Cold Approaching Is Basically Improv Comedy

In praise of the noble goldfish

Improv comedy is a hard skill. Most of the reason it’s hard is because it forces you to turn off the part of your brain that wants to achieve outcomes. If you go into an improv skit with a plan, a set of believes and desires about how things are likely to play out, then you will fail catastrophically.

The reason for this is straightforward: when you say a thing, your improv comedy partner could say any number of things in response and the chances are vanishingly low that they will be what you had built in your imagination. So now you are forced to either ditch the thing in your imagination (fine) or, alternatively, you can attempt to steer the interaction back to what you were hoping for it to be. This last approach— grasping, inflexible— results in sketches where the participants are awkwardly talking past each other instead of really engaging in a shared, improvised universe.

That means skill in improv comedy involves adopting the demeanor of the noble goldfish: no knowledge of the future, no ability to plan, merely seeing what is currently happening and reacting to it.

a handsome beast

There was a girl in my improv comedy class— call her Ashley— who was quite bad at improv comedy. Most of her problem, looking back, was that she would come into a situation with a really specific and concrete idea of what the situation was in the privacy of her own head (“a manager and her subordinate in an ice cream truck”). No matter what her partner said (“I’m having a tough time wrangling this tiger!”) she would attempt to enforce her original understanding of the situation (“It’s so funny you would say that when we are in an ice cream truck!”) or, when she couldn’t, she would become paralyzed.

She was also transparently very nervous, I think because she could tell that something about her approach wasn’t working and she didn’t know what.

Anyway I think this was just cold-approaching in microcosm? It’s hard to go in without a game plan; for some neurotypes (of which I am one) it feels deeply unnatural.

Cold-Approaching Was In Retrospect Kind Of Like That

I sucked at cold approaching— trying to flirt with random women in public places— back when I was in the Attractive Man dating coach program. So many approaches, so few numbers.

Partly this was because the structure of cold approaching does actually mandate a path for the conversation: you had a bunch of beats you were expected to quickly hit to ensure the girl knew you (a) were a sane person (b) not selling her anything and (c) not going to consume an unbounded amount of her time. I think this pushed guys (like myself) into an attitude where they were flowcharting their conversations.

I was grasping at outcomes, and I think this grasping quality both made the conversations miserable and— separately— unsuccessful.

My D&D Characters Have More Rizz Than I Do Apparently

We did a lot of different weird things with cold approach when I was in The Attractive Man.

One of them was called the “rejection approach”: you were to do something that was transparently silly and stupid while still clearly hitting on someone and then allow her to reject you. I think this was one of TAM’s more-effective exercises; I’m not sure what the instructors perceived as the goal of it (they took a somewhat guru-esque stance of “I’m going to tell you what to do without telling you why”) but on reflection I think the point was to push us out of the mode where we’re grasping at outcomes.

Sometimes it worked.

My specific assignment was to do an approach with a silly accent with some random girl on the street. So I decided to be the character Ellis from Left 4 Dead 2. I have a pretty good model of who Ellis is— good natured, sorta dim, very enthusiastic, very positive, strong Appalachian accent, sometimes offensive but always unintentionally and never mean about it.

Anyway the approach I did as Ellis was one where I said a bunch of things that included “YOUR ACCENT IS FUNNY, WHERE ARE YOU FROM” and “WELL I NEVER REALLY HEARD OF THAT PLACE BUT IT SOUNDS NICE” and at some point I asked for her number and she said “sure!” and I remember standing there in stunned silence because I had not prepared for that outcome. (After a few seconds she said “are you going to get out your phone?”)

And then there was another one where I was pretending to be Nikolai, a slow-spoken but well-read Russian D&D character I played that sounds kinda like a Bond villain. I would introduce myself with “Good eff-tehr-nuhn, I am thinking you are ext-rhem-lee attrac-teef young woman yes, am con-sid-ehr-ing you fohr a love-ehr” (real actual quote) and their eyes would light up and they were way more into it than I would have expected?

