Are Improv Classes Good for Social Skills? An Honest Take From a Coach

Last month I was on a discovery call with a guy who’d done two years of improv at a well-known school in Chicago. Funny guy. Quick on his feet on stage. He could hold a long-form scene in front of a paying audience without breaking a sweat. Eight people in the room, lights up, his teammates lobbing him a setup and him swinging at it. He was good.

And he was on the call with me because he’d just bombed a third date and didn’t know why.

That’s the gap I want to talk about. Improv comes up on almost every sales call I take, partly because it’s been one of the most-recommended things on Reddit threads about social anxiety for years. Whole subgenres of self-help borrow from it. Yes-And shows up in business books, dating books, parenting books. There’s a real signal there. Improv does some specific things that help.

But it also doesn’t do a few things that people assume it does, and the gap between “is improv good for social skills” and what people are actually trying to fix is wider than most articles will admit. So let me give you the honest answer. Not a hit piece on improv, which I love and have done myself. The actual, this-is-what-I-tell-my-students answer.

I’ve been coaching social skills full-time for over ten years now at Jaunty. Somewhere north of 10,000 students have come through our programs. I’ve taught 217 of our live classes personally. Improv shaped a lot of how I think about practice, and we built parts of Jaunty by lifting things directly from improv pedagogy. I’ve also watched a lot of really committed improvisers come to Jaunty and say “why doesn’t the stuff I learned on stage work in real life?” That question is the whole article.

The 30-second answer

If your goal is to get faster on your feet, looser with strangers, more comfortable being weird in public, or you actually want to perform comedy, take an improv class. It works. Yes-And, status work, agreement, and stage presence are real tools and they bleed into everyday life in helpful ways.

If your goal is everyday conversation, dating, flirting, making friends, or getting your social anxiety down in real-life one-on-one situations, improv is closer to the right thing than Toastmasters is, but it’s still not the right thing. You’ll get a confidence bump. You’ll get more comfortable speaking up. But the format trains you to be a character on stage, not yourself in line at a coffee shop, and the gap between those two situations is bigger than most people realize until they try to close it.

Improv is a great cross-training discipline. It’s not a replacement for direct conversational practice with real-time coaching on the stuff you actually want to do better.

What improv is actually good at

Let me steelman improv first because I think it’s the most useful of the “social-adjacent” disciplines and I don’t want to come off like I’m trashing it. I’m not.

Improv schools like UCB, Second City, iO, The Magnet, and any decent local conservatory program have figured out how to take adults who are afraid of looking dumb and walk them through a structured progression that gets them comfortable being publicly unsure. That’s a hard thing to do and they do it well.

Here’s what improv classes are great at:

Getting you out of your head. The whole pedagogy is built around shutting off the planning brain and responding in the moment. If you’re someone who scripts every interaction in your head before opening your mouth, the experience of being forced to just react in a scene is disorienting in a useful way. After a few weeks you start to feel a different muscle firing.

Loosening you up around being weird. A lot of social anxiety is really fear of being judged for doing something off-script. Improv normalizes off-script. The class culture is built around “everything you do is fine, your scene partner will make it work.” That permission, repeated weekly, is freeing in a way most other adult environments aren’t.

Yes-And and agreement. The most-quoted improv rule for a reason. The instinct to accept what someone gives you and build on it, instead of blocking or correcting, is one of the single most useful conversational tools that exists. It’s the reason your friend who did improv is somehow easier to talk to. They’ve practiced not making other people work for it.

Status work. Almost no one in the general population knows what social status is or how to play with it. Improvisers are taught it as a craft tool. Watching it click for an improv student (the realization that they’ve been performing low status by accident their whole life and can choose differently) is one of those things that changes how someone moves through a room.

Stage presence. Having a class of people watch you and not die from it is its own form of inoculation. People who’ve done improv tend to look more comfortable in their bodies. They take up space differently. That carries over.

If you want any of those things, take an improv class. I’m not kidding. UCB, Second City, iO, The Magnet, The Pit, and any solid local school all run beginner tracks specifically for non-actors. Most cost a few hundred dollars for an eight-week run. Most have a final showcase. The structure works.

I’ve sent students to improv before. I’ve taken classes myself. We borrowed a real chunk of our pedagogy from it, and I’ll get into that later.

Where improv runs out of gas for “social skills”

Here’s where the people who already did the work show up to Jaunty wondering why a year of improv didn’t fix the thing they thought it would.

The short version: the format is designed for performance, not for everyday conversation, and the difference matters more than most people expect.

