The House That Del Built

Yes And (No)

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:00:00 -0400

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"

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 11:48:00 -0500

(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

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 17:21:14 -0500

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!

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:06:07 -0500

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

nataliebaseman:

Just re-watched the 2007 Upright Citizens Brigade: ASSSSCAT on Netflix. You should watch it - especially if you’ve never seen the UCB4 (plus a line up of additional amazing comedians). It is a full hour of great, great improv.

I first saw ASSSSCAT as part of the Del Close marathon when I…

Natalie is one of the most naturally talented performers I’ve ever known. Despite that, or maybe because of it, she’s also one of the hardest working performers I’ve known. And one of the most lovely people I’ve known period. I can’t imagine all that isn’t connected.

Signifying Something

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 12:28:26 -0500

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.

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

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 23:44:45 -0500

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

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:35:00 -0500

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:

Fraggle Rock would be an entertaining, funny children’s show.
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

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 10:00:00 -0400

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:

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).
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:

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.
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

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 09:55:00 -0400

“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.

"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.

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 08:45:07 -0400

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

Third Beats in the Harold

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:00:00 -0400

There are a million different theories on Harold third beats, and the only one I’ve ever rejected out-of-hand has been the “1 meets 2, 2 meets 3, 3 meets 1” or “worlds collide in a very specific and codified way that implies that all three plots were actually part of the same temporal universe.” My rejection for this systematic approach probably comes from the same place that my aversion to set openings comes from. It comes from a place in me that believes that, although the Harold is probably the greatest inherent structure for improv ever discovered, if you force too many restrictions upon its parts, you are no longer able to allow the Harold structure to find its natural expression for this particular show on this particular night. What if your scenes just don’t want to line up from beat to beat in a way that makes a neat little overlapping third beat structure feasible or desirable? What if that overlap already found itself in the second beat? Have you irrevocably “blown your wad” and ruined the Harold? Of course not.

Instead of following rigid prescriptions, the following are two (non-exhaustive) ways of executing third beats that I believe capture the spirit of the Harold without forcing an artificial structure onto it. For me, these styles highlight some of the best of what a third beat can achieve. As you’ll notice, neither of them dictates a specific type of interaction between scenes, but rather reveals a way of thinking about their connections that can lead to a variety of executions:

1. The “Best of” Style: In the “best of” third beat, you simply let your mind and body run back through the first two-thirds of the show, rediscovering the characters, bits, lines, etc. that seemed to have the most comedic impact. In brief, you’re giving the audience what it wants, but in a deeper way you’re gravitating to the things that got the most laughs because you believe that those are the things that held not only the greatest comedic potential, but the deepest truths of the show. This means their return will be met with joy and recognition, and that whoever finds himself in the scene with you where this character or scenario or bit is being revisited will have an instant sense of where the comedic potential lies and how to blow it out one last time.

2. The “Criss Cross Callback” Style: In this style of a third beat, you can bring back anything you loved about the show that someone else did. In other words, you cannot call back your own funny character, or revisit a story line that you were a character in. You can initiate a scene with someone by revealing that they are their character from the second beat in new circumstances; you can use someone else’s premise as your inspiration for a heightened enactment of it (in the second beat your friend was somehow hilariously scared of cats; in the third you can be Battlecat from He Man). In this execution, comedic moments are both proprietary and shared—in other words, to the extent that you “own” your moves, you cannot bring your own moves back, but to the extent that all moves are “property of the show,” you can freely filch (or pimp) your teammates’ best moves. The effect of playing this way is that a) you are a more present and active participant throughout the show, even (or especially) when you’re not on stage, because you know that other people’s work is the source material for your third beat inspirations, and b) it keeps individual players from being focused on their own cleverness. This is especially important since we are not always the best judges of the value of our own moves in a show. How many times have you seen a player selfishly force his wacky character back into the show in the third beat, when the character wasn’t all that funny to start with, or, if it was, it had run out of comedic potential long before that third beat came around? Allowing your teammates to decide what the collectively best work of the show has been can be a failsafe against that error. In a way, you each become audience members of each other’s contributions to the show and seek to repeat the moves that you enjoyed watching the most—most likely those will be the actual audience’s favorites, too.

Notice that in neither of these descriptions have I stipulated how many third beat scenes there should be. In keeping with my aversion to a set interaction between scenes in the third beat, I have no set number of third beat scenes in my head when I perform. A third beat could be one long scene that incorporates a bunch of elements from the show (I’ve done those) and it could be a bunch of quick blackout scenes that just blow every bit of comedy in the show out to its most absurd level until the show just pops and the lights are forced down (I’ve done those, too).

