, that doesn’t get us anywhere, we have to all do this together. That’s that’s what the human experience is about. And I’m not saying you have to put up with, you know, unjust systems. I’m saying in many cases, we let low stakes, low level dumb stuff, get in the way of a potentially flourishing relationship, and be that with a friend, a partner, and a customer, people want to be in in delight, and they get that feeling they can get that feeling with a human relationship. So one of the things that’s always bugged me, especially in recent years, as I’ve worked with the business schools and with businesses, is in businesses, how much they don’t pay attention to what we know about human behavior like that. Like, why would you not use the science of human behavior, because you’re probably have human beings selling to other human beings. I’ll give you a good example. So Nick Eppley, who’s one of the scientists we work with, he wrote a fantastic book called Mind wise, and Nick studies, all the various ways that we don’t communicate well with each other. And he discovered through study that people generally speaking, are wary at self disclosure. They think other people don’t want to know the details or lives. In fact, it’s the opposite. And what happens when you disclose even some small stuff, you know, you have a dog, that sort of thing. And people will respond, they might have a cat, but they’d like pets. So then you have that sort of thing. It is actually deceptively simple to build relationships with your new clients and existing clients even more. So as you as you begin to self disclose a little bit more, in some interesting as you discover, discover what passion areas might crossover. And we actually we created an exercise to teach people this it’s called universal, unique, and we pair up people and we say, all right, you’re gonna the first person, you’re gonna say how people grocery shop, just universal. You get into a car, you go to the store, blah, blah, that five minute, then we have to say right? Now take a minute, think about how you personally grocery shop now over the next minute, tell them how you grocery shop. And then when we when we debrief this, everyone’s like, I learned so much. Because we’re all freaks, let’s admit that, that thing, and we all have tails. And they usually revolve around banal things like grocery shopping. I know I do. I’m very specific in terms of my patterns of where I go. And the fact that I always forget my bags and all that stuff. But those small moments can can be incredible opportunities to build relationships. And I had one of my very first bosses when I ran a video store in Wilmette, Illinois, said all business is relationships, and I do not think he was wrong.

Josh Schachter
No, I totally agree. I mean, I don’t know about you, I always I find it hard to build relationships with people that come across as very kind of closed and they’re unwilling to share personal information. I, I need that I need to nourish on that. And I sometimes overshare I’ll be gassed. Yeah, I mean, like I had a LinkedIn post yesterday. It’s funny, like, we were talking about, like, what’s your cheese? I don’t even know the origin of this. But anyway, those are I start over and I start telling joking around with somebody on LinkedIn about Alec, take bathroom breaks at night. That’s my biggest problem that I gotta solve is like, like getting up to go pee in the middle. I also though, like, and maybe it’s just me being you centric, right? Probably 80% but 20% of it is I’m actually trying to break down a certain barrier. And I’m actually trying to be my authentic self and, and but like there’s a method in that madness, right of opening myself up because I think that’s how they’re going to open up and I’ve I found that it’s worked, you know, it’s it’s, it’s I’ve been able to develop lots of relationships through that approach.

Kelly Leonard
I think that one of the things that’s true Through improvisational theatre is you’re creating a variety of characters in any given evening. And that mirror is something that exists in world because we are a variety of selves, there’s science to back this up. But I think it’s a mistake to think of like, there’s one authentic self, that’s you. And I think that also is bad when it’s like whatever works off in the home. So I was like, No, you have many cells, I have many cells at work, the way I talk to the CEO of the company, is very different than my friend Abby who’s in the office next to me, it just is and it needs to be. And that doesn’t mean it’s okay. Yeah, I’m not being not authentic to myself, I’m being highly authentic to myself and recognizing the nuances of the room I’m in and the audience I have. So one of the things that’s a huge value, when you get hired, it’s when you get hired to Second City usually go into one of three touring companies, kind of our AAA clubs, and you tour all across the country, performing colleges, clubs, performing arts centers, theaters, and you develop the skill of like, okay, it’s different in the south, right than it is in LA, or New York, and it’s different in the Midwest. And, and, and it’s gonna be different in this church than it is in this club. And so you, you make these subtle shifts, and that’s great, it’s great practice for them the way you’re going to then exist in your career, if you’re in the entertainment industry, because it’s gonna be different if you’re on TV, different if you’re on film, different if you’re on a stage, different if you’re in a writers room. And that’s not. And that’s no different than all the ways we work in business that I held many, although I’ve worked in Second City for 34 years, I’ve done so many different jobs here. And all of them required a shift in how I worked or the different ways I was working. And so it’s interesting, one of the things because we do so much work in the business schools were embedded in a class in Harvard. And the thing that they kind of figured out with us is like, Oh, you can actually bring exercises so everyone can practice this stuff. Because no one is practicing this stuff.