You’re playing a character, not being yourself

This is the thing nobody warns you about. When you’re in a scene, you’re not Daniel-from-the-marketing-team. You’re a heightened version of someone else. A truck driver. A wedding photographer. A mom in a Trader Joe’s. The whole exercise is about committing to the bit and serving the scene.

That’s a different skill than being yourself in a conversation with a real person who has real opinions about you. The improv student who can do a brilliant character-driven scene with a stranger from class can still freeze when a coworker asks them what they did this weekend. Because in the scene, “self” wasn’t the variable. In the conversation, self is the entire game.

What you actually need to get better at is being yourself in front of another person without going somewhere else in your head. Improv mostly trains a different muscle than that one. That’s not a critique of improv as an art form. It’s the wrong tool for the conversational job most people are trying to do.

Laughter becomes the reward signal, not connection

Watch any improv class for ten minutes and you’ll notice what gets rewarded. Funny moves get laughs. Laughs are the feedback. Even in classes that explicitly tell you “comedy is a byproduct, not the goal,” the room rewards the comic move because that’s what the room can hear.

This trains a specific instinct: in any social moment, look for the comedic angle and play it. Which is fine on stage. In real life it can turn you into the person who deflects every emotional moment with a joke. Or the guy on a date who can riff for an hour but can’t sit through a real answer to “how are you doing.” Or the friend everyone likes but no one actually feels close to.

I’ve coached a lot of people coming out of long improv runs who had to specifically un-learn the “always reach for the funny” reflex. It’s a great reflex on stage. It actively gets in the way of intimacy.

Dating, flirting, and romance aren’t on the curriculum

Look at the syllabus of any improv conservatory. Levels 1 through 5 will cover scene initiations, two-person scenes, group games, character work, long-form structures (Harold, Armando, Movie), and a final showcase. There is exactly zero curriculum on flirting, reading romantic interest, holding eye contact in a way that builds tension, escalating a date, navigating early relationship signals, or recovering from a romantic miss.

When we looked at 43,000+ responses from people who took our intake quiz, the top goals were meeting people (66%), dating and romance (64%), approaching groups (52%), managing social anxiety (51%), and flirting (50%). Flirting was the number one self-identified weakness, scored 2.22 out of 5. Almost none of that overlaps with what an improv class teaches. The skills are adjacent, but adjacent isn’t the same as direct.

The feedback loop is wrong for conversational reps

In a typical improv class, you do a scene, you sit down, the teacher gives notes after the scene ends. Sometimes the notes go to the whole class because the lesson is general. Sometimes they go to specific players. Either way, the correction comes after the fact, and the next time you try the move it’s three or four scenes later, with different scene partners, in a different premise.

That’s how you build performance instinct. It’s not how you build conversational instinct.

At Jaunty, when we run a conversational drill in a breakout room, a coach is watching live and stepping in mid-conversation. “Slow down.” “Try that again, but actually look at her.” “Good notice, now without the hedge word.” You get the note in the moment, you try the next line thirty seconds later, and the correction sticks. That’s how skill compounds. Tennis coach on the next swing, not the next match.

Your scene partners aren’t the people you’re actually trying to talk to

An improv class is twelve other people who have all opted into being weird with you for two hours. They’re agreeing with everything you say. They’re committed to making your moves look good. They’re playing a game with you.

That is not the same situation as trying to talk to a stranger at a bookstore who didn’t sign up to be your scene partner. Or a date who is actively forming an opinion of you. Or a coworker you have to keep seeing on Monday. The stakes, the stakes-management, and the social rules are all different.

You can practice scene work with willing scene partners for years and not transfer it to “real-stakes conversation with someone who has not agreed to make you look good.” That transfer is the actual job.

Side-by-side: improv class vs Jaunty

Since you’re probably going to skim this part either way, here’s the honest comparison laid out:

Notice I’m still not saying one is universally better. Improv and Jaunty are doing different jobs that look similar from the outside. If you read this whole article and concluded “improv is bad for social skills,” that’s not what I’m saying either. I’m saying it’s an indirect path to the thing you probably want, and there’s a more direct path that’s purpose-built for it.

When improv is actually the right call

I get this question on sales calls weekly so let me just be direct. These are the situations where I’ll tell a prospect “go take an improv class first, come back to me later”:

1. You actually want to perform. If part of what you want is to do comedy, sketch, or theater on the side, take improv. It’s the actual training for the actual thing. Jaunty isn’t going to teach you to do a Harold.

