The House That Del Built

Yes And (No)

You know how after a few years of doing improv, someone lets you in on the secret that denial isn’t about literally saying the word “no,” but rather about saying “no” to the reality that your scene partner has created, to the expectations of the scene and the situation in which you find yourself? It’s an expansive feeling—suddenly you find yourself being able to still say “yes” while your mouth says “no,” and you remember that improv, in the end, is less about rules and restrictions than freedom and play (For a reminder of how that works, reread this and watch the video of Amy Poehler presenting a veritable master class on the subject).

Well, I’m starting to realize that there’s a (perhaps even contrapositive) experience with “yes, and.” We learn from day one to say “yes” to our scene partner: Yes we’re on the Moon; Yes I’ll go to Prom with you; Yes it’s raining and also there’s lightning. Yes. Yes. Yes.

But sometimes there’s a way of saying “yes” that actually feels like a big, fat “no.” And I don’t mean just some sneaky form of denial (“Yes, you are the captain of this ship, and this ship is actually just an inflatable raft in a backyard swimming pool”). I’m also not talking about the infamous “I’m going to acknowledge that you just walked through the imaginary table we established earlier thereby calling out the fact that we’re improvising and breaking the fourth wall.” That happens, but as long as it’s not a habit, we can all just acknowledge that it’s generally rare among experienced performers, and, although sorta hack, forgivable in the grand scheme of things.

What I’m talking about is the persistent affirmation of the details at the expense of the whole—saying “yes” to the facts, the premise, the scenario, but “no” to the larger proposition of the scene, or even, in the worst case, saying “yes” to the facts and “no” to the larger collaborative project of improvisation itself. I call this behavior “YES(no)” because what you hear is a loud, resounding “yes,” but what you feel is a silent, nagging “(no)”.  Because what the “YES(no)” comes down to a disconnect between the improviser and the character she’s playing. It’s a conflict between a stated “yes” of a character and an implied, more meta “no” of that same person as your scene partner. “Yes, as this character I acknowledge that we are fighting a zombie apocalypse, and I’ll get the machete,” but actually, “As a performer, I prefer my ideas and choices to yours, so I’ll play along with this basic premise, but I’m gonna use it to do this killer pantomime bit with the machete over here that will quite likely undercut whatever could have happened between us if we’d just engaged with each other directly.” In this example, the machete pantomime isn’t a denial at all. In fact, it’s a totally legitimate expansion of the reality of the scene. A machete is a great thing to have in a zombie apocalypse. What’s at issue here is the motivation of the move—the performer uses the reality of the zombie apocalypse as little more than a springboard for self-serving laugh generation—a “move” he knows will “succeed.” Not that machete pantomime can’t enhance a scene where the two performers remain engaged in each other, but it can derail the trajectory of a scene when it’s done self-consciously, by the performer, as a “bit” at the expense of the reality. And that’s not just selfish; it’s a form of denial.

Now it’s possible that, on the surface, an audience might not be able to distinguish that scene from a more inherently collaborative one, just like a teacher can’t always tell whether everyone shared the work equally on a group project just by looking at the poster. The scene centering around your scene partner’s physical ineptitude with a machete might end up being very funny, even if it’s not emotionally honest or organic, just as the group project might end up being well done, even if one person dominated and drowned out the other voices. But as the participant in the collaboration, you can feel the lack of engagement. Sure, sometimes in school someone had to take over the group project—others weren’t pulling their weight or didn’t understand the material—but sometimes one person just wanted control, or thought her ideas were better than others’.

Now, no audience member wants you to tell them that their laughs are somehow illegitimate or tainted by a “mean old scene partner who wouldn’t share,” just the way no one ever wants to sound like the whiner whose ideas weren’t taken into account in that poster on the French Reformation. In school, the teacher might care, because your learning is affected if you aren’t allowed to contribute to the project, but why should an audience member care if you didn’t get the opportunity to be heard in a scene that they thought was perfectly funny? When you get down to it, laughs are laughs, and your scene partner got ‘em. So why should we split hairs about whether you felt eminently supported in those two or three minutes? Calm down, take your compliments, and get a drink at the bar.

Well, indulge me while I argue why we should care. Because, firstly, even in the short term, those moments can add up. Sure, one moment of selfish “Yes(no)” might just be a fun little bit, but when they occur over and over again over the course of a longer show, they can, at best, put the rest of the performers on edge, and at worst, alienate players from each other enough that they stop listening and working together—it’s only a quick slide from that subtle “Yes(no)” to full-on denials as members of the cast attempt to “protect” their ideas from each other and make their reality dominant. And that the audience will notice.

But what’s worse is that, in the long term, the person who consistently gets her laughs by saying “yes” just enough to play in the scene but “no” to trusting, engaging, giving over control to her scene partner eventually wears out her welcome on a team, and with an audience. Sure they’re funny once, twice, maybe a few more times. But if their go-to move is one of shutting down the scenic development in favor of unilateral joke production, it stops being fun to play with, or to watch over and over. Because watching new characters engage with each other in new worlds can be fun and surprising each time, but watching the same performer you saw last week doing basically the same gags he did to get a laugh this week wears down the impact of the pleasure the gag once elicited, and takes away from the collective experience of the performance.

Okay, so what to do? Should we just bitch about this person behind his back and half-ass our way through scenes with him? Or fight fire with fire and double down on our own jokes and make our scene a battle of wits? Of course not. First of all, to be fair, we are all guilty of this from time to time. If you’re reading this you’ve probably already realized that, even just sometimes, you’re that “YES(no)” player. And there’s a lot of reasons that can happen.

It could be you’re just having a hard day/week/month. You’ve got a lot going on, and you’re naturally turning inward and having trouble “getting into” your scenes, so you’re falling back on easier moves you know you can control. That happens to everyone, and it’s no big deal. If you’re a genuinely collaborative player you won’t be stuck in that place forever, and a few shows there isn’t going to hurt the audience or erode your team’s trust in you. Just keep trying to open back up and you’ll naturally get back in the groove of collaboration.