There is, however, a favorite little move I like to try to do to end a show, no matter how many scenes are in the third beat. And if you believe that using the Harold structure truly creates meaning, that the form of the Harold really has the power to unleash a coherent and thematically-rich work of comedic performance art (Ack! Yes, I said it), then this little move can be one of the most satisfying things you can do to end a show. The move I’m taking about is a return to the opening—the moves of the opening, a line from the opening, the stage picture of the opening. It can be as little as a gesture toward that opening (restating a particularly memorable line from it) and as much as a complete wormhole reversion back into the center of it (if in the opening you were a group of miners in a coal mine, you might bring the group back to the mine at the end). And if your show is tight enough, and your performance present enough, you’re never more than a move or two away from that revealing return to your point of origin (for example, the last scene of the Harold might have someone finally proposing to his girlfriend, and you can focus in on the ring and scene paint the origin of the diamond on the ring back to that mine from the opening, where the coal has now become a diamond). When it you start to feel this kind of return coming and can execute it, the whole show ends up feeling like an awesome thirty-minute Clover, or that moment in an M. Night Shyamalan movie when you realize that that first scene actually held the key to the whole logic of the film, but that it wasn’t until this moment that you were given the piece of the puzzle necessary to make everything come together. I have literally heard gasps of recognition from the audience when that return to the opening is done deftly, and it’s one of the greatest feelings I have on stage as an improviser, because it makes me feel like I’ve done something somewhat meaningful with the last thirty minutes of my life.

Scales and Arpeggios

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 12:27:53 -0400

The other day, I wanted my Harold team to work on incorporating moves from the opening into the rest of the show in order to infuse not only the content of the opening but also its style into the whole piece. The exercise I put to them was this: do an organic opening, then choose three (and exactly three) style elements from that opening (a gesture, a sound, a stylized statement, etc.) and use them a) in the initiation of the first scene, b) at some other point in the first scene, and c) in the edit from the first scene to the second scene.

It was a very specific exercise, and there was some confusion. “If we’re working on organically integrating these moves through the show, why would we be so rigid about how we integrate them in the exercise?” My initial answer was this: “It’s just for the exercise. We won’t do it this way on stage, but I want to isolate the skill right now and work out how we might use it when we actually do perform.”

Of course, it can be disconcerting to hear that you’re going to rehearse something for an hour and then never do it like that on stage, and the group was still a little reticent. That’s when a member of the team, Sasha Goldberg, stepped in with a more elegant answer than I had given: “Scales and arpeggios, guys. Scales and arpeggios.”

I’ve talked before about not treating rehearsal like a finished product, and instead as a place to work out ideas, experiment with styles of play, expand your skills toolbox, etc., and this experience was a beautiful sub-set of that concept. In this case, I was purposely setting up a scenario that was not meant to be a finished product. I would never want the team to actually go into the show with that kind of overly-specific directive. They’d be, as we like to say in the biz, “all up in their heads.” But, I did want them to feel how they might integrate those moves and when. And without a specific directive for the exercise, I wouldn’t have gotten the data I needed as a director in order to set the team up for performance success. I needed to see how these moves were going to function, when they were and were not successful, which types of moves yielded the best or most natural repetition in the scenes, etc. in order to coach the team toward the successful executions and away from pitfalls that might hang up the show. Additionally, without practice the team might have gravitated to one type of execution again and again (only using the opening moves in the edit, for example), and wouldn’t have gotten practice with how the move might work elsewhere, or how different moves might work in different ways.

Improv is one of those strange art forms (like abstract painting) about which people sometimes proclaim, “I could do that.” Since everyone coming to it is fully capable of having a conversation with another person, of “playing pretend,” and—on the whole—of “being funny,” there’s a mistaken perception that all you need is a little push in the right direction and some stage time then, poof—you’re an improviser. We’d never claim that a five-year-old who’s had two piano lessons is a “pianist.” We wouldn’t even claim a teenager with years of lessons is “a pianist” (unless they happen to be a prodigy). My daughters spend most of the time they practice piano playing scales and chords, practicing rhythms, etc. And even the “songs” they play are short and isolate the skills they’ve been working on (not that they know that). They are nowhere close to being “pianists” yet, but they can’t get there without this isolated skills practice.

But skills practice isn’t just for beginners. In fact, professionals spend even more time working on scales and other skills exercises in order to maintain their fundamentals and refine their techniques. Walk by the practice rooms in a conservatory and you’re more likely to hear exercises being played over and over than full-out musical performance pieces.

And so it is with improvisation. With new improvisers, it’s the basics (agree, have a relationship, be in a defined space, etc.), but as you grow as a performer, you keep adding new skills to your arsenal, and each time you do, you’re a beginner again. And so you isolate skills, practice them in steps, talk over what worked and what didn’t, and work on it some more.

