The Harold
Earl William Muntz was the original crazy car salesman, running ads that highlighted how crazy it was for Madman Muntz to sell cars for so cheap. He would run radio ads where he threatened to destroy a car with a sledgehammer if it didn’t sell that day. He appeared in television spots wearing pink pajamas and a Napoleon hat, complaining that his wife wouldn’t let him give all his merchandise away for free.
As soon as it became clear to Muntz that televisions were going to be the next must-have, he moved into the market.
At the time, televisions were obscenely expensive and profligately over-engineered. Designed to operate far from the urban centers in which the television stations were located, they were labor intensive to produce, containing many expensive components that served no purpose other than to amplify and refine faint signals.
Muntz’s insight was simple and brilliant. By removing all the parts that boosted weak signals, he could make a television that worked fine in metropolitan areas (where the towers transmitting the television signals were located).
After removing every part he knew to be unnecessary, he went further. He systematically removed every other component, one at a time.
If he lost the picture, he put the part back in.
If the television still worked, he kept that part out.
The Harold is the lingua franca of long-form improvisers. You take eight complete strangers trained in The Harold, throw them on a stage, give them a suggestion, and you’ll get something watchable. Phenomenal? Yes, it really is a phenomenon in need of attention.
Even when the players have different training, The Harold allows them to communicate with each other and the audience.
The flexibility in the form allows different goals to be achieved simultaneously: this person wants to work on matching energies; these players are into analytical game; here we have two people that are killing it with characters. These goals can move, unspoken, from player to player. If I came into this group looking to bone up on my object-work, only to notice that the person with the best object-work in my ensemble is also consistently playing characters… now I’m interested in characters.
The Harold, with scenes that march independently through time and space, merges both the players involved and the scenes they create into a coherent and robust force.
Spanning 43.3 meters (nearly half a football field), the Pantheon in Rome has the largest un-reinforced dome in the world. The dome is made of concrete, a substance so common in the contemporary world that it is shocking to learn that it was used by the ancients… and then forgotten.
Concrete is composed of a variety of substances, bound together by some type of cement. You can put rocks, sand, glass, steel, sawdust, slag, plastic fibers… and mix it with cement and you get a material that has some great properties:
- It can be poured. You can build a mold of any shape and turn it into stone.
- It's waterproof. There are structures built by the Romans that reveal themselves at low tide (Roman cement could set underwater).
- The components can be easily transported. The rigmarole with the ropes and the ramps that we associate with Ramses and the Rapu Nui is unnecessary.
Substitutes for cement existed, but have fatal flaws like: needing to be kept dry (lime, clay); a tendency to drip or catch on fire (pitch, tar, bitumen); or being delicious to bugs (animal glue).
These drawbacks make it hard to believe that the recipe for cement was lost. Only when we remember that most training in the Roman world was on-the-job (even state-craft) can we understand how such a daft oversight could occur.
Imagine you are a mason. You learned from your father, who learned from his father, who learned from his uncle… how to make Roman cement. You have your son tag along, giving him decreasingly menial tasks to perform. There’s no need to sit him down and tell him everything that will be important, all that he needs to know is going to come up in the course of his apprenticeship.
Except… the emperors have become so obsessed with being emperors that they’ve forgotten about the empire, and haven’t commissioned anything built out of concrete in a generation or four.
Whoops.
As a result of this loss, great works were even more of a pain in the ass. It took generations for the domesticated thralls of the neutered empire to carve the eminent thrones that define Christendom’s cities; the Pantheon was whipped up in a she-wolf’s lifetime.
Madman Muntz made a fortune selling cheap, stream-lined televisions that worked perfectly well in urban areas. Competitors soon began paring down their sets to reap enormous profits. Televisions became a fixture in most American homes.