Or maybe you’re still young and learning and you just get anxious when you’re in a scene and you shut down a little bit. And that’s normal, too. Just stay open to the process, keep learning, and you’ll learn to trust both yourself and others.

If you’re a veteran, this behavior can develop over time from an opposite experience as the newbie—you’ve been doing this forever, you know what works for you, you know what you need to “bring” to a show to get laughs, you’re a goddamn professional. And that’s all true, but if you’re experienced that also means you should be confident enough to let go a bit, to shake it up and let yourself feel that imbalance of entrusting more of the scene to your scene partner and the interactions between you and them. It’s like in yoga class when the teacher suggests that, if you’re very comfortable in a balance pose, you purposely switch it up—look up to the sky, or raise your arms, etc.—to give yourself an opportunity to find your new “edge,” the point of imbalance from which you grow. Especially if you’re a veteran “rock star” performer, you owe it to yourself to stay fresh by reengaging with the newness (and, yes, the fear) that you felt when you first started playing and had no clue what was coming next. Trust me, your scenes will still be great and get laughs, because hell, you know what you’re doing up there and most likely, so does your scene partner.

And what if you’re the one trying to connect but you sense that you’re in a scene with someone who’s playing a “Yes(no)” game? Although the deeper issue is one that only they can address, here’s a tip for trouble-shooting the problem in real time, rather than whining or shutting down: Give every move they make weight. Don’t ignore or undercut the moves they’re making that you feel are distracting from the scene; make them indispensable to the collaboration. They go for the machete to do a pantomime bit where it’s too heavy and they can’t pick it up, etc.? You comment on how they don’t have to worry about trying to prove their manhood just because they were cut from the football team that their dad was the star quarterback of 20 years ago. Or avoid a bunch of backstory and information dropping and simply acknowledge how touched you are that they’re trying to defend you and how much it means to you. You just don’t let them get away with the disengagement. And using their own moves to bring them back doubles down on the collaboration of the scene and, most likely, gets them to turn back toward you with a fuller “yes.” And that’s something you and your audience will appreciate, even if they can’t pin down exactly what made that zombie apocalypse/machete scene so satisfying to watch. 

Breaking Bad, Character, and the Myth of “You Always”

(WARNING: This essay contains Breaking Bad spoilers up through S4.)

I was running a rehearsal once where the following scene occurred:

Person 1: Have you seen the donut I left in the break room that I was saving for later?

Person 2: Oh? This one? I ate half of it.

Person 1: But I was saving that!

Person 2: Oh, sorry. But your chocolate milk is still here (drinks some of her chocolate milk, then hands it to her) well, half of it.  I also ate half of your lunch because it looked so good in the fridge… 

At this point I was beside myself and had to stop the scene. “Are you telling me,” I asked, “that this guy’s entire M.O. in life is eating half of people’s food?! That’s no one’s M.O. He’s inconsiderate, he has bad boundaries, maybe, but he’s not the Half-of-Food-Ruiner. That’s not a thing!” Once I settled down from my tirade, we discussed calmly what had made Person 2 make the decisions he did in the scene—he’d learned about finding the “game” of the scene, and about heightening, and he’d done the simple math: The “game” was taking half of things (because it was the “first unusual thing” that had happened), the heighten was to first take half of the thing secretly, then do it in front of the person, then do it to something bigger. All technically sound, I guess, but obviously wrong in execution. The scene, as experienced from the audience, felt both flat and absurd. 

This was an acute example, but the experience occurs almost anytime an improviser takes that ubiquitous and dangerous “game of the scene” shortcut I like to call “you always.” “You always take the last popsicle!” “You always cheat at cards!” “You always do this!”  The “you always” is a shorthand indicator that we’ve just defined a character by his most salient characteristic, but the problem is that that first action or statement, in all it’s particularities, is almost never indicative of a larger sense of a character’s motives, feelings, etc. And by limiting them to “always” doing that one narrow activity, you basically turn them into two-dimensional caricature who obsessively engages in one tiny cluster of odd or annoying behaviors pretty much all the time.

Enter Walter White. One of the biggest arguments among Breaking Bad fans is whether Walter has been changed by his experiences since we met him at the beginning of Season 1, or whether he’s simply been revealed to be who he has always been. I mean, how could a mild-mannered chemistry teacher become a ruthless, murdering meth dealer in such a short time? Was it just that something snapped when he was faced with his mortality? Or was it that he was finally free to be his true self? The arguments are seemingly endless (I know, because I’ve been caught in the middle of them at parties before—people take their Breaking Bad very seriously). The truth is, it’s got to be a little of both: like anyone, he can’t possibly act in ways completely outside of his true temperament, while at the same time the acute experiences of his current life have certainly shaped the direction his temperament turns in. 

But, and here’s the real lesson, it’s not the same or even particularly similar behaviors every time. It’s not, “You always obsess over insects that get into your lab” or “You always purposely blow up the expensive sports car you bought your son rather than return it to the dealership.” And yet, the same person does those two very, very different things. Of course he does. Because the “you always” is deeper than the present activity—it’s about one’s values, how one views himself, his relationships, and the world around him. It both explains previous behaviors and predicts future ones, regardless of the change in circumstance. And it’s cumulative. That’s why, actually, I prefer “if this is true, what else is true” to “you always” when building out a character. Because the first statement opens up an expanse of thematically related but distinct behaviors, while the second seals off the character in a tiny box of singular compulsion. 

An appropriate response to this argument as I’ve laid it out at this point would be, “Okay, but that’s a serial television show that has hours and hours of story within which to develop nuanced and complex characters. In an improv scene, we get maybe two minutes, and saying that someone ‘always’ does something is just an efficient way of endowing them with a focused persona quickly.” Yes, absolutely. You’re right. We don’t have the time to allow each character to confront scenarios where their true natures can be slowly and subtly exposed. Or the budget.