And then, when you get on stage, your director probably says something like, “Okay, now forget everything we worked on and just have fun out there.” That’s also a unique and strange thing about improv—a stage play director doesn’t say, “Forget your lines and just wing it!” A football coach doesn’t say, “Now forget the plays and just do what feels right!” But in improv, there’s a necessary level of “mindlessness” that you need to have on stage in order to be present and affected by your fellow players and the show. Which may be why, for me, being mindful and thoughtful in rehearsal is even more important. I’ve mentioned before the importance of intuition—as we know, intuition is something that must be cultivated and reinforced, and it’s something that filters though the intellect, but then finds a home in a deeper place—in fact, once an intuition embeds itself deep into the psyche, it is nearly indistinguishable from instinct. And that’s why it’s so important to create experiences that allow you to practice the behaviors you want your brain to “mindlessly” replicate on stage.

Most people hear a great jazz solo and think there’s some sort of magic or instinctive gift that allows to player to execute it. The truth is that almost all of the jazz greats had a deep understanding of theory. And they’d practice those scales and arpeggios until they became second nature, so that when they would improvise on stage, those coherent musical ideas would express themselves in a way that felt totally spontaneous but also grounded in the inherent rules of Western music. Sometimes we as a culture like to tell myths about preternatural talents (Robert Johnson learning to play the guitar from the Devil himself, or red shoes that magically turning you into a prima ballerina), but those mythologies represent a fantasy, not a reality. In reality, it takes a whole lot of time and effort to make art look (and feel) effortless in its execution. Anyone who says differently is doing something wrong.

The Economy of Comedy

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:24:43 -0400

I had the pleasure of returning to my improv roots last month when I took a group of high school students on a week-long Chicago Improv field trip (one of the perks of teaching at a private school that values “experiential education”). We had workshops at both iO and Second City, and each night we saw a show. It was awesome.

Of course, I got my former Harold coach and improv instructor extraordinaire Bill Arnett to teach the iO workshop. As always, there were some amazing sound bites from him throughout the day, but my favorite, after “There’s not enough crying in improv,” was (and this I have to paraphrase because it was more involved than the first point), “Think back to a hilarious improv show you saw and think about how many laughs there were, and you’ll see that some of the most hilarious, most memorable shows didn’t have lots of laughs—just big laughs when it mattered.”

And sure enough, that night at the Armando show, the best scenes were in fact the ones with a clear, patient build-up to a big comedy finish. Sometimes we think of comedy existing only in the moments of laughter, but in these scenes in particular, I was reminded how comedy resides in the entire process—the build up, the set-up, the knock down. And it struck me as well how often those big, deep, satisfying laughs can only be achieved through patience and process; I like to call this “building comedy capital.”

I may have mentioned this metaphor before, but I want to get deep into it today—to break it down into its component parts and really understand what it means and how we can use it to create memorable, deeply true, and yes, hilarious, improvised comedy.

So, what does it mean to build capital? It means that you have an initial investment: that’s the content of the scene initiation, the opening of the Harold, the character traits with which you endow yourself at the top of the scene, etc. That investment is in the bank and labeled “capital.” And just like with your real bank account, you have the choice of either taking everything out immediately and spending it, or allowing it to stay and earn interest as you continue to add to it to save up for something big and exciting.

Now, if you start to think of different types of comedy “costing” different amounts of comedy bucks (someone please turn this into a board game), then you have to ask yourself two questions every time you want to spend those bucks:

1. Do I have a sufficient balance to withdraw this joke from my comedy bank?

2. Is this joke worth my money?

Question one is mostly objective, but you do have to develop the ability to sense the comedy value of the content of a scene or show, which is different depending on the audience, context, and type of show. Using the energy and response of the audience can help you figure out how much you have in the bank. Improvisers who’ve been at it a long time can almost immediately size up whether the audience is buying what they’re selling, and at what price, even without a laugh—it’s about a certain level of engagement and attention, an energy moving in your direction.

Question two is trickier, because it’s reliant on the performer’s subjective assessment of what moves are worth spending their comedy bucks on. And there’s a trade-off between the immediate pleasure you can get from a cheap joke (and by that I mean “inexpensive”, not necessarily “dirty” or “frivolous”, although there is likely to be some overlap there) and the satisfaction you might have had later if you’d cashed all your principal and interest in at once on a big one. I actually don’t want to say that either one is “better” than the other—in other words, depleting your funds on lots of quick jokes that get mid-range laughs at frequent intervals can be a fine way to spend your time and entertain an audience. But I do want to at least make people aware that there is a trade-off, and what it could mean to wait a bit, to earn that extra interest, and invest in a few big, awesome laughs that stick with you. I mean, do you want Starbucks every day if it means you’ll never be able to save up for a vacation to Costa Rica? Maybe. That’s your call. Starbucks can be a pretty nice thing to have every day, and not everyone would want to forgo that daily pleasure for one week of sitting on a pristine white beach. But I want us to at least consider what it would be like to forgo the Starbucks to save up for something you’ll never forget.

