SAM WASSON is the author of five books, including the best-selling Fosse and Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. At Wesleyan University he joined the Desperate Measures improv troupe, cofounded its annual 24-hour show, and earned limited admiration for his parody of Virginia Woolf.
"Improv Nation masterfully tells a new history of American comedy . . . Wasson masters the art of the monograph by locating a sharp argument within a sweeping, messy, compelling history . . . Wasson's dizzying style drives the point home. Though he jumps around, he never gives a player short shrift, and his conversational tone captivates. The book's focus tightens as its narrative strands converge, but it maintains a loose unpredictability throughout. It holds the element of surprise -- true to the spirit of its subject. Grade: A-" --Entertainment Weekly "Sam Wasson's Improv Nation examines one of the most important stories in American popular culture . . . Wasson may be the first author to explain [improv's] entire history in comprehensive detail. For that reason alone, it's a valuable book, benefiting from dogged reporting and the kind of sweeping arguments that get your attention."--New York Times Book Review "[A] winning history of the subject . . . [Wasson] makes fine use of improv as a prism for understanding the development of American comedy, and it's a pleasure to encounter his acute characterizations." --Wall Street Journal "In his studious but breezy book, Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art, author Sam Wasson tracks the relatively young craft of creating humor in the same time it took Neil Simon to sharpen a pencil, making readers feel like they're sweating on stage with its quick-witted practitioners. Like the best of his subjects, which include Stephen Colbert, Bill Murray and Tina Fey, Wasson has perfect timing . . . Wasson has assembled a loving tribute to one of entertainment's most daunting challenges, with lots of laughs to boot."--Minneapolis Star-Tribune "A fast-paced, thoroughly engaging road map of how improv -- that rapid-fire art of entirely unscripted performance -- came to infiltrate and shape the American pop-culture landscape . . . A whirlwind of quick, sharp anecdotes, never lingering too long yet still giving the reader a full sense of the people and the history shaping improv into what it is today." --Seattle Times "With Saturday Night Live looming ever larger in the pop culture landscape, it's time for a history of improv comedy. Wasson delivers, moving nimbly from improv's origins in 1950s Chicago to movies like Caddyshack and TV shows like The Colbert Report."--Entertainment Weekly, Fall's 20 Must-Read Books "Wasson makes a thoroughly entertaining case that improvisational comedy has 'replaced jazz as America's most popular art' and represents the best of democracy . . . Wasson brilliantly weaves together the disparate strands of improv's first decade . . . [and] nicely foreshadows future events and collaborations and does an admirable job of making simultaneous events easy to follow . . . In the spirit of an improv performer, Wasson takes care to never let the stars take over the show."--Publishers Weekly, (starred review) "Wasson, author of the stellar biography Fosse (2013), brings his spellbinding prose style to this history of improvisational comedy . . . There's a natural flow to the author's writing--a conversational tone and a way of capturing our interest that transforms what could have been a dry recitation of people, places, and facts into a compelling, absolutely unputdownable story . . . And, in case you& --
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