But I would argue that the most important choice you can make about character, whether it’s a high-budget scripted television series or a two-minute improv scene, is not reliant on budget or time or, if you get really good at it, even script. Because the most important choice you make about your character is the second choice you make, and it takes the same amount of time to make a choice that gives a character depth as it does to turn them into a gag. That second choice determines the type of pattern you are establishing for your (or your scene partner’s) character—and if we hit that sweet spot in the pattern, that choice will be plausible enough to seem like it’s just what that character would do, but surprising enough to make us feel like we’ve learned something new about them.

Back to Breaking Bad. The first thing Walter White does, when he’s told his diagnosis (actually, while he’s being told his diagnosis) is to obsessively stare at a mustard stain on the doctor’s lapel. You think it might be because he’s in shock and spacing out, but when the doctor asks him if he understands what he’s said, he responds by saying back everything the doctor said. He heard him alright. So then you think, “okay, maybe this is just his way of avoiding dealing with his mortality.” But the writers of Breaking Bad are too careful for that. They’ve used this moment as a defining one—faced with his mortality, Walter White does exactly what Walter White would do. And in case we don’t get it, when he starts planning his meth-cooking business with Jesse Pinkman the very next day, sure enough, he’s obsessing over details, this time of a higher order. “No, this is a volumetric flask,” he tells Jesse as he tries to teach him about the proper equipment for making methamphetamine. “You wouldn’t cook in one of these. Volumetric flask is for general mixing and titration. You wouldn’t apply heat to a volumetric flask; that’s what a boiling flask is for. Did you learn nothing from my chemistry class?” Data point two. And that, right there, is Walter White. Mustard-stain obsessed, proper flask-using, detail-obsessed, judgmental, desperately seeking order and control in a world that thwarts his attempt to control it at every turn (whether it’s a cancer diagnosis, or, we later find out, being left behind as the business he started and abandoned becomes wildly successful). And it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are. Do his behaviors become more monstrous, unethical, abhorrent as the series continues? Yes. But part of the brilliance of the show is that, if you go back at any point in your viewing to an earlier episode, the details may be different, but the people are the same. The Walter White who refuses to take orders from a meth distributor is the same Walter White who refuses to take orders from a car wash owner (and that, incidentally, is a lesson in heightening as well). Because the details serve the character, not the other way around, the “you always” (or the “if this is true…”) is never about the details—it’s always about the person.

Okay, but again, you’re in a scene, happening in real time, and you only have a few seconds to make this character make sense. How do you not use the details to inform the nature of the character? Well, you can. It’s not, like, evil. And some ways of doing it work better than others. For example, naming a similar thing you’ve done in the past that is different but still relatively concretely fits the pattern of behavior is better than simply repeating the behavior almost exactly to establish a “pattern” or “game” (“I eat half of your things”). And doing a tag out to actually show your character doing that similar behavior in a different context is even better than talking about it (“Randy, you ate half of these box lunches for homeless people!”). Sometimes this can be executed in a conceptual way by moving your character into a context that doesn’t actually match up to the character’s (“Randy, you ate up half the food in the Secret Annex and we don’t get another ration until next week!”). This is a smart way to heighten out when a pattern becomes too literal, but it does expend most of the comedic value of the scene pretty quickly (these tag outs usually heighten into a button and are then swept, the character never to return).

But let’s say we want to avoid this kind of literal pattern formation altogether (which is, after all, the point of my argument). How do we, in real time, open up a meaningful pattern of behaviors for our (or our scene partner’s) character? How do we avoid just eating half of everything in the room? 

Practice. At rehearsal, sure, but start with the material that’s right in front of you, in your everyday life. Notice when you or a friend says “you would” to someone—why “would they”? People watch and ask yourself “what else might be true about this person that I can’t readily see just from looking at them?” Write a story about them in your head. Be generous and expansive in developing their “character.” Watch good films and tv shows that develop consistent but nuanced characters. Read novels that do the same. Realize that the reason these are satisfying is that, as human beings, we’re actually amazingly adept at recognizing clusters of behavior associated with the same core persona, even when those behaviors are seemingly very different on the surface. Then, let this natural ability guide you on stage. Forget the rules you were taught about “yes, and” and “playing the game,” and just be (or be with) the person in front of you. Let that second thing you do or endow your scene partner with flow out of the first without being stuck to it. And then let that pair of things define a whole person—a person who obsesses over mustard on a lapel the way he obsesses over the proper chemistry equipment for a meth lab; a person who eats half of the donut his colleague was saving for later the same way he signs his name so big on the office birthday card to Laura that there’s no room for anyone else to write anything. Because that guy? That guy is real.

The Multiverse of Denial

We know not to “deny” in a scene. I’ve talked about why it might be an instinct (borne of a desire to create one’s own reality rather than accept the terms of another’s) and what is and is not denial (simply saying the word “no” in a scene has very little to do with denial. Rather, denial is the act of rejecting the rules of the reality of the scene established by your scene partner). But, the simplest reason not to deny may be mathematical. 

Think of an initiation (of a scene, game, show) as the placing of a point on an otherwise blank piece of graph paper. There was an empty template, and now it has been populated by a single bit of information. In the Freedom, Power, Responsibility model, subsequent moves are placed on the graph in relation to the first—the Power move establishes a direction and begins to frame the boundary of the scene; the Responsibility move shapes the scene definitively, the way a third point creates a polygon.

But this is all assuming the points are placed in some linear relationship to each other, and that assumes a lack of denial. If we follow this imagery of moves in a scene as the placing of points on a graph, denial is the equivalent of flipping up the graph paper currently being used and placing a point on an entirely new graph. That’s a pretty obvious and simple illustration for how denial mucks up a scene. But it gets worse.