As a slight side note, I would be remiss here if I didn’t point out that, even in a show that wants to get lots of laughs quick, there’s still a necessity to reserve a bit of your comedy resources so you’ll be able to heighten the funny as the show progresses. It’s less an investment strategy and more a straight spending plan, but it shouldn’t go unnoted lest we end up perceiving one strategy as more inherently “mindful” than the other.

Now, let’s say you want to save that capital and even build it up so you can spend it on a few well-earned, great moments of comedy. How to you do that? There are some specific ways you can continue to follow a comedic trajectory while maintaining the tension that will keep the audience from blowing its laugh-wad too soon:

1. Keep it real: Ignore that little voice in your head that wants to say funny things that don’t feel genuine and true. Say what your character would actually say. Follow the patterns within the scene without jumping to an inauthentic gag. Be truthful, even if that means being serious. If you’re truly building a believable character the audience feels invested in, they’ll enjoy it that much more when things start to heighten and get a little ridiculous.

2. Stay emotionally invested: Let your character care about the other character(s) in the scene and what they’re doing (See above, re: “not enough crying in improv”). This doesn’t necessarily mean being dramatic or serious—sometimes we make jokes or are silly because we care. The biggest thing here is to stay present as your character rather than stepping out of the scene as an improviser, because once you let the improviser take charge, he’s got a million great ideas to make the scene funnier, like a writer punching up a script. Hold back on allowing that instinct to take over and let your character start to believe and act like she’s real—your investment will translate to the audience’s investment, which will make your character’s successes and failures all the more real, and more deeply funny.

3. Heighten in a way that increases tension, but doesn’t undermine the information that came before. Heightening too high or in a way that contradicts (or maybe just doesn’t really support) previous information (the most obvious one I see in this category is the “I’ve actually been naked this whole time” when nothing about the scene implied or suggested such a fact) just blows off the tension created by the previous information. The audience will laugh at this crack in the tension—but that laugh costs capital (and lots of it). And you probably don’t have enough capital to keep this up afterwards. If you want to save that capital, say something that’s in line with what came before—maybe you jump one level, but you don’t blow the whole reality out. So maybe you’re farmers and you’re worried the government is going to take over your land—a real situation the audience recognizes from history and literature, etc.—and then we find out you’re actually growing opium. Much higher stakes than the corn or wheat we probably thought you were growing, but still totally fits the reality, especially if we realize you’re in Afghanistan, where government takeovers of drug crops is actually a reality. It’s funny, but because it maintains the reality of the capital you build, it’s a relatively cost-effective strategy.

4. Hold off on the one-liners and puns. Ugh, I know! We love these things! Some improvisers absolutely live by them. And they can be great fun, and in many instances they’re just what your show calls for. But they are quick bursts of comedy, and they have a cost associated with them. They also are a little wink to the audience, which, again, can be a fun moment of shared recognition (“Can you believe we’re making all this up?! COMEDY!”), but they also put a crack in the suspension of disbelief that the audience had been sustaining, another way of draining some of your funds, and that can sometimes cost more than it’s worth.

Which brings me to the most important point:

5. Ask yourself whether you’re in the kind of scene/show that’s playing its comedy fast and hard or slow and smooth. What’s the investment strategy of this show or scene? Take cues from what’s come before. Has the rhythm been one of continual and moderate laughs, or have you established a pattern of starting slow and letting it build to a finish? And regardless of what may have happened before in the show, what is your scene partner doing now? If they’re trying to build a meaningful relationship and you’re making fart jokes, you’re working at cross-purposes.

And I’ll add here one more thing, which I’m going to call the Law of Comedic Conservation. This law states that there is a finite amount of comedy potential present in any closed comedic situation. And combining that with the comedy capital metaphor, we could talk about the danger of trying to force more comedy out of a scene that’s already spent all its inherent comedic value. This would be like printing more money to try to dig your country out of a financial crisis. And we all know what happens when you print more money, right? That’s right—inflation; the dollars themselves become worth less and less. We’ve all experienced that feeling where we go goofy right up top of a scene, get some quick laughs, but then find that, if the scene is left on stage, the goofs we got mileage out of up top don’t get the same response as the scene progresses. You flood the scene market with immediate laughs rather than investing in future laughs, and that’s unsustainable. Again—doing a show with quick scenes and aggressive edits? Then you can afford to spend quickly. But I’ve seen many a Harold crash and burn in the third beat because they ended up breaking the bank by the end of the second beat. Hell, I’ve been in them. It’s exhausting and frustrating.

