The House That Del Built

The Intellectual Musings of an Improv Wonk.

The Atomic Model of Improv

I’ve been using the analogy of an atom a lot in my advanced Harold class this session. Specifically electrons. Specifically electron valence levels. Specifically revealing that I am a big fat nerd.

 

Now, I was an English major in college, but I find that some of my favorite and clearest metaphors for improv come from the world of mathematics and physics. And I think that must be because comedy, like the graph of a function or the shape of a crystal, is ruled by the laws of nature—symmetry, balance, beauty. There are some great poems about that stuff, too (Keats’s Grecian urns and “truth is beauty” and all that), but I find that the precision of an analogy from the physical world is sometimes more fulfilling than what that we can express with the imperfect tool of human language.

 

So, electrons. As many of us might remember from high school chemistry or physics, an atom is comprised of a nucleus, containing protons and neutrons, and, surrounding it, a bunch of moving electrons. If the atom is not ionic, there are the same number of protons as electrons, which maintains the balance of the charge of the atom. In the atomic model, electrons move in orbital paths around the atom, called valence levels (picture planets orbiting the sun). And each valence level can hold in it a certain number of electrons. Here, I’ll let Wikipedia explain the rest:

 

An electron shell may be thought of as an orbit followed by electrons around an atom’s nucleus. The closest shell to the nucleus is called the “1 shell” (also called “K shell”), followed by the “2 shell” (or “L shell”), then the “3 shell” (or “M shell”), and so on further and further from the nucleus. The shell letters K,L,M,… are alphabetical.

 

Each shell can contain only a fixed number of electrons: The 1 shell can hold up to two electrons, the 2 shell can hold up to eight electrons, and in general, the n shell can hold up to 2n2 electrons. Since electrons are electrically attracted to the nucleus, an atom’s electrons will generally occupy outer shells only if the more inner shells have already been completely filled by other electrons.

 

What, you ask, does this have to do with improv? It’s actually a really beautiful and simple (in the mathematical sense) way to illustrate the concept of “heightening”. In heightening—whether in a scene or a game—subsequent statements, details, sounds, etc. build off of previous ones, increasing in intensity or impact until a sense of release occurs and the scene or game is over.

 

Why I like the atomic model is this: in heightening, it’s not necessary that every single offer, statement, sound, etc. be bigger and bolder than the last. It’s okay to stay at one level of intensity and explore it for a little while. This happens in a group game when one person makes an offer and several others chime in with related offers that provide reinforcement to the initial offer. But there’s always that time when the team senses that it’s time to raise those stakes, and, in the analog of the atom, that’s when you’ve exhausted the space in that first valence level, and it’s time to start filling the next level—a player makes an emotional offer when up to that point the offers had been simply factual; a subtext is revealed where before there was only exposition. And once this heightening happens, you can’t go back down. Not just because you’ll lose momentum, but because, according to the model, there’s literally no more space in that lower level. The show is already full and done with this non-heightened material, and it’s time to move on.

 

(Now, those who know this model well know that it’s actually possible for electrons to be present at a higher valence level even when the lower level isn’t completely full, and we’ll talk about that in a bit, but for now suffice it to say that this is not the natural state of things and that it takes extra energy for this to come about.)

 

You can see this analogy in action by considering an example of someone trying to force a game or scene back down a valence level after the lower level is full and it’s already moved up. Imagine a group game where the team is lined up across the stage making individual statements (often called a “We See Eight”):

 

“The color blue reminds me of rain.”

“The color red reminds me of fire.”

“The color green reminds me of the first time I went to a frat party and I puked in the bathroom.”

“The color yellow reminds me of the time I peed my pants in Mr. Archibald’s Geometry class.”

 “The color orange reminds me of the sun.”

 

That last statement is clearly a let-down from the direction that the game was going. The audience will be disoriented and will wonder why we’ve gone back to the place we started just when things were getting intensely personal, and your fellow players will wonder what their next move is (stay down there? Try to pop back up? Cut their loses and end the game?). You’ve taken the energy right out of the game.

 

Now, for those of you who really want to steep yourselves in this analogy, in some cases not filling the levels in their natural order creates the possibility of emitting a comedy photon. In the atom, this happens when an electron is at a higher valence level and shifts down to a lower level. And this happens when an electron didn’t naturally belong at that higher level anyway (i.e. there was still some room at the lower level). Extra energy was added to the system to get the electron higher than it naturally wanted to be, but it wants to be lower down, and when it comes back down that energy is released. In the analog, if someone heightened to a level before the game was ready for it, it can be cathartic to pull it way back down:

 

“I don’t like the color blue because it reminds me of a rainy day.”

“I don’t like the color green because it reminds me of the green scarf I lost.”

“I don’t like the color purple because it reminds me that there was a time in United States history where African Americans were kept as slaves to the white man.”

 

Here there wasn’t enough build to justify such an extreme heightening, so you can either keep pushing energy into the system and keep the intensity that high, which will take a lot of work, or let the game come back to rest where it probably belongs (“Uh…I just don’t like red because I’m color-blind.”). The result there, in the atomic model, is the release of a photon, which would probably translate in the comedy analog into the laughter that follows a tension and release (this experience can actually make for some of the most satisfying “buttons”).

 

Whatever your move, the single most important factor in executing heightening well is being able to sense the build of the energy. One has to be able to mentally note how each offer is “filling the levels” of the game, when the offers pop up into the next level, and how much each level can hold.

 

And, of course, in the end, this is just an analogy, and improv is more art than science. There’s no exact number of electrons, no actual concentric circles of energy balls orbiting a stationary center. There’s no failsafe for funny, and sometimes it’s the times when we completely break what we think are the rules that we find the most surprising and fulfilling moments of comedy. But, really, none of those things I described is observable in the atom, either. That’s why it’s called a “model.” It’s a suggestion for a way of visualizing a natural phenomenon that is statistically consistent with the data we can observe. And in the way that we as improv coaches and performers try to create and use models based on our experience of what generates laughter, improv is science. 

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