If what we’re really creating in a scene is a universe wherein our characters can live and interact, physics may be an even more apt model to use to illustrate the devastating effects of denial than mathematics. It’s as though the scene partners are gods (or whatever non-theological imagery you’d like to insert to stand in for a conscious creative power) creating a world and establishing its rules as they create it.  Say “yes” and the rule stands. “Say “yes and” and new rules are created that build on the previous ones.

Now, you might think that next I’ll say that denying destroys the world being created. That’s the conventional wisdom. The problem with that conclusion is it actually might be over-simplifying the problem. If the world of the scene is really destroyed, the scene would literally be over—edit, sweep, blackout, done. But most often, the players have to play through the denial. If so, are they just playing in a broken world?

Possibly. But in my experience, what often happens with a problematic denial is the uncomfortable scramble to justify it. And that justification usually comes in the form of a revision of the preexisting world. In the simplest and quite possibly worst example of this, one player’s name is established, the other player subsequently calls her by the wrong name, she answers with, “You know that’s my middle name!” This is a perfect example of how the denial doesn’t usually completely blow up the scene, but rather, it forces the characters to reframe the universe. Now we’re supposed to believe that the second character a) knows the first character’s middle name, which implies intimacy, and yet b) has inexplicably decided to call her by her middle name. Worse than being a time-waster (there are probably bigger fish to fry in this scene than justifying a mistake made by a forgetful improviser), it actually creates an alternate scenic universe. In effect, the world of the scene has spawned a new and related world where all of the information is the same, except for how the two characters refer to each other. 

Now, we could optimistically argue that this “slip up” could actually lead to a discovery and not a departure—why does he use her middle name? What does that tell us about their relationship? But that kind of “lemonade out of lemons” is not usually how a scene with this kind of mistake in it plays out. In fact, what usually happens is an aggressive over-justification of the slip up (e.g. “Well, you know that your twin sister died in childbirth and that was her name so we gave it to you as your middle name but we wished you would have died instead of her.”) And while there’s nothing technically wrong with that information, all it does is create a third alternate scenic universe. Since the information was not built linearly from the truth of the scene, but tangentially, from the lack of listening and commitment of the performers themselves, it can’t be contained in the same world. We now have 1) the initial world established by the characters prior to the denial, 2) the world created at the moment of the denial where middle names are inexplicable used in place of first names, and 3) the world wherein the daughter had a twin sister who died. And because each denial and subsequent justification is more concerned with patching up the hole of the error rather than being true to the reality of the scene, the likelihood that the justification will fit with the rules of the initial universe is low.

The problem for the improviser caught in this scene is that she is now unsure which universe to inhabit. If she tries to double down on the initial universe and ignore that denial/justification, she runs the risk of seeming like she is ignoring important information. But if she follows the denial/justification into the new universe, she risks leaving behind the initial grounding of the relationship and character of the scene and entering an unstable universe without clearly established rules. In fact, a choice to abandon the initial universe and enter the denial/justification universe almost always ends with a scenic crash and burn or, with an experienced cast, a tag out run that isolates the comedy present in the denial/justification and successfully heightens it through to a satisfying conclusion. In effect, the team isolates the unstable universe and quickly adds energy into the system until it burns itself out.

But if the scene stays stuck in the limbo between worlds, the prognosis gets worse and worse as the scene continues. That’s because once alternate universes are introduced, it can set off a chain reaction. Since you don’t quite know where you are anymore, each new line has the potential to be a denial of one or more of the universes the scene is trying to straddle. The more information you try to pile on, the more splintered and fragmented the worlds become. In physics it’s called the “multiverse” theory (in particular, what I’m describing is best explained by the “quantum multiverse” theory, or the “many-worlds theory”). I have to imagine there’s a Star Trek episode that relies on a premise somewhat like this: each new decision one makes creates an entire new world, and the more worlds that are created, the more unstable the person creating them becomes—Which one is the real me? He wonders. How will I ever return to the real world, if there even is such a thing anymore? And when am I going to bang that hot alien chick?

Luckily, an improv scene isn’t likely to last longer than a few minutes (God help the pair trapped in a monoscene of infinitely fragmenting universes, unless they’re doing it on purpose, and then, I’d love to see that show). And the “real you” is still intact once the scene is edited. But if you’re doing a Harold, for example, the residue of that fragmentation can affect the whole show. In the worst case, it can become either an albatross around the show’s neck, or a constant energy suck as the team tries to align the broken scene with the rest of the show. In the best case, the team recognizes that shit happens, that there’s still a lot of show to do, and that there are always bits of fun and joy that can be isolated and extracted from the scene to fuel the rest of the show. 

To me, this is what it means to say that “there are no mistakes in improv.” It’s not that you can’t “mess up” (because we’re all liars if we claim that we’ve never seen or been a part of a scene that was just a clusterfuck of bad, stupid, and even self-sabotaging decisions), but rather that both the “best” and the “worst” moves can, in the hands of a confident, competent, and trusting team, fuel the comedy engine to help the show reach its destination.

Natalie Baseman: Upright Citizens Brigade: ASSSSCAT is on Netflix!

Signifying Something

This has been a hard year in the Boston improv community. Two great luminaries—one who’d just begun his career, the other who’d already left his name indelibly on the community—were taken from us. Everyone has handled this loss differently—some hardly knew either man, others had been close with one or both of them for years, had worked with them, knew intimately their talent, good natures, and big hearts. I never really got to know TC Cheever, but I saw how other people knew him, and in the few interactions I had with him, understood him to be the kind of person who takes you into his heart immediately, sees the good in you, and reflects it back with love. Griff O’Brien had just been cast on a Harold team at ImprovBoston when he was taken from us—we only had one wonderfully sweet and awkward conversation (although I found out, in an odd “small world of comedy” way, that he was actually a member of the high school improv team I coached in Chicago, but had joined the year I’d moved to Boston).  Anyone who’d seen Griff perform knew instantly that he was the real deal, and that he was going to be famous someday. Both men were taken too soon, from their families, from their friends, and from the world to which they still had so much to give.

