Evening with the Impro

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Summer Wildcat Tony Carnevale

The "status transactions" Johnstone refers to have nothing to do with what you might normally think of when you hear the phrase. Wealth, class, race, gender - none of these necessarily has an influence on your status. In fact, your status is not constant, nor has it been bestowed upon you by forces beyond your ken - rather, your status is constantly varying, and you have complete control over it.

Johnstone's reason for writing about status was to demonstrate its use onstage, but he made it very clear that each of us is involved in intricate real-life status games every day. Thus the effectiveness of status in a theatrical setting - using it well makes simulations of reality all the more real.

What is status? It's hard to explain, but here's a rough attempt: it's your perceived psychological rank in the hierarchy composed of you and whoever you're interacting with at any given moment. This last part is important: you only have status relative to other people, and your status at any given time will be different depending on who you're interacting with. And in many cases, what you say to people will be an attempt to increase your status. I'll give you an example.

Yesterday I was in the car with Phil, a friend of mine who knows a good deal about pop music. Here's a reproduction of a dialogue we had, with my annotations in italics.

Phil: Have you heard the new Moby album? (Phil attempts to increase his

status by demonstrating that he knows about a new album.)

Me: Yeah. It was a lot worse than his last one, though. (I boost my own status by proving that I'm a long-time fan.)

Phil: The last one? How could you afford it? It was a triple-disc set! (Phil tries to one-up me: he has more important things to spend his money on than music.)

Me: Oh, I didn't buy it. I got it for free when I interviewed him for the paper. (An obvious ploy for status.)

Phil: Hey, did I tell you that my sister got the job with the New York Times? (Phil is related to someone who's obviously more important than a mere college journalist.)

Me: Yeah. I'll probably subscribe when I move to New York and write for Letterman. (And so on.)

Okay, Moby's last album wasn't on three discs, and that wasn't a real discussion, either. It was a pretty unrefined attempt at demonstrating status transactions, and if it had been a real dialogue, Phil and I would probably have come to blows in another few lines.

But nonetheless, I've become keenly attuned to the much more subtle status-bargaining in real life. The most insidious status negotiations are those without any obvious form of conflict (Johnstone's ducks), which can't be said of my fake dialogue. And more and more, I'm discovering that everything anyone says, no matter how innocuous it seems on the surface, is tinged by status - either a desire to increase one's status, or a reinforcement of whatever status one has accepted.

The depressing result is that I can no longer look at any conversation as mere conversation. All my relationships have been exposed as the feral, tooth-and-nail battlefields they really are. Is this because I'm several orders of magnitude more petty than most people, or is it more likely that Johnstone nailed one of the more unpleasant aspects of human nature? Start thinking about what your interactions really mean, and maybe you'll find out.