The House That Del Built

Typical Situations

Last week I extolled the virtue of “skipping the joke.” This week, as promised, I’m back with what at first may seem like a contradiction as I extol the virtues of embracing the “typical situation.” 

Like many of the insights I’ve had over my improv career, I owe the origins of this one to an exercise taught to me by my coach in Chicago—and one of the smartest improvisers I know—Bill Arnett. One day in rehearsal, Bill made us do warm-up scenes that were line-for-line recreations of the most typical comedic scene scenarios: nervous pool boy and cougar housewife; multiple dates on the same night hi-jinx; Three’s Company–style mistaking of a benign interaction in the next room for a sexual one (“Why’s it so loose?” “I don’t know—I tightened it just the other day!”)

The point of this exercise—and it’s way harder that you’d think—is to not veer from the script at all, to play in out exactly the way you might read it if you were literally reading it from the script of your average television sitcom that was attempting to enact this very typical comedy scenario. The reason it’s hard is that since we all know this scenario already, the temptation to change it up or insert some novel detail is very strong. You take off your shirt as the pool boy, because that’s what’s expected, and—Oh! You’ve got eczema! Or a hump! Or wings! I get it, but that’s not the typical situation. So, in the case of this exercise, you’ve failed. 

But wouldn’t it be funny for the pool boy to have eczema? Or a hump? Come on! Wings are hilarious! Why tie the improvisers hands like this at all? Why not let his imagination run free? Well, because what this exercise teaches is two of the most important skills for a comedian and an improviser: recognition of comedic archetypes, and discipline. 

Respect for the archetype means understanding that thousands of years of comedy have preceded you, and have in fact led up to this comedic moment in which you find yourself. You owe your ability to play in this playground to those who came and built it before you. Like the cavemen who discovered fire, these early comedians found that a few simple principles—familiarity + twist, for example—could exhort a chuckle from those around them. And you are not too good for that tradition. Often that “typical situation” is “typical” because it’s tried and true. Like all of those Shakespearian turns-of-phrase that he invented but have since been used so much that they’re deemed “cliché” (e.g. “all the world’s a stage,” “into thin air,” “standing on ceremony”), these situations have been proven to be an effective delivery system for comedy, and sometimes your attempts to make it your own actually thwart the natural success of that delivery system. Sure, wings are funny, but I’m not sure that would give you a bigger laugh than just the straight pool boy scene we’ve seen a thousand times. It’s going to depend on how the cougar reacts to the wings, whether it makes sense for this guy to have wings at all, where the scene goes from there. It could be funny, sure—it’s just not the pool boy scene anymore, so its funny is going to have to come from a different place now—you may have gotten some mileage from exploiting the typical situation premise at the start, and now you’re heading out on your own in the vast comedy sea. The skilled performer can navigate those waters, but you don’t need to just to prove you can. And more importantly, you should be able to play it both ways—and know what’s called for in a given scenario. Sometimes less is more (a phrase which, incidentally, comes from an 1855 Robert Browning poem).

As for discipline, you need to ask yourself this: Do you have the discipline to play this scene out exactly the way you’ve seen it played out a hundred times before? I’ll tell you right now that most people (myself included), have a very hard time doing this. Perhaps because it just feels too obvious (Really? You really want me to just do this scene exactly the way you expect?), but also because, as improv comedians, we’ve been relying on—and been getting positive feedback for—our cleverness for a long time now. Part of what probably led us to comedy is our ability to “out-invent” our less-funny peers. We’re the ones who’ve always had the skewed take on a situation, the wacky insight. Now we’re being asked to suck all that in and play by someone else’s comedy rules? 

But the truth is that you’ve been playing by those rules your whole life; an innate sense of those rules is actually what has made you a good comedian. Without that sense of the universal formula for comedy, you’d be one of those people who makes jokes that are only funny to him, and are met with awkward silences and stares. You are not one of those people. You make jokes that people laugh at. And they laugh, in part, because you have—consciously or not—used our shared understanding of universally funny premises as your basis. 

This is not to say you should always play “typical situations.” God, no! This is an exercise, and although I do tell people after completing the exercise that there would be nothing wrong with doing one of those scenes, word-for-word, in an actual show, you probably don’t want to do a whole show of them, because the audience’s pleasure of recognition would eventually cross over into complacency.

The great thing about being able to play typical situations is how you can use them in an actual show as a base layer for a scene—like scenic long underwear. This is different from completely derailing its typical-ness (the way the “pool boy with wings” does); it’s about using it as an unspoken way to ground a scene and produce pleasantly surprising results. One of my favorite scenes I’ve ever seen was performed in my level 3 class at iO in Chicago. My friends who were playing the scene began with the body language of two people who clearly felt some awkward sexual tension. Then, after a few seconds, the girl in the scene opened the dialogue with this: “Well, thanks for the kidney.” What followed was an adorable scene we’ve seen a million times: guy likes girl, wants to keep seeing her, girl is trying to figure out a nice way to end it—but also he had given her one of his kidneys. The great things was, they just did the lines pretty much as you’d expect, but with the kidney inserted. “Yeah, well, like, if you ever need help with it, you know, it was mine for a while, so I could come over and—“ “Oh, no, that’s cool. I’ll figure it out.” “Oh, cool, sure. Well, if you ever want to, like, hang out, or—“ “Yeah, totally. I mean, I’m supposed to be resting right now…” “Yeah, of course. Because you just had a kidney transplant.” Adorable. And, apart from the kidney thing, totally real and relatable and typical. And hilarious.

That’s how I tend to use typical situations in actual shows; they provide me with a grounding that has more than once saved a scene of mine from crossing into crazytown where nothing makes sense anymore, especially when there’s already a layer of atypical on top of the typical. I remember the base layer and stop myself from adding elements to the scene that are too far afield of that, no matter how clever they sounds inside my brain. The power and legitimate humor of typical situations have also comforted me in scenes when I feel like I’m not “working hard enough” to produce something novel, because I remind myself that comedic novelty is often overrated, and that, really, everyone likes a good “I-Love-Lucy-factory-conveyor-belt-speed-up” scene every once in a while. 

How typical.

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