The one solace I keep taking (and everyone mourns and processes and heals differently) is in the spirit of improvisation itself. At TC’s memorial gathering at The Field Thursday night, I spoke with many people about how improv is an inherently fleeting art. This came up once when I was trying to explain to a sketch performer why improvisers are not actually (or at least not entirely) lazy. “We need the immediacy that comes with impermanence. We need it to be different every time,” I explained. And in the context of the evening, it suddenly struck me to finish my claim with, “Just like life, I guess.”

It’s a thing I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past year as I’ve watched the lives of brilliant, beautiful people seemingly ending too soon. A theatrical performance, of course, pales in impact and importance to that of a life lived well, but it’s not new to compare the two. Macbeth determined that, in fact, our lives “signified nothing” in their fleeting impermanence. I don’t doubt Shakespeare might have felt the same. And yet he was drawn to the stage, to creating a facsimile of that fleeting, messy, comic, tragic performance that is life.

Thursday afternoon, before I went to perform at ImprovBoston and then attend TC’s memorial, I coached my current high school improv team. In one scene, a student came in with an idea, but the scene went a different direction, and afterward he lamented the loss of his original inspiration. A more experienced student on the team responded definitively, “It’s gone and it’s never coming back. That’s improv.” To which I responded, because it was clearly at the forefront of my mind, “and life.” Most of the kids laughed, but one looked at me knowingly—a moment passed between us where he took in the truth of the comparison. He winced and smiled simultaneously.

Working with high school students means constantly being surrounded by people who think that they are invincible—that they will never die. But as true as that is, it is equally true that I am surrounded by people who are potentially about to realize that they are mortal. And because I teach literature, which is mostly, as Woody Allen won’t let us forget, about death, sometimes I’m there when it does. Every day I risk witnessing human beings lose their immortality. It can be a sad moment, and it’s only the beginning of a lifetime of considering what it means to live and die, but it’s also a beautiful moment, a full moment. If channeled well, it can lead to a life of meaning and purpose rather than despair. We can agree to Macbeth’s proposition without choosing his path.

I’m one of those people who’s been cognizant and afraid of my death since I was very young. I used to think everyone was like that, then I started figuring out that it’s only one way to be. My kids are not like me in this regard, and I guess I’m grateful for that, because it can be paralyzing at times. But I think it is, in part, what draws me to comedy (that’s probably true for many of us) and even more so what draws me to improv.

In my more philosophical moments, I sometimes hear myself begin to talk to students about the beauty of patterns in improv—“Human beings crave patterns; we seek them even when they are absent, make meaning of chaos”—up to this point my students are usually with me, but then I sometimes hear myself continue—“because, in the end, we all want to feel like this seemingly random chaos of life actually has meaning, and that sense of meaning might help us forget, for a few minutes, our own impending mortality.” That usually gets one part wince and one part laugh (a lot like my high school student’s response on Thursday). Besides for the incongruity of your comedy teacher going all David Foster Wallace on you, there’s a sting to the absurd truth of it. Some of us are plagued with a more conscious recognition of this feeling than others, but I think we all, especially those of us who do comedy, and improv especially, know it’s there. It’s the fear at the center of the laugh—it may be the source of the laugh itself.

We’ve all been in a show where the lights get pulled before we felt it was really “over.” You didn’t get to that third beat of your Harold, or you had an awesome callback to that character from early in the show that would have tied the whole thing together. Again, at the risk of belaboring the metaphor, the difficulties of this year have started to make me at least try to think differently about that feeling. Because no one is ever ready for their performance to be over. There was always one more thing that could have been done. If we’re lucky, we’ll feel like most of the things we’d wanted to do we’d gotten around to—but I’m starting to doubt that’s ever the case. Griff was so young, and had so many years of life and laughter ahead of him, and his death felt to many of us like a cruel trick of fate. TC had accomplished so much already, and yet from where I sat, he was just moving into that place in his life where he would be able to watch all of the seeds he’d sown, the connections he’d made, start to take on lives of their own. There’s no doubt that this will, in fact happen, but it seems like madness that TC won’t be able to be here to watch and nurture that process.

And yet, that is the truth. And so, despite my overwhelming feeling that things have been cruelly cut short, I’m trying to allow myself to think of Griff and TC’s lives as full unto themselves. Not to judge their lives by what could have been had the lights stayed on, but by what they were to us when the spotlight shone. I’m not suggesting this is how everyone grieve, and I know that I am in the somewhat misfortunate position to not have been close enough to either of these wonderful people to feel their loss at the most personal level, which might afford me the strange luxury of this philosophical point-of-view. But I will say that thinking about things this way, and continuing to create art, despite its ultimate futility (after all, my twelve-year-old self reminds me, even if you accomplish everything you seek to accomplish and your work lives on after you, eventually the sun will become a red giant and destroy the Earth and then nothing will be left—not Michelangelo’s David or Chagall’s stained glass or the Great Wall of China), continuing to live this life as though it matters, is the best way I can think of to honor those whose light has gone out.

improvdan asked: I'm an improviser from Australia and I just wanted to say I really enjoy your blog. It's a real honest perspective on your journey and I've really found it useful. I wanted to ask who is your favourite improviser, or improv idol? And what is it about their work that you enjoy? Look forward to hearing from you. Dan

Thanks for writing (and reading the blog)! I have to say, beyond the obvious members of the improv pantheon, the improviser who I owe the most to, hands down, is Bill Arnett who teaches, coaches, and performs out of iO Chicago. Not only was Bill the first teacher who I felt really spoke to my sensibility (a delicate balance between comedy intuition and brainy self-reflection), but as a coach (he directed me for a year on a Harold team at iO) he taught me so much about the art of directing improv. Bill came to every rehearsal with an agenda in mind and thoughtful exercises (sometimes ones that already existed, other times ones he created especially for us) that isolated the skills he was looking to improve. He never wasted our time, and I always felt that I was a better improviser at the end of each rehearsal. 

