3QQ Interview: Will Hines on Nonsense

The improv comedy maestro pontificates on philosophy and other B.S.

Aug 28, 2024

Welcome to 3QQ: Three Questions from Quora, our series of interviews in which a guest expert joins me to field strange and interesting questions posed on Quora.com (the internet’s oddest knowledge repository).

Though I will respectfully restrain from calling him a “guru,” Will Hines is one of the world’s greatest improv comedy performers and teachers. Some would even say he’s THE greatest—including him! After all, he did write the book How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth and co-founded The World’s Greatest Improv School. I’m pretty sure these claims are facetious, but then again he is truly great at what he does, and he also has a very dry sense of humor… so who knows? At the very least, I don’t see anyone else staking their claim to the honorary title of World’s Greatest Improv Anything.

Will also has a Substack called Improv Nonsense, where he writes lots of long, thoughtful posts about improv—but counter-intuitively almost NONE about nonsense. So I asked him three questions on the topic.

How do I deal with nonsense?

WILL: The nonsense I deal with is other humans complaining to me about things in which I do not know the context. For example, I was in a Starbucks1 recently, and a woman I did not know came up to me and said, "Do you know where Mike is?" And I said I did not. And then she said, "Do you think he's with that group outside?" And I said I wasn't sure, and I didn't know who Mike was. Then she said, "He said to meet him here." And I said, "Then he must be here."

So I guess the way I deal with nonsense is I make my best guess possible.

Is philosophy nonsense?

WILL: Philosophy is not nonsense! Philosophy is essential to survive.

I'm defining philosophy as the stories we make up about how the world works. And even though I believe the world is basically unmanaged chaos, it is our ability to delude ourselves that there is logic out there that lets us mentally survive. So philosophy is not nonsense -- it's necessary.

But it is also all lies.