Nikolai got numbers. Nikolai was the man.

Anyway, D&D-Character-Aaron was far more effective than Standard-Aaron at getting numbers from random strangers on the street basically irrespective of what character I was playing. (Unfortunately this is not practical long-term since this approach commits me to adopting a fake accent forever.)

And this makes a certain amount of sense: “pretend to be this D&D/video game character” is not a guiding principle that involves grasping at outcomes. It is instead a process goal that I have completed many times. The only difference between D&D games and here is that here I am pretending to be this character who is hitting on this specific girl at this specific time.

Which meant there was no nervousness. The Ellis approach was one I was doing with Lynn (the dating coach); she noted that in contrast to other approaches I had done with the Ellis approach I didn’t have any of the anxious tells that I ordinarily brought in with me.

Which tracks, honestly.

Lynn’s explanation was different from mine: that I was buffered from the meaning of rejection because I wasn’t getting rejected, me-playing-a-character was. Basic self-handicapping theory, I suppose. But I think this was false: the feeling of “I am going to just say whatever this character would say in this situation” actually felt like a D&D game or an improv sketch instead of the frenetic calculation I was used to doing during cold approaches. For the engineers in the audience, “do whatever Ellis would do” is an O(1) calculation; “do what will make this hot girl like me” is O(????). It felt easier in a way that seemed totally disconnected from felt stakes.

Yeah Sorry It’s Buddhism

Okay so. The Buddhists have two words for what I’ve been referring to as “grasping.”

The first is tanha— craving, literally “thirst.” It’s the impulse to pull toward or away; the bare desire, the want. Probably not much to be done about this.

The second is upadana— grasping or clinging. It’s about latching onto the object of thirst and making it a project. This one we might be able to do something about.

In improv comedy, the grasping manifests as “I need to make this scene go well.” This is a structurally doomed goal (you’re only one of the players in the scene) and it recruits your planning faculties, which makes you non-goldfish. The move back to goldfish is “I cannot make this scene go well, my job is to yes-and and react to what is actually being provided, and the scene will go however it goes. The scene going well is not my business.”

I Think Maybe Rumination-Focused Exposure Therapy Is Just Applied Buddhism?

There’s a clinician with a blog I really like: probably the flagship essay is “Rumination-Focused ERP: Turning Exposure On Its Head” (and its sibling essay, How To Stop Ruminating.) His whole deal (which I partly used as inspiration for Abandon Hope) is that he thinks exposure therapy should not be stressful in anxiety or OCD-spectrum disorders; because (if his theory is correct) the thing causing the stress is the same compulsive cognition that the patient is trying to eliminate.

The core insight being that anxiety in general is compulsive problem-solving. The goal isn’t to stop whatever the problem is from entering your mind; your goal is merely to stop trying to solve whatever this problem is.

Meta-Outcome-Goals Vs Outcome Goals

Looking back, while cold approaching women in the daytime (not bars or clubs), I received numbers on four occasions: playing silly characters got me three of them, and the fourth was on a “warm-up” approach where I wasn’t even expected to go for a number. I was just trying to chat with someone with zero agenda; I think it was about a nearby bubble tea place. It was a nothing conversation. At some point I noticed we were vibing and said “hey, you seem cool, can I have your number” and she was like “for sure!”

“Adopt this character” is one form of suppressing grasping; “chat with this person with no romantic expectations” is another. So the question becomes: how do you train cold approach without accidentally reinforcing grasping behavior?

Well. I, uh, don’t know. But I suspect the answer routes through “speak to a very large number of people that you don’t know while having no agenda.” Which implies these people will be both men and women with almost complete disregard to how attractive you find them. The meta-goal is to install the script “I am going to just gonna goldfish this interaction” as your habitual stance toward cold approaching.

Does this work? Lol idk I fucking hate cold approaching. But, you know, food for thought.

Probably I need to read more about Buddhism.