He also writes a great wonky improv blog that inspired my own: http://billarnett.com/wordpress/. 

And, of course, he’s a fantastic performer. He plays regularly in the Armando at iO Chicago and with his team 3033—his play is whip-smart and laser-focused, yet always patient and supportive to everyone else on stage. He’s a consummate technician who makes every scene seem effortlessly hilarious. 

So, that’s my two cents. Hope you get a chance to see Bill perform sometime (or take an workshop from him, which I highly recommend). And thanks again for reading! 

Laugh Your Cares Away

When the cable television in my home was first hooked up, the first thing I saw was Fraggles. Like most kids at that time, I loved Fraggle Rock, but it was only years later, when my brother got a hold of a box set of DVD’s of the show with facsimiles of Henson’s original scribbled notes as well as letters to producers and executives that I learned that the show was created by Jim Henson with the relatively lofty goal of illustrating to children of the interconnectedness of all of humanity in order to make them more empathic global citizens.

Let’s back up. So the premise of the show, for those for whom memory is a bit fuzzy, is that there is a fantastical universe of Muppets living somehow side-by-side with yet undetected by a human and his dog (the dog glimpses a Fraggle in the opening sequence of each show, but the Fraggle runs into a mouse hole, and into the fantastical world it inhabits, before the dog can grab him).

Now, this fantastical Muppet universe of Fraggle Rock is divided into three tiers. In the middle are the Fraggles, who are mouse-ish sized creatures that most closely resemble the original Muppet Scooter. They live in Fraggle Rock and have all sorts of adventures. Underneath them are the Doozers, who are smaller still, and who spend all their days creating beet-sugar structures that are, conveniently enough, the main diet of Fraggles. At the top are the Gorgs, a family of giants who hunt Fraggles for food (mostly without success).

Hold on…a three-tiered universe where each tier is self-contained but also interconnected? Are you trying to tell me…? Yup—Fraggle Rock is a Harold.

Now, this actually shouldn’t come as a big surprise to most of you. Most sitcoms and other half-hour television shows are generally divided into three interconnected plots. Comedy comes in threes, patterns come in threes, etc. But what’s so special about Fraggle Rock is not only its structure but its mission. Yes, Fraggle Rock was fun and funny and silly, but at its core, it was Henson’s vehicle to try to change the world for the better. Because by revealing the necessary interdependency of these three universes, Henson hoped that, subconsciously, children would come to realize how interconnected their own world was with other micro and macrocosms that surrounded them—other communities, other countries, rain forests, the ocean floor, etc., etc., etc.

To summarize, the two most important implicit features of Henson’s mission were these: 

1. Fraggle Rock would be an entertaining, funny children’s show.
2. Fraggle Rock would be a positive and active force for good in the world by conveying a strong, clear (implicit) message to its viewers. 

And these goals were to be achieved by juxtaposing three interconnected universes within an inherently comedic context. And I guess what I have to say about these goals is this: they are not only not mutually exclusive, they are necessarily linked. Because for Henson Fraggle Rock would only achieve the second goal if it could achieve the first.  First and foremost, kids had to want to watch it. They had to be entertained by it and want to keep watching it until the message (maybe, eventually) penetrated at a deeper level. 

No, I’m not trying to argue that we perform Harolds (or other long forms) in an explicit attempt to bring about world peace or even accomplish any sort of measurable social good. But I guess I am arguing that it would be a mistake to ignore the power of what we do to affect change, even simply at the level of bringing a bunch of different kinds of people into a room and making them laugh together for a little while.

In light of the recent tragedy in Sandy Hook, and so many other man-made tragedies that have and continue to occur in our world, I guess it’s easy to argue that Henson’s second goal might have been a bit quixotic, that we’re no closer to feeling “interconnected” and responsible for each other than we did before the Fraggles came around. But I guess, too, that’s also not an excuse not to keep making art that seeks to both entertain audiences and maybe, just maybe, change a tiny corner of the world for the better, if even for a fleeting moment. 

Happy holidays.

Coaching the Character

Two people are doing a scene. It’s going just okay. Suddenly it’s going pretty not okay. They’re losing the center of the relationship, the premise, they’re denying, not locking into the moves of their scene partner. Don’t worry—this is just a class (or a rehearsal). The teacher/director can help! Suddenly, a voice emerges from a person sitting in a chair and holding a Moleskine. The voice starts to point out all the way the scene is going wrong. Then he starts to launch into a description of all the moves that could have been made to make the scene better. Then he says what he would have done in that scene. The voice goes on for a full two minutes. Then it tells the performers to keep going using the corrections it’s offered.

Uh…okay.

If you’ve ever taught or directed, you’ve been that voice. If you’re smart, you can realize you’re doing it and either stop yourself or, if it’s too far gone, admit you’ve killed the scene, cut your loses and move on to a new scene. It’s human to want to make something better when you see that you could, but we all know that that kind of detailed, mid-scene critique, even if some of the concepts you’re sharing do actually get through to the performers, isn’t going to get results within the scene itself. It’s trying to dock the ship instead of righting it on the open seas.

There are a lot of ways this kind of side coaching can go wrong, and a lot of advice one could give to help a teacher/instructor be a better side coach, but I want to share one simple but powerful thought here that almost always helps me provide more productive side coaching, and it’s this:

Coach the character, not the improviser.