Josh Schachter
Let’s talk about the how do we make it a daily ritual? How do we how do we Yogi yoga? Is this this?

Kelly Leonard
If I had the answer, that I’d be a billionaire, but I talk about it all the time? Because it is we in any level of peak performance across any field. People practice. So pro athletes don’t scrimmage the whole time they work on their individual skills. They do batting practice, they do they throw the ball around, there’s drills in soccer that you do, they’re different same in tennis, yo, yo ma does his scales every day, every day, that’s the only way he can keep it that. And yet in business, we’re billions and billions of dollars on the line who is practicing anything listening skills? Are you practicing your your presentation, I mean, it’s like, you know, great lawyers practice, you know, what they’re gonna be saying in front of a jury and a judge. So I think that that, you know, if there are a way for businesses to carve out just sort of time for ideally, l&d would be about, okay, we should work on a different skill throughout any given week, and it doesn’t have I mean, these can be like 10 minute sessions of just so is it, here’s an example of a listening exercise that I think is very useful, which is we pair two people up, and they’re gonna have a conversation doesn’t matter what they’re talking about, talk about anything. But there’s one rule. And that is your response, the sentence you’re going to respond to, has to begin with the last word the other person spoke. So a couple things are happening there. One, it’s forcing you to listen to the end of a sentence, which we don’t do very often as human beings. And then also we have to be agile enough to take that word, and allow it to inform the thing that we’re talking about, which means we can’t pre plan when because when we pre plan, we aren’t listening. So that the

Josh Schachter
conversation has to be relevant if you can’t just like start completely different tangents. Yeah.

Kelly Leonard
Sometimes it’s hard to it’s hard when someone ends with orange to figure out how you’re going to start with orange and say something.

Josh Schachter
Can we try for 30 seconds? I mean, I’m not a pro. I’m I’ve kind of faltered at improv in my my attempts in the past, but let’s let’s see where to

Kelly Leonard
start. Start us off. Okay. I have that harder part for me. That’s why I’m having to do this.

Josh Schachter
Oh, even here. Now the pressures on I have to get the perfect control line. I’m talking to Kelly Leonard, like, pressures on okay. So I’m actually standing up right now my standing desk talking to you, Kelly and I’m looking at a poster of my favorite hockey team from my childhood childhood hockey team. Which team is it is the Hartford Whalers, which no longer

Kelly Leonard
exist, exist they do not I remember didn’t a very famous aging hockey player play for the whalers was that Gordie Howe How did you

Josh Schachter
know that would like to do that was

Kelly Leonard
perfect, but that was perfect. And it was like, like you could you did that which was fine. And it’s also like how absolutely Gordie Howe was, you know, right.

Josh Schachter
I know you went you went Yoda there for one of those lines.