2. Your specific blocker is that you over-script everything. If you can talk fluently when you have a script and freeze when you don’t, the improv pedagogy of “stop planning, react” is built exactly for that block. Eight weeks of scenework will retrain that habit better than almost anything else.

3. You want a creative or expressive outlet alongside skill-building. A lot of writers, designers, and performers I know take improv for reasons beyond social skills. The play and the absurdity have value on their own. If that’s you, the social skill spillover is a nice bonus on top of the real reason you’re there.

4. You like the in-person, comedy-club, post-class-beer scene as a community. The community at a UCB or Second City has its own thing going on. Some people love it. If walking into that room every Tuesday for two months is appealing, the community alone is worth the price.

For any of those, take the class. I mean it.

When Jaunty is the better fit

Here’s the other side. These are the patterns I see in students who tried improv first, didn’t get what they were after, and ended up at Jaunty:

1. You can perform but you can’t be yourself. This is the most common one and the one the improv guy from my opening call described almost word-for-word. He could be a character in a scene. He couldn’t be himself on a third date. Marcus, a software engineer who came through our six-week cohort, told me he could deliver a technical talk to fifty engineers and could even do an improv scene at a party trick level, but couldn’t get through small talk with a new coworker without his brain short-circuiting. The character muscle and the self muscle are not the same muscle. We train the second one.

2. Your goal is dating, flirting, or romance. Scott, one of our Wednesday flirt class regulars, joked after his program that he felt like an “eye contact Jedi Knight” from all the practice reps we did. He wasn’t doing scenes. He was practicing the micro-skills of holding someone’s gaze, reading interest signals, and using playful push-pull tension. None of that lives in an improv curriculum.

3. You want to make real adult friendships. Adrian came through our program and described the shift as “conversational agility, body language, and touch.” What he actually learned was the ability to connect with strangers in coffee shops and bookstores and turn that into ongoing friendship. Improv classmates can become friends. The skill of making friends out in the wild is something else.

4. You have moderate-to-high social anxiety and the idea of being on stage makes it worse, not better. 72% of the people who come to Jaunty have moderate-to-high social anxiety scored on our intake. Nearly one in three has it “all the time.” For some of those people, the idea of standing up in front of an improv class is a hard no, even if intellectually they know it’d be good for them. The Jaunty model (a 30-minute online class from your living room, small breakout rooms, no stage, no audience) is a gentler on-ramp. You’re practicing with one other person while a coach quietly gives notes.

5. You want to learn the conversation-specific toolkit, not the performance-specific toolkit. We teach humor as a specific skill, broken into seven types. We teach threading, which is the art of picking up a thread the other person dropped and carrying it forward. We teach push-pull, eye contact mechanics, body language as a curriculum, empathy as a skill. These are conversation-shaped tools. They borrow from improv but they’re not improv.

What we actually borrowed from improv (and a lot of it)

I want to spend real time here because the comparison would be misleading without it. Jaunty owes more to improv pedagogy than to any other discipline I can think of, and I want to be honest about it.

From improv we took: Yes-And as the baseline rule for almost every conversational drill we run. Status work, which we teach explicitly as a tool. The principle of agreement and heightening, which underpins how we teach storytelling. Stage presence, which we apply directly to how someone moves into a coffee-shop approach. The acting muscle of being fully present to another person, not running your own lines in your head. The idea that play is the engine of social ease.

The “game of the scene” mindset shows up in our flirting curriculum, where we teach students to find what’s playful between them and a person they like and lean into it. The way we structure breakout rooms (small, low-stakes, partner rotation) is borrowed from how good improv teachers run scene work. The whole “don’t plan it, react to what’s actually happening” instinct is something we drill the way an improv class drills it.

What we added: the conversational drills that improv doesn’t teach. Threading. Push-pull. Body language as a curriculum, not a vibe. Flirting mechanics. The seven types of humor as concrete tools. Empathy as a teachable skill, not an inherent trait. Live coaching during the roleplay rather than after. Real-people roleplay (coworker, date, stranger at a bar) rather than character-people roleplay (a truck driver in a Cracker Barrel). Specific feedback on you-as-yourself, not on the choices you made for a character.

If improv is acting class for non-actors, Jaunty is closer to a karate dojo for conversation. You show up, you bow in, you run drills, someone adjusts your form mid-rep, you bow out, you come back next week. We took a lot from improv. We just pointed it at a different target.