At the most fundamental level, this admonition is about connection. The improviser is in a scene and, if he’s doing it right, he’s inhabiting a character. If that’s true, your goal is to provide the character with a “satisfying” (which needn’t necessarily mean “pleasant,” but does mean “authentic” and “truthful”) interaction. Talking to the improviser at this point rips the character from his world and jerks the performer back into the world of rules and skills. That may be good for a more skills-focused exercise, but in the midst of a scene, what he needs is to feel that moment of truth, that locking-in to the universe of the scene, and the rules and skills have nothing to do with it.

What’s the difference between talking to the improviser and talking to the character? I mean, isn’t that just semantics? It’s the same body on stage, after all. Well, it may be the same body, but the mind is agile, and if you’re training them right, your students should be able to flip the switch that engages an actual persona that is not their own when they inhabit that character. That switch-flipping can be a difficult skill to acquire, but it’s where the greatest depth of truth and comedy will come from in their scenework. Calling them away from the world of the character may afford you the opportunity to bestow them with some of your vast improv wisdom (and sometimes they need that, don’t get me wrong), but it will not allow them to feel the visceral feeling of the scene “locking in.”

So how do you coach the character, and how can you tell when you’re doing it and when you’ve lost the moment? The following rules of thumb can help:

1. Brevity: Maintain the natural pace of the scene (this means your side coach should not go longer than the characters would naturally pause in their reality).
2. Maintain the Reality: Give your side coach as a part of the universe of the scene, not as a person teaching improv.

The first rule, because it can be quantified, shouldn’t be too hard to sense. The second rule can be harder, but some examples can help:

Example Scene:  It’s a scene about a brother and sister. The brother keeps killing the sisters’ fish. It’s four lines in, and the person playing the sister is showing through her body language that she’s upset, but she’s trying to be subtle (subtlety, incidentally, is almost always overrated in improv), passive aggressively saying things like, “Hunh, that’s weird…where’s Mr. Gills?”

Now let’s look at two very different ways on could side coach this issue:

Side Coach 1: “I can’t tell what’s at stake in this scene yet. Be more clear. Name the conflict, guys. Monica, is your character upset about how Brad’s character is killing your pet fish? I sort of saw it in your face but you need to say it out loud. Like, say, ‘Mr. Gills was my best friend and you killed him!’ or something. Okay, go back to that last line.”

Vs.

Side Coach 2: “Go ahead.—tell him how you feel!”

If you claim you’ve never given the “Side Coach 1” type of coaching, you’re either a liar or a genius. I’ve done it a hundred times. Sometimes you just can’t help yourself when you can see exactly what needs fixing and how. And it’s not that Side Coach 1 is “wrong”—in other words, the note in and of itself is probably right—but it’s probably not going to get an authentic correction within the scene, even if the improvisers are able to return to the scene and execute your notes, because now they’re executing as performers who’ve been given a note.

But let’s actually break down some of the potential problems with Side Coach 1:

• Using “improv terms”: The coach here starts out right away with mentioning the idea of “stakes.” This engages the improviser” brain and shuts down the character. It’s like the trigger in the Manchurian Candidate, except in this case what’s killed is a scene, not a person.
• Direct instruction to the improviser: “Be more clear. Name the conflict.” Again, talking to the improviser. You’d never tell two real people to “name the conflict.” That’s not how we talk to each other in real life. It’s improv-speak, and it’s distracting.
• Naming the performers by name: If you had any chance of holding onto those characters, it’s gone now. Monica and Brad are listening to their coach. This is the point, incidentally, where you might actually even see the drop of the character in their bodies—they’ll turn to you, relax their posture, drop the emotional intention from their face.
• “Say this”: There’s actually a potential benefit to feeding a line to a character mid-scene, if you can do it in a way that it naturally integrates into the reality, but in this case, the scene has been so thoroughly disrupted that the specific suggestion of the line is more theoretical than functional, because you’ve lost the emotional intention from whence the line might have derived.

Side Coach 2, on the other hand, is actually the exact same note, but it follows the rules cited above: 

1. Brevity: A brief, concise directive can slip its way into the pause between lines in a way that doesn’t change the rhythm of the scene. You’re almost acting as the character’s subconscious here, planting a seed in an instant and watching it flower in the next.
2. Maintaining the Reality: “Tell him how you feel” is an encouragement to the sister, not to Monica the performer. You’re reinforcing the reality that she feels a certain way, and that she’s ready to reveal those feelings with just a bit of a push.

Also, and this isn’t a primary rule of coaching the character, but it is a nice side-effect, you’ll notice that coaching the character will tend to be more positive (“do this”) rather than critical (“you’re not doing this”). That’s logical, since the character can’t “break a rule” of the scene the way the improviser can. The character might just need encouragement to steer the scene toward its truth.

All this said, there are times when coaching the character is not productive. If your students are so new to improv that they’re really not inhabiting characters yet, they might need a note that’s directly to them as a performer. Additionally, there are those scenes that are so off the rails that no amount of character coaching can right them. But in these cases, the reason character coaching is not effective is really that the nature of the scene hasn’t built up authentic characters that you can actually talk to—the performers are making jokes instead of inhabiting the reality, or their denials are so flagrant that there’s no agreed-upon reality to inhabit.

But as long as your performers have entered the scene in good faith and are doing the work in earnest, coaching the character can be a powerful tool to keep them engaged, right the ship of the scene, and allow them to experience that satisfaction that comes from really locking in and unleashing the power of the scene from the inside.

A Series of Accidents

“If you don’t have the technique upon which to base the style, you don’t have a style at all—you have a series of accidents.” -Philip Glass

The quote above is from an interview Philip Glass, the famous avant garde composer, gave to his cousin, Ira Glass (maybe you’ve heard of him, nerd), in 1999. I was so struck by it when I heard it (yes, on NPR) that I had to pull over to write it down (okay, so I didn’t pull over—but I drove really carefully while I tweeted it). And, of course, since this statement was about art, I thought about how it could apply to the art of improv.

