The 17th-Century Highlight Reel: Were "Drolls" the Original Short-Form Improv?
- Guy Winterbotham
- 11 hours ago
- 4 min read
Imagine this: The government has officially "canceled" theatre. Your favorite playhouse is boarded up, the costumes are gathering dust, and the authorities are roaming the streets, ready to fine anyone caught wearing a doublet with too much flair.
This isn't a dystopian sci-fi pitch; it’s London in 1642. The Puritans closed the theatres for nearly twenty years. But if you think that stopped people with a script to ignore and a funny bone to tickle, you don’t know actors.
Enter the Droll.
If you’re a modern improviser—whether you’re a ComedySportz veteran or a long-form purist—you owe a debt of gratitude to these scrappy, illegal "highlight reels" of the Early Modern era. They are the missing link between scripted drama and the high-energy "games" we play today.
What on Earth is a Droll?
A "Droll" (or drolerie) was essentially a theatrical "Best Of" compilation. Since full-length plays were illegal, actors would sneak into taverns, halls, or country fairs and perform short, punchy comic scenes ripped straight out of larger plays.
For example, why perform all five acts of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when you can just do the "Bottom the Weaver" bits? The audience wanted the funny stuff, the physical bits, and the "clown energy." They wanted the short form version.
Parallel 1: The "Snackable" Format
In modern improv, we often talk about "getting to the fun." In a ComedySportz match, we don't have time for a forty-minute exposition on the protagonist’s childhood trauma; we need to know the "Game of the Scene" now.
Drolls worked on the same principle. They stripped away the boring subplots and the "thou art" monologues to focus on what the audience actually cared about. The collection The Wits, or Sport upon Sport (1672) is basically a big book of 17th-century improv prompts. It’s a series of independent beats designed for maximum impact in a minimum amount of time.
Parallel 2: The Celebrity Clown
Every improv troupe has that one player who can make the phone book funny just by standing there. In the Renaissance, that was the Clown.
While the "brand name" Drolls of the 1650s featured stars like Robert Cox, they were standing on the shoulders of giants. Legends like Robert Armin and Will Kemp pioneered the performance style decades earlier. Even though Armin and Kemp were gone by the time the theatres were officially closed, their "clowning DNA"—the ability to "elasticise" a comic moment and rely on "crosstalk" with the audience—was the secret sauce that kept the Drolls alive.
Is "cross-talk" just a fancy way of saying "breaking the fourth wall"? Not exactly. Breaking the wall is the concept of acknowledging that the audience exists; crosstalk is the active conversation that results. It was a verbal volleyball match where the clown would riff on a heckler or take a "theme" from the crowd. When a droll performer "mistook the word" (deliberately mangling a sentence for a laugh), they were using that "imp of irreverence" to turn a scripted line into a spontaneous audience interaction.
Parallel 3: The "Guerilla" Stage
Drolls were the original comedy skits. Forget the velvet curtains and the hushed silence of a Broadway house; these were performed in rowdy, non-traditional spaces that forced performers to be adaptable and interactive:
Mountebanks' Stages: Temporary platforms set up by traveling medicine sellers who used clowns as "warm-up acts" to draw a crowd.
Halls and Taverns: The 17th-century equivalent of performing in the back of a bar or a basement club.
Bartholomew Fair: London's massive, chaotic summer festival where "booth theatres" thrived despite official bans. It was like a 17th-century Fringe Festival, but with more mud and a higher chance of getting arrested.
Historical Fun Fact: The Original Social Distancing Long before the 1642 ban, drolls were the survival gear for actors during the Plague Years. When London’s "great houses" like the Globe were shuttered by the Privy Council to stop the spread of sickness, actors survived by touring small, portable "merriments." They were the original "Pop-up Improv Show," born out of a need to keep the funny alive when the world felt a bit too much like a tragedy.
The Big Difference: Scripted vs. Spontaneous
So, are they the same? Not exactly. A droll started with a script, whereas we start with a suggestion. But here’s the kicker: back then, the script was often just a "skeleton."
Because drolls were performed in rowdy environments (imagine trying to do a scene while drunk soldiers are yelling at you), the actors had to improvise to keep the show alive. They would riff on the audience, extend the physical bits if the laughs were loud, and cut scenes short if the "Watch" (the 1600s version of the cops) showed up.
Finding the Method in the Madness
You might not have a degree in Shakespearean Literature, but by doing improv, you have a PhD in the exact survival skills that kept theatre alive when it was illegal. It reminds us that the human appetite for fast-paced, character-driven comedy is ancient. When you’re on stage doing a 3-minute scene about a sentient toaster, you aren't just "playing around"—you are participating in a tradition of "Sport upon Sport" that survived a literal ban on fun.
The Droll was the original Short-Form. It was rebellious, it was fast, and it was entirely centered on the chemistry between a funny person and a rowdy crowd.
