What Is the Harold? The Long-Form Improv Structure Explained
The Harold is a 30-minute long-form improv structure invented by Del Close. Here's how it works, where it came from, and why it's still the most-taught form in improv.
The Harold is what happens when improvisers stop doing five-minute games and start trying to build something that actually adds up.
Del Close invented it in the 1960s. Thirty minutes. Three beats of scenes. Group games between the beats. Patterns that tie back to the opening suggestion. No set list, no scripted jokes, no safety net. When it clicks, it feels like a play that’s being written in front of you. When it doesn’t, it’s a bunch of people flailing for half an hour.
Either way, it’s where most serious improvisers learn how to actually do this thing.
The short version
An audience gives a one-word suggestion. The ensemble takes that suggestion and builds a half-hour show out of it, without stopping to explain, without reading from anything, without any of them knowing what the show is going to be until they’re in it.
The structure has three “beats” of scenes plus opening and group games between them. That’s the scaffolding. Inside the scaffolding, everything is improvised.
The origin story
Del Close was a bleak, brilliant, mostly-broke theater director in Chicago. In the 1960s he was running workshops at The Committee in San Francisco and later at Second City. He was frustrated with improv as it existed at the time. It was all short-form games — funny in the moment, but forgettable. He wanted improv that could stand on its own as theater.
In 1967 at The Committee, he and the ensemble tried a new format. One-word suggestion. Thirty minutes. Three scenes about the suggestion, revisited three times each, with group games between. They called it the Harold, supposedly after a George Harrison joke: someone asked him what he was going to call his haircut, and he said “Arthur.” The performers asked what to call the new form, and someone said “Harold.”
That’s the story. It’s probably at least half true.
The form didn’t really take root until 1981, when Del co-founded iO (originally ImprovOlympic) in Chicago with Charna Halpern. iO was built around the Harold. Every house team did a weekly Harold. For decades, Tuesday and Wednesday nights at iO Chicago’s Wrigleyville location were where improvisers proved they could do this thing.
Tina Fey learned to do Harolds there. So did Amy Poehler, Stephen Colbert, Chris Farley, Mike Myers. When those people moved to New York and co-founded the Upright Citizens Brigade in 1996, they brought the Harold with them. UCB made tiny modifications (they emphasized the “game” of each scene more explicitly), but the form is the same.
The structure, beat by beat
Here’s what a canonical Harold looks like. Variations abound. This is the skeleton.
The opening (2-4 minutes)
The ensemble takes the one-word suggestion and does some kind of opening exercise with it. This isn’t scenes — it’s a group exploration of the theme.
The most common openings:
- Pattern Game. The ensemble free-associates on the suggestion. One person says a word or phrase that connects to the suggestion, then another, then another. Patterns emerge. Themes surface.
- Invocation. A ritualized group piece where the ensemble layers descriptions of what the word evokes. Almost liturgical.
- Monologue. One performer tells a real story from their life that the suggestion reminds them of. The rest of the ensemble uses that monologue as source material for the scenes ahead.
Whatever the opening, its job is the same: generate raw material. Specific images, specific phrases, specific ideas that the rest of the show will pull from.
First beat: three scenes (6-10 minutes total)
Three two-person (or three-person) scenes, one after another. Each inspired by something from the opening. Each establishes a world and a game of the scene — the repeatable pattern that’s going to drive the laughs.
Scene 1. Scene 2. Scene 3. Boom.
The scenes don’t have to be connected yet. They should each stand on their own.
Group game (1-3 minutes)
After the first round of three scenes, the whole ensemble does something together. A tag-out run. A group environment. A song. A choreographed moment. The point is to break out of the two-person scene structure and let the whole ensemble play.
Second beat: three scenes again (6-10 minutes)
The same three scenes come back, but now they heighten. The game of each scene — the pattern established in the first beat — gets more extreme. The stakes go up. The absurdity escalates.
Also: connections start happening. A character from scene 1 might walk into scene 2’s world. A theme from scene 3 might surface in scene 1. The pieces start talking to each other.
Group game (1-3 minutes)
Another group piece. By now the ensemble has a shared vocabulary — specific phrases, specific characters, specific jokes. The group game riffs on what’s been established.
Third beat: three scenes, fully merged (6-10 minutes)
The third round. The three worlds are now colliding. Characters cross scenes. Callbacks fire. The themes the opening seeded are paying off in ways that feel inevitable and surprising at the same time.
If the Harold is working, the third beat is where the audience stops laughing at individual jokes and starts laughing at the show itself — the way it’s all adding up.
Callbacks and close (1-2 minutes)
A final button. Often a callback to the opening. The show ends on a beat that rhymes with how it started.
Total runtime: roughly 25 to 35 minutes.
What the Harold actually teaches
It would be easy to dismiss the Harold as a gimmick — why not just do short scenes?
Here’s why. The Harold forces improvisers to:
- Trust the ensemble. You’re not doing your own show. You’re building one piece of a larger whole. Your scene in beat one has to be strong enough for someone else to pull material from it later.
- Find patterns. Heightening requires you to notice what the game of a scene is and escalate it. You can’t escalate what you haven’t identified.
- Listen across scenes. The callbacks in beat three are only possible if you’ve been listening to every scene, not just your own.
- Commit to organic discovery. No one in the ensemble knows what the show is going to be. Everyone has to trust that the themes will emerge from honest scene work.
It’s a hard form. Most Harolds are bad. That’s fine. The point isn’t to perform a perfect Harold every time. The point is to build the muscles that make great improv possible.
Variations
The Harold spawned a family of related long-forms.
- La Ronde — a five-scene structure where each scene shares one character with the previous. Less about pattern, more about relational chains.
- Monoscene — a full-length single scene. Same runtime as a Harold, but one continuous piece instead of three beats.
- The Bat — a Harold where the audience yells “Bat!” at any moment and the scene transitions via blackout. A frantic, edit-driven variant.
- Armando — similar structure but anchored by monologues from a featured performer rather than an opening group exercise.
- The Movie — a Harold stretched and re-shaped to feel like an improvised film.
Dozens more exist. All of them descend from what Del Close was working on at The Committee in 1967.
How to try it
You can’t really do a Harold solo. It’s an ensemble form. If you want to try one, you need six to eight people, a coach, and at least a couple of months of training on the fundamentals first.
But you can train the muscles that make a Harold possible. Scene work. Game of the scene. Heightening. Object work. Those are drillable alone.
That’s part of why we built Improv Chat. The solo practice app that gives you reps on the fundamentals — scene work, character, genre, monologue — so when you do show up to a Harold rehearsal, you’re ready to play.
The Harold is where improv becomes theater. It’s worth taking seriously.