I may be one of the few people that doesn't regularly watch the reality show 'Top Chef' but I did watch (and enjoy) it tonight because the chefs visited Second City, and several people I know were guest judges.

The competitors watched a Second City ETC show. The clip showed part of a notepad improv set (performers ask the audience for a lot of suggestions all at once, and they all get written on a large notepad to inspire a run of scenes). The audience was asked to yell out colors and emotions and... food ingredients. So, yes, those audience suggestions became the names of the dishes the chefs had to cook the next day.

Purple Depressed Bacon. Magenta Drunk Polish Sausage. Orange Turned-On Asparagus. (I don't know about colors or food, but if you ask for an improv audience to yell out emotions, especially at Second City, they're almost certainly going to give you "drunk" and some variation on "turned-on"... usually "horny." That's just the way it is.)

So the chefs had to make these dishes, with the producers constantly throwing in curve balls like, "quick, we have to move to a different kitchen NOW" and "there are no blenders." So, the gimmick was that the chefs needed to improvise. The episode was called, 'Improv' and the word improv was said about a million times. "We need to improvise this dish." "I think we improv-ed it pretty good." "This requires a lot of improvisation." Soon, the chefs would just yell out the word improv whenever some new twist was introduced. "Oh shit, yo! Improv!" I've never heard the word improv said so much, and I'm an improviser.

Which is, probably, a good thing. Improv is creeping more and more into popular culture, or at least into reality television (Charna, and iO West are supposed to play a big part in the new season of 'The Real World').

Sure, 'Top Chef' didn't show any actual improv, and the appearance of the improvisers seemed edited to within an inch of its life, but the show unintentionally touched on a central improv dilemma when one of the chefs huffily whined, "I'm not going to dumb down my food because of what some drunken schmuck yelled out in the audience."