Come Out Swingin' With Conor Allen
“Come Out Swingin’”
Conor Allen, improv savant and native Oaklander, was my Level 4 teacher at All Out Comedy Theater and is also the coach of an indie improv troupe I perform with, Oakland Dogwater District.
Every other Wednesday, Conor coaches us, usually in a living room or in a basement in a teammate’s house. Recently, we’ve been running JTS Browns, but we used to hit the monoscene with frequency. All the same, we had a spat of shows this past summer, and at the end of practice before our first show in the run, Conor advised us in an off-hand sort of way. His hands tucked into the pockets of his hoody, he offered up: “Come out swingin’,” his usual smile shining out of his bewhiskered face. His advice was met with a tizzy of excitement from the group, and it stuck with me.
A couple thangs come to mind when I think about Conor’s colorful phrase. In my mind’s eye, I see a stocky baseball player looking at his fresh batting job, a dinger way off over the fences, legs splayed in a batter’s lunge across home plate, with batter’s gloves and helmet on.
I also consider a muscular stray dog I once observed in the streets of Tijuana with an impressive set of low hanging testes the size of the ripest tomatoes, boppig down the boulevard. (At the time, I was an unworldly 10th grader, and my virginal eyes hardly had the language to fit the image, until a fellow student referenced the dog’s huge balones in the moments that followed the great hound’s journey past our van. Then I knew, and the memory would prove indelible ever after.)
What I love about this phrase “Come out swingin’” is the tautology implied. If we take the Dinger Factory image, a big swing suggests a tight grip on the bat, and of course a focus like a vise on the pitcher’s incoming ball. There’s a looseness in the swing, but a rigidity in the lead-up to it.
Swingin’ in improv seems to connote the peace in or the trust of the unknown, under the name of what is natural. That dog’s tender bad boys were first and foremost following the motions of the dog’s every whim– that dog looked supremely confident that his balls would follow him to the very ends of the earth. I’m no expert–not then, nor now– but I like to think that I know what I know.
Come out swingin’, in short, refers to a confidence in the process, in the game of improv, that it will always work out and that there needs to be some tension in order to swing for the fences.
Thusly, I conclude. I hope we can all “come out swingin’” on every improv stage we find ourselves.