So, in the end, the most important thing is to do what’s right for you, your scene partner, and the show. And, just like in real life, you might decide that, even though you’re a Starbucks person, this year you want to go on that trip, so you’re willing to give it up for a fixed time in order to reach your goal. In the end, the same admonition regarding saving money is true of laughs: “You can’t take it with you.” So please, by all means, spend every last laugh by the time you hit that final blackout—but spend it at the pace and rate that feels right, and reap the rewards.

Jumping the Shark

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:54:01 -0400

Being a parent means getting the chance to explain all sorts of awesome things to your kids. Recently, for me, it was “jumping the shark.” As I started trying to explain it, I realized the only way to really clarify the concept for my kids was to go back to the original shark-jumping and explain it as it first appeared in our cultural consciousness. As you (and now my daughters) know, the first jumping of the shark actually occurred on the show Happy Days, when, in one episode, the Fonz literally jumped over a shark that was confined in an open tank inside the ocean, on water skis. Don’t believe me? Watch it. We explained to the girls how, ever after that, “jumping the shark” has referred to an attempt by the creators of a waning show to infuse new life into it—a far-fetched plot point, an out-of-the-blue new character, etc. Jumping the shark invariably comes off as cheap, pandering, and/or anywhere from unnecessary to uncalled for.

My eight year old listened quietly to my explanation. Then, when I was done, she said, with a sad shake of her head, “And then it just ruined everything that came before and after.”

From the mouths of babes.

It was at that moment that the profound pain of “jumping the shark” hit me. It’s not just that it’s a cheap, Hail Mary attempt to reenergize that waning character or show. It’s a singularity (to bastardize a term from physics) that suddenly makes everything that came before it cease to make sense and everything after it utterly pointless. And what my daughter picked up on, without having seen the show or the episode in question, was the profound sense of loss one experiences when the reality of a character—or the entire world of a show—is torn out from under you. It’s not just that moment that’s ruined—it’s that that moment ruins everything.

In improv, one of my favorite guiding principles is, “If this is true, what else is true?” It means that your characters and their worlds emerge detail by detail, and that all the details build from and can be traced back to each other and together they reveal a single, consistent, coherent universe. So you don’t build a bedroom with a pink Hello Kitty bedspread on a four-poster bed above a pink tufted carpet and suddenly drop in a Grateful Dead black light poster. Or, you can, but if you do, you’ve changed the character and the story—you’ve made it that the brother and sister share a room, or that the girl who lives in this room is a pot-smoking teenager now and just hasn’t gotten around to redoing the decor. But you can’t just drop the poster into the room and keep trying to insist that it’s just a normal little girl’s room anymore. And you better not drop that poster into the room after it’s almost completely populated with regular little girl things, because then there’s just too much of a different truth that’s been built up, and your poster becomes a confusing distraction.

I find that holding myself pretty strictly to the principle of “If this is true, what else is true?” allows the humor to bubble up from inside the characters and their world, rather than forcing the jokes on them from the outside. And I find that the discoveries and surprises that come (because there will be discoveries and surprises, even if you are being careful to remain beholden to the truths already established in the scene or the show) are always more hilarious and shocking that the ones I’ve tried to impose onto the scene in a conscious effort to shock and surprise.

But there’s something more important here than getting a better joke, and it’s what’s at the root of what is wrong with jumping the shark. Because that external imposition of the joke, the wacky detail that clearly doesn’t fit, the ”I bet you didn’t see that coming wink wink” move that we all can’t help making sometimes (often in a state of panic when we don’t trust the scene to do the work) actually has the power to ruin not just that moment of the scene, but everything that came before and everything that comes after.

When “jumping the shark” is used to describe a television show, what we’re talking about is sense of an inherent flaw in a character choice or event given the world of the show as we’ve known it. And when that happens, we suddenly become aware of the writers’ choice to send the character or plot in that inauthentic direction. We’re not mad at the character; we’re mad at the creators of the show—the writers, the director, the producers. We trusted them with that most precious of human gifts: the willing suspension of disbelief. And in that moment, they betrayed that trust. Because although we all knew that Arthur Fonzarelli was just Henry Winkler in a leather jacket, up until that point we were willing to allow ourselves to believe he was The Fonz, because the creators of the show had made a world satisfying enough that we were willing to buy in to it, and we did. We invested our time and emotional energy to get to know (and love) the characters and the world they lived in, and we legitimately cared what happened to them. And The Fonz made sense as a person in a world. But the moment that shark is jumped, we lost hold not only of the character as he was at that moment, but the character as we always knew him. Our Fonz had an office in the men’s bathroom at Arnold’s. Our Fonz could get girls to follow him by snapping his fingers. Our Fonz would never water ski, let alone over a confined shark. Who is this Fonz and what have they done with our Fonz?!

And what’s awful about a shark jump is that it doesn’t just ruin that character for us. It taints the whole show with an air of inauthenticity. It cheapens the experience and removes the pleasure we felt at immersing ourselves in a universe at once recognizable and novel. It lifts the curtain, raises the fourth wall, says to the audience, “none of this has mattered. There is no Fonz.”