Kelly Leonard
Yeah, sure. And but because I’m trying to, I’m trying to have it make sense. I’m going with the rules. And so is that important because it’s making sure I listen. And then I don’t want to put too much on my site. We visit like we do is we put so much pressure on ourselves to like, Oh, I gotta be perfect. I do that, when both of us are concerned with that we’re both paying attention to ourselves mostly. And because we’re worried about looking good. So when you can begin to shed that, that just opens up a whole other areas of communication. And also, it’s not just about words. So one thing I think we and I chatted first, I might have told you that the the origin story of all these exercises, these improv exercises that we get, that get taught at Second City actually started with a social worker by the name of Viola Spolin in the 20s and 30s, at Jane Addams Hull House on the south side of Chicago, and her job was to better assimilate the immigrant children who were coming into her care. So a lot of the early exercises were in gibberish or silence because the kids didn’t share language, but she still needed them to come together and find ways to communicate and empathize and play. And her son Paul sells was studying at the University of Chicago. He loves these exercises, these games he taught them to his friends, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, among others. They formed the first improvisational theater in America, the Compass Players in 1957. That morphed into the second city in 1959. So it wasn’t even Yes, they were theater games, but they were in the service of immigrant children communicating Yeah. And so So no surprise that then someone sort of figured it figured out that, wow, communication is so vital in work, and it’s so disastrous, so often, whether it’s the ill timed email or the you know, I saw, I think was the Washington Post is doing layoffs or whatever, and then they, the guy wouldn’t even take questions afterwards. People, it’s like, no, get snap. You gotta you gotta be present for your people, especially in dire times. That is just a like, what a business mistake. Yeah, what a terrible moment of leadership.

Josh Schachter
I want to I want to get back to some of the scenarios here. We talked about the, you know, how do you Yes, and when you can’t, and I love that, thank you, because I am bookmarking that moment right now, to come back to in my own experiences. Let’s talk about another one. When, you know, in a lot of companies, you’re you’re handing over the relationship. So yep, sales hands over to customer success, they hand over right for the right, like, so you’re always warming up new relationships, how do you suggest or their or their professional, your easy yet professional ways to get that rapport going quickly with a customer or with anybody? Well, I

Kelly Leonard
mean, the one earlier that I spoke about in terms of sharing small details, I think, is a good one, certainly. And that that that that does create sort of instant rapport or can Okay. I think the other thing, people talk about active listening, and that’s not wrong. But I think there’s there’s not everyone knows exactly what different kinds of active listening consists of. So one is, the science pretty much shows that if I’m just silent, and listening to you, that that is worse than if I’m at least making some noise of acknowledgment throughout. So I’ve been challenged by this by certain people, but I’m like, it’s in the literature. And it’s sort of like, No, you know, I’m here. I’m like, Ah, okay, yeah. And then and then stop. And I’m gonna stop you on this one and double click on what you just said, is this, how you said this. And then it’s very gratifying to be heard and seen as a human being. But then the other thing you’re doing is really trying to learn what’s important, this person. So I started a podcast four or five years ago, called Getting to Yes, and it’s on WGN radio in Chicago, and then also through second city. So I interview a scientist and author, a business leader every single week. And I’m reading about two books a week in a variety of fields. And one of the things that I’ve realized is been Life and Work changing for me is when I always read the book, I always read the full book, and I underline and I’m a voracious reader. So this is not hard for me. But But I didn’t do it like this before. So I read the whole book, I underline it, I go through the what I’ve underlined, and I type which notes I’m going to use for the podcast. Then I have the podcast. And what I am doing is creating what’s called a learning loop. So the way we learn best is when we can read the information, soak it up, and then spit it out back to the other person and then hear hear what they say. And then inevitably, and this happens a lot. I hit it off with a guest. And we are like, Hey, I’ve got a project idea. So I actually interviewed Wendy Smith, who wrote a fantastic book is getting a lot of attention called both and thinking about how navigating ambiguity. She’s a professor at the University of Delaware. Well, I just hosted her and three of her colleagues for two days at Second City watching shows, seeing workshops, coming up with ideas of things we could do, we could study and work on together. And it’s like, wow, that happened because we had this really informed half hour discussion. I did my work. I read her stuff, and I tried to think about it. And then it’s like, oh my god, is that all it took? Like, I like I wish I’d had this note at 26 When I became a producer at Second City, because I think I think you know I could have done way more amazing things. I If I’d known that Oh, of like, just read the book, find find ways of of, you know, back and forth. And you just, you add that to your arsenal that then you can bring into whatever the next conversation is.