The bigger picture: improv vs Toastmasters vs Jaunty vs books

Improv comes up alongside two other things almost every time: Toastmasters and self-help books. Quick read on all three:

I wrote a separate piece on whether Toastmasters is good for social skills and the short version is: it’s great for prepared public speaking, not for conversation. Improv and Toastmasters are basically opposite tools. Toastmasters is structured prepared content. Improv is unstructured live response. Neither is purpose-built for the everyday-conversation job.

And then there’s the book/passive-content path. Reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” watching social skills YouTube, listening to podcasts. I’ll just be blunt. It doesn’t transfer. It’s like watching tennis videos and thinking you’ll get better at tennis. You won’t. You have to hit the ball. The research on procedural skill acquisition is consistent on this. You build skill through repetition with feedback, not through information intake. So if you’re choosing between improv, Toastmasters, Jaunty, and a stack of books on your nightstand, throw the books out of the running first. Then the question is which of the three live-practice tools matches your actual goal.

For most adults whose real goal is conversation, dating, friendship, or anxiety reduction, a direct social-skills practice program is a closer fit than improv or Toastmasters. That’s the bias I have, and I’ll own it, but it’s also what the intake data and a decade of sales calls keep telling me. Improv is a great cross-trainer. Toastmasters is great if speeches are also on the list. Books are practice avoidance.

The common mistake: picking a tool because it’s familiar, not because it fits

People recommend improv for social skills because it’s the most-recommended thing in their feed. People recommend Toastmasters because their dad did it. People recommend therapy because it’s the safest-sounding answer. None of those reasons have anything to do with what you specifically need to get better at.

The better question is: what specifically do you want to be different in six months? Be concrete. “I want to flirt with a stranger at a bookstore without my heart pounding.” “I want to get through a work happy hour without counting minutes.” “I want to be able to ask someone out without rehearsing the line for three days.” “I want to do a comedy show at the open mic at my local theater.”

The last one is improv. The first three are Jaunty. Pick the tool that was designed for the job you’re actually trying to do, and you’ll make more progress in a month than you have in a year of taking the wrong class for the right reasons.

Who Jaunty isn’t for

Same caveat as I’d give anyone making this decision. Don’t join Jaunty if your real goal is performance comedy or theater. Take improv. We’re not training you to do scenework on stage.

Don’t join Jaunty if you want a one-and-done weekend intensive. We’re built around weekly live reps over months. If you want a crash course that promises to fix everything in a weekend, there are people who sell that. I’m not one of them.

Don’t join Jaunty if you can’t or won’t show up live. Passive video content isn’t how our programs work. The value is in the live practice. If your schedule makes it hard to attend live classes consistently, you’ll get less out of it than you paid for.

Don’t join Jaunty if you’re in acute mental health crisis or working through trauma that hasn’t been touched in therapy. Skill practice doesn’t replace therapy and can sometimes surface things that a therapist is better equipped to handle. Do that work first or alongside.

Frequently asked questions

Is improv good for social anxiety?

It’s good for performance anxiety and for the general experience of being seen by a group. For conversational social anxiety, the kind that shows up on dates, at parties, or in one-on-one work conversations, the help is indirect. Some people get a real confidence bump from improv that carries over. Others find that the performance frame actually intensifies their habit of “scripting” social moments, which can make conversational anxiety worse. If your anxiety is mostly about being watched by a group, improv can help. If it’s about one-on-one, a live conversational practice program will match the problem more directly.

Does improv help with dating?

Indirectly. The stuff improv teaches (presence, not over-thinking, agreement, playfulness) does carry over to dates and helps. The stuff it doesn’t teach (reading romantic interest, holding eye contact in a way that builds tension, escalating physical proximity, recovering from a romantic miss, knowing when to ask for the second date) is most of what people actually struggle with on dates. Improv is one ingredient. It’s not the meal.

What’s the difference between improv and a conversation class?

Improv trains you to play characters in scenes with willing scene partners for the purpose of being entertaining. A conversation class like Jaunty trains you to be yourself in real-life conversational situations with real-time coaching for the purpose of being effective and connected. The reps look superficially similar. The skill being built is different.

Is improv better than Toastmasters for social skills?

For most everyday social situations, yes. Improv trains real-time response to other humans, which is closer to actual conversation than the prepared-speech format Toastmasters runs. If your goal is dating, friendship, or party-style social ease, improv will get you closer than Toastmasters will. If your goal is delivering a wedding speech or running a quarterly meeting, Toastmasters wins. I wrote a separate piece on whether Toastmasters is good for social skills if that’s the comparison you’re actually trying to make.

What’s the best alternative to improv for conversation skills?

