The House That Del Built

The Intellectual Musings of an Improv Wonk.

Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Improv I Learned By Watching The Tick

In college, like all good college improvisers, I dated another college improviser. And like all good college improviser couples, we once got into a horrible fight over the nature of comedy. It ended in tears. Hilarious.

Oddly, I remember quite a bit of the argument, and what I remember best is that we both used the television show The Tick as our case study. Remember The Tick? It was about a giant superhero tick who lived with a regular dude in an apartment. There were superhero elements of the show interspersed with everyday sort of sitcom moments. Very Post-Modern. Anyway, I can’t even remember which of us was arguing what point, but I remember that The Tick embodied both sides of the argument, which went something like this:

Comedy is the recognition of the familiar, versus

Comedy is an unexpected twist on the familiar.

Honestly, looking at those two positions now, I really don’t see why we were at odds, because those two points seem to really be the same thing, and the second one seems to contain the first (clearly there were other issues with this relationship if we were jonesing this bad for a fight). But, outside of the ridiculousness of this story from a relationship perspective, the comedy formula of “familiarity + twist” has stuck with me ever since.

Serving up scenarios both familiar and novel is often considered good comedy practice. But that juxtaposition also represents a dramatic irony—the gap between your understanding of the scene as a performer and your character’s understanding of the scene as a real event in her life. So, while from the point-of-view of the performer, the world of the scene may be quite novel, to your character, that world is, by definition, familiar. After all, she lives in that world. In other words, “in a world of Nazi zombies, a Nazi zombie stripper is just a stripper*.”

Think about that for a second.

That means if everyone in that stripper’s world is fascist, undead and eats brains, then that information might, you know, come up in context or whatever, but it’s not a “big deal.” It’s not a “discussion.” It just is.

And to me this is an error we often make as improvisers—we mistake our sense of novelty regarding the scene for the character’s. Because the character isn’t shocked or surprised when she walks in on her mom eating some dead human’s brains. (I feel like I have to give a serious disclaimer here that I am in no way generally advocating Nazi zombies as a go-to premise for grounded scene work. That said…) The stripper might wonder what her mom is doing up so late, and the mom might say she was worried about her stripper daughter, dancing every night for all those leering Nazi zombies who might take advantage of her (not the regular nice-guy Nazi zombies she wishes her daughter would date). Anyway, stripping isn’t something nice young Nazi zombie girls do. Nazi zombie stripper roles her eyes. Here we go again…

The twist, if you’re noticing what’s happening here, occurs in the presentation of this scenario to the audience, but it requires the dramatic irony that keeps the characters unaware of this twist. There’s no “Oh my God why is your face falling apart?!” from the mom. Of course the daughter’s face is falling apart. A simple, “Your cheek is crumbling, honey…you should take better care of yourself,” suffices, and is actually a more potent execution of that dramatic irony because by not acknowledging the strangeness of the context, it maintains a greater tension between expectation and reality. And calmly reminding the daughter that she missed the neighborhood book burning—sigh, again—acknowledges the full identity of the characters without throwing in a bunch of performer-generated Nazi jokes (which, let’s face it, will most likely not be well received anyway).

It’s hard to maintain this set of simultaneous understandings—you have to be at once totally given over to the reality of the scene yet totally conscious as a performer of how the scene is playing to the audience. But it’s sorta like any skill that takes time to practice, and you can learn to maintain both perspectives in the same way you can learn to pat your head and rub your tummy. In fact, like patting your head and rubbing your tummy, once you nail it, it feels awesome and you never want to stop.

That “awesome” feeling is you locking into your scene in a real way, such that the content plays itself, and you’re not searching your improviser brain for funny things to say. At the same time, your improviser brain isn’t disengaged; it’s listening for clues on when to heighten, what to notice in your scene partner’s responses that might intensify the scene, and how to keep the pace of the scene moving forward toward a strong edit. Basically, the improviser in your head is free to focus on technique while the character lives in the specific world of the scene. Basically, all the awesome parts of you are firing on all cylinders and doing what they do best.

Just don’t ever try to discuss it with your boyfriend…

*Credit where credit is due: I adapted this statement from a similar one Bill Arnett once said to me. I don’t know if he borrowed it from someone else.

  1. bernardin reblogged this from thehousethatdelbuilt and added:
    read, especially
  2. thehousethatdelbuilt posted this