I’m no funnier, but improv comedy somehow made me a better traveller

My wife thinks I’m funny, which is about as close to a joke as I get these days. Unless, of course, you consider my bank account, which is hilarious to everyone but me.

This is all to say that while my years of improv comedy did nothing to sharpen my sense of humour, they did wonders for me as an open-minded traveller, and it all comes down to this golden rule.

Yes, and …

The cornerstone of any good performance, ‘yes, and …’ is about more than accepting the offer, as it’s known in the parlance. It’s about creating a scene where there are no closed doors and no dead ends.

Although it’s been a long time since I’ve done any actual improv comedy, you’d be amazed at how much this rule has echoed through my travels, where invitations are accepted and going off script is all part of my poorly laid plans.

To get the obvious out of the way, if you say yes to everything, you’re likely to end up wearing fluffy handcuffs in a Hiroshima hostess bar at two o’clock in the morning. And while this might sound like fun to some (it was), the bill that you get at the end of the night is less amusing.

Think of “yes” as a form of acceptance, not literally saying yes to every tout who tries to sell you something on the beach. The latter is wildly impractical, given that there are only so many pairs of fake RayBans one can fit in their backpack. It’s more about being open to whatever a trip throws at you, be it an invitation, an opportunity or a chance to deviate from the expectations of your travels.

Let’s use my following morning in Hiroshima as an example. I accepted that yes, I was far too hungover to drag myself to the Peace Memorial, and I decided to make amends for this by coming back and spending a whole month in the city, which turned out to be one of the best months of my life.

Or it could be my trip to Myanmar, where my friend was tasked with booking our domestic flights. Everything was fine, he assured us. He had it under control, until he finally got around to booking the flights and they were full. It would have been easy to cancel my friendship with him, but instead, we went on Facebook, found a dude with a van, and paid him $1000 to drive us around the country for two weeks.

This definitely wasn’t in our script but I’ll be damned if it didn’t heighten the scene, and make our trip look so much better on the stage.

This is what makes the “and …” so important. It’s how you pursue the unexpected and transform the mundane into the magical. It’s easy to think of the 15th hour into what was supposed to be an eight-hour bus ride as torture. It’s a lot harder to treat that torture as an opportunity to befriend fellow passengers, accepting that even the best-laid plans are no match for a bus timetable in Laos.

I’m not saying that you should start watching reruns of Whose Line Is It Anyway? to make yourself a better traveller, although there are worse ways to spend an afternoon. I’m saying that when you accept your role as a player in this performance we call travel, then you become more than just a passenger on a trip. And while no good travel story ends with “and everything went according to plan”, I can think of quite a few that started with “yes, and…”