If your real goal is everyday conversation, dating, or making friends, the closest match is a live online social-skills practice program with breakout-room reps and real-time coaching. That’s what we do at Jaunty. Other options include a small in-person social-skills group (rare but they exist, often run by ACT-trained therapists), a conversation-focused coach, or a 1-on-1 communication coach. The common thread is live practice with feedback. Anything passive (books, podcasts, lecture-format video courses) doesn’t transfer.

How much does improv cost compared to Jaunty?

Most major improv schools charge $400-500 per 8-week level, sometimes more for the higher levels. Drop-in classes at smaller theaters run $20-40 per session. Jaunty’s entry-level membership, the Jaunty Gym, is $39/month with a 7-day free trial. The All-Access tier with the flirting and dating track is $89/month. The six-week Live Cohort Masterclass is $1,596 (or four payments of $399). On a per-month basis Jaunty is cheaper. On a per-show basis improv is its own thing.

Can shy people actually do improv?

Yes, and a lot of shy people end up loving it. The class culture at most schools is built around making it safe for new students to fail. That said, the upfront friction is real. If the idea of standing in front of a class and being weird makes you want to crawl under your desk, the on-ramp is steeper than a Jaunty live class would be. Some people use Jaunty first to build a baseline of social comfort and then take improv later as a cross-trainer. That sequence works.

Is improv better than Jaunty for introverts?

Usually the other way around. Improv tends to reward bigger, louder, more performative choices because those get the laugh. Introverts can adapt to that, and many do well over time, but the format pushes against the natural introvert mode. Jaunty’s format (small online breakout rooms, 30-minute classes, low-key feedback) tends to fit introvert preferences better. Most of our incoming students self-identify as introverts and the format doesn’t ask them to perform out of that.

What’s the best improv school for adults?

If you’re in New York, UCB and The Magnet both have well-regarded beginner tracks. Chicago has iO and Second City. LA has UCB and The Pit. Most major cities have at least one school running an adult conservatory. Pick the one that’s closest to you and lets you commit to a full eight-week run. The school name matters less than the fact that you actually finish a level.

Is improv worth it if I don’t want to perform?

It can be. The “non-performer adult” track exists because a lot of people want the social spillover without ever doing a show. The catch is that a class without a show at the end tends to be lower-stakes, which means lower transfer. The students I’ve seen get the most out of improv-as-social-training are the ones who reluctantly agreed to do the showcase and discovered they could survive it. If you’re sure you’ll never want to perform, the marginal value of the later levels drops, and you’re probably better off putting that time and money toward direct conversational practice.

How long until I see results from either?

Most of our students notice something different in the first two to three weeks. Not “my whole life is fixed,” more like, I went to a work event and didn’t panic, or I held eye contact with someone I liked, or I asked a stranger a follow-up question without spiraling about it. The bigger shifts (feeling confident in groups, comfortable on dates, able to make new friends as an adult) usually show up between month two and month six. Same is true for improv. The people who get the most out of it are the ones who do level 2 and level 3, not just level 1. Both tools reward consistency. Neither is a weekend fix.

The bottom line

Improv is a great discipline. It’s helped a lot of people get out of their heads, stop scripting every interaction, and learn to play. If performance, comedy, or pure “get me out of my own way” is what you want, sign up for a beginner class at the closest reputable school this week. Don’t overthink it.

But if you’re like most people who search “are improv classes good for social skills,” meaning you want to get better at everyday conversation, dating, flirting, making friends, or handling social anxiety in real one-on-one situations, improv is closer than Toastmasters but still adjacent. You’ll get a confidence bump, you’ll get some useful instincts, and you’ll spend a lot of practice time playing characters in scenes that aren’t shaped like the conversations you’re actually trying to have.

What you actually need is direct practice with real people, real-time coaching on you-as-yourself, and a curriculum built around conversation, dating, friendship, and anxiety. That’s what Jaunty has been doing for over ten years. Over 10,000 students have come through our programs. We run live classes every week and our six-week cohorts run every couple of months. The first week is free. You can drop in, try a class, and see if it feels like the right fit.

Whatever you choose, improv, Jaunty, both, the one thing I’d push back on is sitting in the “reading about it” phase for another year. You’ve probably been there long enough. Pick something with live reps. The reps are what work.

About the author

Eric Waisman is the founder of Jaunty and has been coaching social skills full-time since 2008. Over 10,000 adults have come through Jaunty’s live online classes and 6-week cohort programs. You can read student success stories here or reach Eric directly at eric@jaunty.org.