Muntz didn’t stop there. A ceaseless innovator, he used his profits to hire teams of engineers to design and produce the first car stereos, the 4-track, rear-projection televisions…
If he thought his employees were over-designing the new devices, he would walk around carrying a pair of wire-cutters, removing parts at random.
Repeating the process, known now as “Munzting”, that had made him a success.
It is easy to forget that The Harold had to be built. The ubiquity of The Harold in long-form renders it innocuous. It stands out when a theater doesn’t have anything oriented towards The Harold; a home without a television.
The designers of The Harold, like those enterprising electrical engineers crafting a system for receiving images, created a mechanism that can amplify and refine what is being broadcast by the players. The Harold can change channels, so cartoons, game-shows, and soap-operas can be broadcast simultaneously.
The Harold is so robust because it is a top-notch television. The Harold has parts that can pick up the faintest signals and turn them into something watchable. When the signals are strong enough, a lot of the components that we think we need for a functional set turn out to be superfluous or redundant. They can be removed intentionally or haphazardly; sometimes we lose the picture, but if the thing still works…
Cement allows for us to build in ways that are otherwise impossible. With cement, you gain a way to transfer advantages of one skill-set to another. A carpenter’s abilities can be cast in stone, a mason’s slow and careful work can be performed with a pick-ax by someone with only one eye.
- Carving stone takes a lot of skill and a lot of time. Natural variations in the stone mean that even a highly skilled mason will from time to time ruin a work-piece by cracking it.
- Concrete can be poured into a mold. A carpenter, working with wood (easier to carve and lighter to transport than stone), can build a form that will become stone after concrete is poured in.
- The materials for concrete can be mined by unskilled slaves (in the Roman world, skilled slaves would be domestic servants; literate slaves served as secretaries). The Romans, ever practical, would use a red-hot iron rod to ruin a mine-slave’s eye: anyone with one eye trying to leave a mining camp was immediately recognized as a slave.
Roman cement allowed the efforts of the skilled and unskilled, brute-forced laborers and voluntary artisans, to be bonded together to make incredible structures.
The Harold serves long-form players well, able to pick up even the faintest signals and amplify them into something watchable. A contemporary long-form improviser needs to know what some of the knobs do, understand when it’s time to change the channel, learn that even the smallest adjustment to the antenna can completely change the picture.
An important breakthrough for players and teams is to discover when and which parts can be removed: Wait… the scenes are taking place in a subway car? We won’t need a sweep-edit, we can just have characters enter and exit as needed.
When we start with something functional it’s easier to gauge the effect of removing parts at random. Building the first functional televisions took teams of geniuses backed by significant resources. The components they used to build those televisions ended up being used in other devices, the skills we learn when doing The Harold serve us well in other long-form structures.
The Harold has been essential for building contemporary long-form improvisation. By allowing us to take a variety of skill-levels and styles of play and cement them together, The Harold has ensured that individuals, teams, troupes, theaters, communities, and entire ecosystems of ideas have steadily grown and flourished.
Cathedrals were built without cement. Each block was carefully cut, labelled, and then hoisted into place while the arches and vaults were painstakingly carved. It often took more than a century. Hundreds of skilled masons worked on a cathedral, very few saw the results of their life’s work.
Long-form improv would never work that way. Players honing skills for scenes they would never get to play? No. We need some sort of cement, and so long as we want to keep building players, theaters, and communities… we need The Harold.
Those parts Muntz removed did have a function, they just weren’t needed in the urban centers where he sold them. I live in a city where thousands of the most talented people on the planet have moved to perform. There are three (and counting) long-form theaters with mature long-form programs. There are enough players with enough long-form experience that you can remove whatever you want from The Harold and get a solid show.
What about far from the cities rich in the raw materials of long-form? I did my first Harold in a dorm room with two other people and an open copy of Truth in Comedy for reference. We were about as far from the source as possible. Three players with different styles and goals, bonded together into something stronger. The thing worked, and we got something watchable. We had all the parts we needed.
We had The Harold.
