The Rule of Threes: Freedom, Power, Responsibility
The Rule of Threes. We all know it. It’s been beaten into our heads since our first day of improv, like “Don’t Deny” and “Yes, And”. And we have some idea of why it works, too. Three’s a pattern. Three’s a set. Three’s company.
But if we really want to crack the code of threes, we have to start with mathematics. In geometry, one point is simply a placeholder, two points a line, but three points make a shape. And they make the simplest shape possible. That’s why stools have three legs. Add a fourth, and you need them to match lengths perfectly in order for the stool to be stable. Leave it at three, and the stool finds its stability regardless of the length of the legs; three creates a state of natural equilibrium.
That’s also why we talk about the “Rule of A Thousand.” Do it four times, and you might as well do it a thousand, because you’ve already added too much complexity for the system to work it out on its own.
The Rule of Threes can be distilled into a warm-up most of us have been doing since that first day of long-form class: The Pattern Game. It’s simple, right? One person starts the pattern, then next person says something that matches what he or she presumes is that pattern, and on from there until everyone’s had a chance. But let’s just focus on the first three people right now because, as we’ve said, three is all you need for a pattern—the rest of the people basically just need to fall in line.
I identify these three people with the following attributes that define their position in the game: Freedom, Power, and Responsibility. Really, these roles fit with any set of three—in a scene, a game, a graph (the first point can go anywhere it damn well pleases; the second point, no matter where it goes, is in relationship with the first; the third point establishes the bounds of a three-dimensional shape that points one and two are obliged to join)—but using the Pattern Game, I think, isolates how it works pretty well in terms of performance and improvisation.
Start with Person One. He has the freedom to choose from anything in the world of things and ideas. He could say “octopus” as easily as he could say “loneliness”, and no one can argue that he is wrong on either account. He is free to say whatever comes to mind.
Person Two then has her chance. Hers is a position of power. No, she did not get to create the pattern, but she now holds a single point in her hand, and gets to control the direction in which it will travel. From the word “red”, for example (and my favorite example for the pattern game, because colors are both very concrete and potentially very abstract nouns, so they present so many possible patterns), she can say “blue” to establish a pattern of colors, but she could just as well say “printed” and turn “red” into “read” and set up a pattern of past tense verbs involving things done to or with words. She could say “platelet” and you have a pattern of words involved with blood (“blood”, incidentally, does not fit this pattern, because it is the pattern). The world of ideas has been reduced by Person One, but Person Two chooses where to go from there. She sends us in a direction.
To Person Three, then, falls responsibility. The pattern has been set in motion, and clearly enough so that the third choice should be clear. It is the responsibility of Person Three to listen to and acknowledge the direction in which the pattern has gone. It would do no good for “red” and “blue” to be followed by “printed”, even if “printed” could have been a word that would have followed “read.” But it is equally irresponsible for person three to follow “red” and “blue” with “color”, since the first two words were not category names but actual color names. It is always hardest to be Person Three, but it is also the position that produces the most satisfaction in both the players and the audience when executed correctly.
And by “correctly”, I don’t, of course, mean to suggest that improvisation is prescribed in a way that removes spontaneity, but neither would I ever lie to someone by telling him that every single move in the universe of moves is equally what the scene or show needs to progress in a meaningful, satisfying way. Moves can be wrong. Shooting someone who has just knocked on your imaginary door in order to provide useful information for the progression of the scene is “wrong.” Telling the person who has already established herself as your mother that she is your pet cow is “wrong.” When such things happen, good improvisers adapt and fold them into what is already true about the scene or show, but the time this takes is almost always at the expense of forwarding the established themes of the show. It’s rare that a one-sided move of this sort is a pleasant discovery, and pleasant (and pleasing) discoveries are what patterns are all about.