Every night, as improvisers, we ask our audiences to engage in an intense feat of willing suspension of disbelief. We don’t have sets and costumes like a scripted play. We morph in and out of characters and, when we’re not on stage, we’re just hanging out, at the back of the stage or the sides, just being ourselves. And yet we ask our audience to invest their energy to believe something about the characters and worlds we create in those brief moments. And they’re willing to do it, because the satisfaction of watching the truth of life heightened and twisted and transformed into comedic art on stage is strong. But we have to keep up our end of the bargain. We have to let the twists and shocks and surprises come out of that truth, not at its expense. We have to trust that following a genuine path through that truth will lead us to the truth in comedy we’re seeking. And we have to follow that path until we’re there.

Stirring The Hot Chocolate

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:41:58 -0400

I’ve been hearing myself saying something a lot lately that I think warrants fleshing out here. “You are always two seconds away from a great scene.” Here’s what I mean by that:

I notice that many students who reach my advanced Harold class are still having trouble getting beyond the quick gag or goofy character as a scene premise and into the “truth in comedy” of their character and his relationship to other characters. But, having studied improv for almost a year, they know enough to understand that they must get beyond the surface of the scene to make any headway—to release that deep laugh of recognition and to create characters, relationships, and worlds that can hold up for the duration of a thirty minute improvised piece.

But, even with a scene that begins gaggy or otherwise “shallow”, there’s almost always an opportunity to deepen it that presents itself. It’s hard to see from inside the scene, but it’s easy to feel if you train yourself (like in A Clockwork Orange) to be uncomfortable with a lack of depth in your scenework—to crave that bit of context or relationship that makes scenes fly.

The great thing is, when that moment presents itself, it literally only takes two seconds (enough time for a single word or short phrase, or even just a facial gesture—a well-timed roll of the eyes or a smirk) to lock in that deeper level of the scene. It sounds cheesy, but calling that foreman who’s yelling at you for taking your lunch five minutes early “Dad” takes one second and provides you with a whole world of motives, incentives, and history that now flood into the scene. That can sound or feel like a “cheap” move to a veteran, but maybe that’s just because, as veterans, we’re sometimes too jaded and clever for our own good. I’ve seen that “calling the boss dad after twenty seconds of the scene” move a million times, but you know what? I’ve never seen an audience not appreciate the clarity and heightened stakes it provides.

That’s an obvious example, but there are other quick ways to deepen the scene. Realize you’ve been setting up a premise for the first twenty seconds of the scene instead of a relationship? Break out a quick emotional reaction to the other player. See what happens. Probably it’ll be something better than the talking head scene you were stuck in up to then.

And then there’s the scene that got some good emotional/relationship data early on, but has strayed away from it—you get fixated on the premise (“We gotta get this space ship fixed before our oxygen tanks run out!”) or you get stuck in an endless negotiation (You know, the one where you and your roommate just keep reasserting your positions in the argument over who drank the last beer, with no sense that either is ever going to win). Again, the voice in your head should be urging you to change the situation, to deepen it, and in this case you already have the information you need to reengage. It was all there in those opening moments, but it’s gotten lost in the flurry of content you’ve piled onto the scene since then. Remember how your character trudged into the room looking tired and sad before he got into it about the beer? What was making him sad, and how might that have affected why he flipped about the beer? If your scene is a cup of hot chocolate, all that good data you brought at the beginning of the scene—about your character and his feelings about his world and the people and things in it—is that thick layer of cocoa that’s sunk to the bottom.

That’s why, in class, I’ve started calling this reengagement with the emotional core of the scene “stirring the hot chocolate.” The good stuff of the scene is there, or has the potential to be brought back in and enrich everything, but it’s sunk to the bottom (or got caught there from the very beginning), leaving the scene a bit watery and bland. But it only takes two seconds to reach that spoon down to the bottom of the cup and dredge that chocolate back up; stir that good stuff back into the scene.

When I side coach this note (a little “Okay, the oxygen is running out, but what’s the deal with you guys?” or “Right…so how does that fit with what you’ve already established? Go back to the grandmother’s will!”, or what have you), I explain to my students that I waited until the point when my attention as a simulated audience member started to wane, because the scene was just going around in a circle with no payoff, and to get my students to learn to feel that moment come upon them. But rather than panic that they’ve lost the scene, they should learn to be confident that they have everything they need to get that scene up and running again, and to get the audience reengaged and back on their side. “Look, we only have one minute before the oxygen runs out, so I might as well tell you now that I’ve been in love with you for years and I lied about my astronaut experience in order to get on this mission with you.” “Dude, I feel guilty getting pissed about the beer when I make more money than you, but house rules, man!” Bam. Two seconds. Maybe five. Tops.

