‘Winging It: Improv’s Power & Peril in the Time of Trump’ by Randy Fertel

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Winging It by Randy Fertel

As Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.” Randy Fertel explores the paradox in his latest book, citing Walt Whitman, who pledged to be unfiltered despite producing five revised editions of Leaves of Grass, and Jack Kerouac’s seldom-spoken-of editing process for the mythic caffeinated rush that became On the Road. Improvisation often benefits from structure, but structures become brittle and lifeless without improvisation.

Fertel composes a paean to the spontaneity of jazz and improv comedy as “the freedom from the metronome” that challenges rationalized bureaucratic thinking. And yet the focus of Winging It is the dark side. For Fertel, a Jungian, Donald Trump represents improvisation’s “shadow,” summoning a dark national archetype much as Carl Jung described Hitler in 1930s Germany.

Improvisation’s ability to quickly seize opportunities can be insensitive. As Trump put it crudely, “My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” His policies—such as “build the wall”—were often built from free-associating riffs while speaking to unhappy crowds that welcomed his disruption of a status quo that wasn’t serving his interests. “His improvised discourse blared the message, Trust me, only I can do it,” Fertel writes. Trump’s appeal flies over the head of reason into domains of the psyche that also allowed Beethoven and Miles Davis to compose music. 

All is not lost, Fertel insists. “If dark improvisation has deeply wounded civil society,” he writes, “the way forward is not to stop improvising but to really listen, learning from the best improviser—comics, scientists, musicians, dancers, and the Founding Fathers—our best listeners.”

Get Winging It at Amazon here.

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