Josh Schachter
Yeah. Any tips around dealing with somebody who’s who’s a big fetcher? There? They like to complain, there’s escalation, right? We all know that folks that talk to customers have to deal with, with complaints and escalations is anything to disarm? Or is that just go back to the Thank you? Because

Kelly Leonard
I don’t know. I mean, comedy is a superpower, which also means it can be used for evil. Yeah, that’s true, too. And I don’t want to suggest that people who don’t have the ability to use comedy don’t, I use it to defuse things all the time. And it’s very, and it’s very useful. And sometimes that’s finding a common enemy. So I think if you can get like, what’s the convention? And how do I get the spotlight off of me, or our company or something like that can be very effective, as well. I do not enjoy toxic people. And I would suggest that if if someone is toxic, you need to stay away from them. And then if you’re in the business of like, well, that’s my job, find another job. This is not healthy.

Josh Schachter
Well, that’s a good point, too, as well, ya know, and

Kelly Leonard
look, I get your I do lots of public speaking on lots of panels. And often somebody’s like, I agree with everything. You’re saying, but I got this boss, and they won’t do this, they won’t do that. And I’m like, quit, I don’t know what to tell you like, like you’re, it’s not going to get you’re not changing this human. And what we know is that people don’t leave companies, they leave bosses, right, that they don’t like. And what we also know is that you can have a business that has a bunch of bad bosses. But if you’re in the one team that has a good boss, you’re fine, you’re fine, because your day to day you’re so I so I have a great boss right now, I have the best boss I’ve ever had in my career at Second City. And this person listens to me values. What I say challenges me makes me understand what I’m actually responsible for. And there’s an there’s a high degree of trust that goes both both ways. And we check in on that, which is like, Are we are we still in this like good place. And it’s like, I work harder. I work smarter because of that relationship. And I’ve had mediocre bosses and has been okay. And that’s you know that that can be fine, too. But if there’s a note, I would give young Kelly it would have been, hey, when that real bad boss came along, you should have left. Now, I like that I’m still here. I’m glad I’m still here. But there were years in terms of, you know, my working life here where I was like, now that I was that was fairly miserable for a couple of years and mission suffer. Yeah, yeah. And then, and then understand that I have value outside of the brand that I’m associated with. And I think we all are, I think we all have a fear that we’re going to, we’re not going to find the thing or you know, like, the grass is always greener, I get all that. But now sometimes you just gotta get up, get in. And look younger generations understand that this, you know, we are no longer working in the place where, you know, my dad worked WGN radio and TV for 33 years. I’ve been here for 34 My wife’s been here for 36 that that is a rare thing now.

Josh Schachter
Yeah. How come you have no loyalty and your family to know? It’s terrible? Wow. Kelly, I want to I want to leave it leave it there. Mostly. I’m a huge advocate of improvisation. I want to thank you for for all the development you’ve done for the trade for the practice, because it has been legitimized you know, over the past decade or so. We’re getting there. Yeah, yeah, it’s not it’s not just fringe. And I know you’re I mean, through these conversations through your literature through those the courses at business schools and everything. You’re continuing to progress that so thank you. I do advocate that everybody in the business world do you talk to customers? Do you talk to colleagues? Try like find your local improv class and give it a try? I did. And, and it was helpful. There really was. i We didn’t start this week, because we just kind of got got quickly going, but I always have this like unsure and we call it EPS podcast, colon churn. This is a raw authentic Unturned opener. I have some questions for you, too. That’s how I actually opened up the conversation. That’s how I open the relationship. Right? But I want to go back to a couple of them. Let’s do it. You’ve worked with so many amazing comedians, and so many of my favorites, probably asked this question 100 times, you probably don’t have an answer for it. Like who was the best who was the most impressive improviser comedian that you’ve ever come across worked with?

Kelly Leonard
I don’t think anyone would disagree with me because most people don’t know his name. But his name is TJ jacobowsky. You might know him as one of the Sonic guys. So sorry, one of the guys Sonic the sonic burger commercial spa. Okay, so there’s there’s two guys, but one is Peter gross, also good improviser. And the other guy is TJ Jackubowski, who is local Chicago guy mazing. He’s part of a very famous in its field improv duo called TJ and Dave. Dave has crazy also an excellent excellent improviser and just just someone who is and I remember he was a receptionist here. And when you worked on staff, you could take free improv classes, like his first improv class. someone’s like, I’m seeing the greatest improviser I’ve ever seen. And that just sort of bore out. So people like Tina Fey, and Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell all Adam McKay all great. They’ve all worked with TJ would say the same thing. So that’s my God.