The goal, as with all coaching, is for the note to be internalized on an almost subconscious level—so the performer who’s practiced this either knows there’s good stuff in the scene and knows exactly how to dig down and get it back up to the top, or realizes the scene hasn’t found that moment of depth, but knows it’s in his power to reveal it. It literally takes two seconds, and the payoff is the difference between a failed scene and an awesome one.

Hey, this blog is super-helpful! I'm taking a Harold class down in D.C., our graduation show is in a week and I was curious if you had any suggestions for the following situation (that seems to happen a lot): what should you do if you think you've figured out what the scene's "deal" is, and you're responding with emotional honesty to your scene partner, but they end up bailing on their initial choices? Or, they fixate on what the scene's abt (fixing a flat) instead of our relationships? Tips?

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:51:01 -0400

Awesome question, Chris! It’s actually two questions, because bailing on choices is a bit different from fixating on details, but let’s try to work through both, starting with the second, because it’s easier:

So this actually happens quite a bit (sometimes you’re on the receiving end, sometimes you’re on the giving end) because, in a scene, we’re constantly trying to subconsciously manage and balance the context (who, what, where, and accompanying details) with the relationship (who are we to each other and why are we here together?), and sometimes that balance gets out of whack. If you realize that’s happening, despite your best efforts to maintain what you rightly call “emotional honesty,” you can literally call it out in the scene, without calling out your scene partner. Just note the think they’re fixating on (changing a tire, the last can of soda, etc.) and say to them, in character, “It’s not really about changing this tire/this can of soda/etc., is it?” 9 times out of 10, your partner will respond with a relationship-oriented offer, because you’ve now taken away the power that the context was holding over the scene. If they insist that it is about that thing, you get to decide what it’s really about and name it (anything that feels right for the relationship—“It’s really about how I always show you up in front of dad,” or “It’s really about the fact that we broke up and I’m not over you”). The scene will more often than not get onto a better trajectory after that.

The first one (when your partner bails on choices) is harder. If he’s really completely dropped those things, how do you “bring them up” again, or should you even bother? Will it just look like you’re fixating on something that’s no longer relevant? Or not listening? Or worse, denying?

Without seeing the specific scene in front of me, I’d offer some advice that I offer for any scene, which is to try to connect to what’s in front of you right now and respond with emotional honesty. Not that you’re just forgetting what came before, but that you’re getting yourself to re-invest in the relationship of the scene rather than listen to that little judgmental voice in your head that side-coaches every scene you’re in, and, in this case, is saying things like, “Your scene partner is really screwing up!” or worse, “You need to make every single detail in this scene make sense or the audience will think you’re a hack.” You don’t, and they won’t. And if you buckle down on the moment at hand, you may find that there’s a natural way of reintegrating some of that data in a way that makes everyone look like a rockstar.

Hope that helps, and good luck in your grad show!

Rachel

The Bengal Tiger in the Closet

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:10:22 -0500

I want to talk today about one of the biggest pitfalls for any improviser. And no, I’m not talking about denial or not listening or forgetting to name our scene partner.

I’m talking about the deep and abiding desire to elicit a laugh, and that crushing moment on stage when laughter-addict in us doesn’t get the laugh it craves right away.

We all know that moment of dread you experience when you sense that your scene isn’t getting laughs because it’s not grounded in a clear relationship, or story, or any clear context whatsoever. You and your scene partner get a couple lines out, but nothing that’s been said has made you feel grounded. Maybe you don’t quite know who you are to each other. Maybe you know who you are—a mother and daughter, let’s say—but you’re not fully clear on the nature of that relationship. Maybe you’ve failed to establish even more basic facts like where you are, or what you’re doing. To build up meaning—and comedy—at this point in the scene would mean several more lines full of a lot of listening and processing and responding. Maybe even some environment work. Meanwhile, due to this lack of clarity, the scene has yet to get a laugh. And it’s been a whole ten seconds already!

So, you panic.

You throw in a wacky detail to make the scene pop. Oh, it turns out that not only are you a non-descript mother-daughter pair doing an as-yet-defined activity for unclear reasons, but you also only have one leg! Really? You do?! Okay…I mean, that’s “funny,” I guess. Maybe. But what about that scene was asking for that kind of detail? Most likely, very little. Instead, the move was probably more driven by your panicked need for something—anything—to be “funny, “ rather than by a real sense that the scene called for that detail.

To be fair, this is one of the most vulnerable moments for any improviser—this feeling of “comedy nakedness.” You don’t know where the laugh is, and even if you could see it just over the horizon, you know it’s out of your reach. If you searched your improviser heart, you discover the truth—that you’re going to have to earn that laugh, and there’s no way to make it come sooner or faster or harder. That’s because, especially in long form, the real, deep laughs come from the establishment of patterns (of character, relationship, behavior), and if the scene hasn’t even established the basics, it’s just not ready to repeat or heighten anything in a meaningful way yet. And so you find yourself in a position where nothing but focusing in on the scene and building that pattern can get you to that meaningful laugh of recognition that is the long-form improviser’s drug.