The first thing that came to mind was that question we improvisers hear all the time from well-meaning friends and family (and that I’ve mentioned before) about how you can even “rehearse” improv. Because one of the major suppositions behind this question is that there is no developable “technique” to improv—that it is a sufficient prerequisite to have comedic “style”—for one to merely “be funny” and comfortable with spontaneity and performance. 

We expect such misunderstandings from those well-meaning friends and family, but a performer who finds the latter attributes to be sufficient prerequisites to make great comedy is naive. And, according to Glass, worse—his comedy is nothing but a series of accidents. 

But wait— accidents are occurrences that are entirely outside of our control. And isn’t improv all about placing ourselves in a situation—technical skill aside—where so many of the variables of the performance are outside of our control. Our first act—getting a suggestion from the audience (unless you’re TJ and Dave)—is one of surrender of control. And then, we get out onto the stage with a bunch of other people, all of whom have the ability to make us do things, to send us in a direction with a character or a scene, that we have little personal control over. In fact, one of the first things we’re taught is to say “yes” no matter what, and what is saying “yes” to the other person’s statement/supposition/reality but the ultimate surrender of control? Under these circumstances, aren’t you necessarily left with mostly a string of comedic “accidents”?

Of course, we know this isn’t true of a good improv show—but why not? Why isn’t it just a lucky combination of some funny people being funny on stage for a while? 

Well, let’s go back to Glass. What exactly are “style” and “technique” when translated to improv? When Glass speaks of “style,” he’s talking about that personal flair you bring to a performance—your flourish, your signature. “Oh, So-and-so has that great old man character he always pulls out.” “Blah-dee-Blah is so funny when she goes meta.” Although your personal style can develop over time, it often comes from an inborn place, an innate and unique comedic sensibility of the world. This is often what outsiders believe they’re seeing when they see someone be “funny.” That style is a powerful part of a comedian’s identity, and it’s at the core of what he has to share with the world. But it’s not enough.

What people watching a comedian don’t always see (especially if she’s doing it well), is her technique. Rather than being something unique and personal, technique is one’s ability to perform certain skills that are associated with a good performance. Prodigies are sometimes born with innate technique, but most of us (and even a lot of them) have to learn and develop technique through careful practice: isolation of skills, performance of exercises, acceptance of feedback from someone with an ability to evaluate the techniques you are seeking to master, etc. If we have innate style, it can make our acquisition of technique easier (we can often see the gains of coupling that style with sound technique in a way that makes us want to gain even more), but sometimes it can make us resistant to applying technique to our craft. We might think we can get by on our talent alone. And often we can—for a while. But, like the naturally gifted math student who doesn’t apply himself in class, pretty soon no amount of innate ability can overcome the deficit in technical skill needed to, say, find the limit of a complex function. 

But Philip Glass would go farther. He wouldn’t just argue that style isn’t enough; he’d argue that however far we might have gotten on our style until now is just a happy accident. What you’d deemed your “talent” or your “comedic sensibility” or your “point-of-view” is revealed to be nothing but happenstance, which means it’s in constant danger of being pulled out from under you, leaving you with nothing. 

Harsh. And perhaps hyperbolic. Perhaps. But ask any comedian (in any form) who’s made a real lasting impression on comedy and they’ll tell you that it took them years to build up the technique strong enough to accurately and effectively convey their comedic style to an audience. That’s why stand ups, even and especially big famous ones, will tell you that you have to plan to suck for years—that’s the time it takes for your technique to catch up with what will eventually be fully realized as your style. That’s why Malcolm Gladwell says you need 10,000 hours of work to actually master a skill set. If it were all about just “being funny,” all of the greatest comedians would be the greatest from the very start.

It’s no accident, either, that one of Ira Glass’s more famous quotes, about making good art, reflects his cousin’s sentiment. I’ll quote it here in its entirety, because it’s pretty great:

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me… is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

What Ira Glass is calling “taste” can be easily substituted for “style,” at least in its latent form. The artist has an innate sense of his artistic sensibility, and he can even recognize excellent executions of similar sensibilities in others, but without practice (Ira’s cousin Philip argues that any thoughtful practice is centered on mastery of technique—and I think Ira would agree), not only will he not close that gap, but his style itself will lose its ability to make itself heard in a meaningful way. It’ll be like a super power without a hero, an elixir without a vessel. And that is a terrible waste.

bankyhimself asked: "the Harold is probably the greatest inherent structure for improv ever discovered" If that's true, we've all given up on this stuff WAY too early. There is much to be learned. And MUCH more to discover. Phrases like that make me really sad. Del built the foundation - not the house. I guess this isn't a question. But I invite you to respond.

Thanks for the thought, and I’m sorry if I made you sad. :(

I completely agree with you that we shouldn’t “give up” on new discoveries, and I’m in no way some sort of “Harold purist.” Perhaps it would be best to clarify that when I say that “the Harold is probably the greatest inherent structure for improv ever discovered,” I am referring to the way it unleashes patterns (and specifically the Rule of Three) across a fully-realized long-form performance piece. In that way, maybe it’s like the discovery of nuclear energy (but without the “threatening-life-as-we-know-it” implications)—it was something that was always there in nature, some really smart people saw it there and found a way to harness it, and while of course new discoveries are made in physics all the time, any scientist working in a post-atomic energy world owes something to the people who brought this discovery to light. That doesn’t mean you don’t make new discoveries, or even discover things that challenge earlier theories, but you’re always in conversation with the scientists who came before.

Regarding the “house”—that’s a way I picture the structure of the Harold itself, not all of improv. I’ll write a post about it sometime, complete with a diagram. :)

Also, I am totally cool with you still feeling you disagree with me, even after the above clarification. I just say things the way they make sense to me and hope it rings true and is helpful to some people sometimes.

Thanks for writing and reading the blog!

Rachel