Now maybe I could cut us improvisers some slack and say that at moments like these what we’re actually doing is trying to make meaning in a scene where we’ve yet to find it—throw in a specific bit of information and suddenly the scene is “about” something. But throwing an outlandish detail up top of a scene that hasn’t generated enough regular, plain-old details yet is like covering a half-baked cake with frosting to try to make it bake faster.

In classes I often call this detail “The Bengal Tiger in the Closet.” Scene’s not going anywhere? Don’t know who you are or why you’re there or why anyone should care? And on top of all that (or really, because of it), you’re not getting laughs? Bring out the Bengal Tiger in the Closet! I mean, why listen to your scene partner and try to actually notice what’s at stake for him in the scene and how that makes your character feel and how that might help define the game of the scene when there’s a Bengal tiger hiding in the closet! Get that tiger out here! Isn’t that wacky?! Isn’t that the goofiest?! There was a freaking tiger in the closet this whole time! Bet you didn’t see that coming! Laugh, audience monkeys! Laugh!

And you know what? Maybe you do get a laugh at that—because a Bengal Tiger in the Closet is shocking and a little goofy—but now you’re stuck with a goddamn Bengal tiger in your scene (or a wooden leg, or a bad case of crabs, etc. at infinitum). Now you have to spend the rest of that scene backwards-justifying that tiger’s presence rather than moving forward toward that genuine, “truth in comedy” laugh that was what you really wanted in the first place. And that’s when you get stuck in a law of diminishing returns: “Oh, what? This tiger? Well, that’s because I used to be in the circus…and I had an affair with the lion tamer…who tried to have me killed so I ran away…but I took this tiger with me…you know…to protect me…ahem…what were we saying again about the mortgage before I brought this tiger out?” And even if he was funny when you first took him out of the closet, now he’s a distraction, and with the shock value of the original reveal gone, you’re just stuck like an idiot, holding a leash. And, in fact, you’ve actually undone whatever comedic value the release of the tiger may have had by wasting time and energy trying to make sense of him in the world of the scene.

But what if we didn’t panic in those moments? What if we could keep our composure and just be present? What if we considered the empty space made by the absence of laughter as a sort of gift—a chance to really process our scene partner’s offer and consider how we feel about it? And then, when we’re ready, what if we responded with honesty? Respond emotionally? You don’t need an exact relationship (mother-daughter, boss-worker) as long as you know how you feel about being in the relationship. Does what your scene partner just said make you happy, sad, frustrated? Is what you guys are doing awesome or wrought with despair? Get your point-of-view straight, get the sense of the relationship straight, and then let the details (even the wacky ones) emerge from the reality of the scene. It literally only takes a few more seconds to commit to locking in to a clear point-of-view and relationship (the same amount of time it takes to bring out the tiger), but the payoff (in terms of the laughs you’ll be able to generate organically and meaningfully) is way bigger.

And don’t get me wrong—that Bengal tiger does belong in a scene somewhere in the world. And if you wait, you might actually discover that the scene he belongs in is yours. But more likely you’ll discover that there was something else waiting to be discovered just up ahead in the scene. So don’t go opening up closets looking for the tiger—if your scene truly needs him, the tiger will come to you.

The Four I's of Improv

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:00:00 -0500

Let’s take a moment to think about some of the improv wisdom we’ve all heard a million times before:

“Play to the height of your intelligence.”

“Don’t think.”

“Follow your instincts.”

“Play smart.”

“Don’t get in your head.”

“Check your impulses.”

Taken together, this advice starts to feel like a giant mass of contradiction. Which way is it? Are we supposed to think or not? Are we supposed to follow our instincts or not?

But actually, if we look deeper into the precise words used in these seemingly contradictory pieces of advice, we can see that they’re really talking about different modes of play, and by understanding the differences between them and their function in improv, we can see how all this advice comes together into a coherent whole. I call this “The Fours I’s,” and at the risk of being one of those people who begins an essay with a definition, I think, in this case, having some dictionary-precise definitions of these words for our discussion is important. So, let’s look at the (American Heritage) dictionary definitions:

Impulse: a sudden wish or urge that prompts an unpremeditated act or feeling; an abrupt inclination

Instinct: a powerful impulse that feels natural rather than reasoned

Intuition: a. the act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition; b. knowledge gained by the use of this faculty; a perceptive insight

Intellect: the ability to learn and reason; the capacity for knowledge and understanding.

Breaking down the language of these definitions can provide us some fascinating insight into how they relate. Impulse is that instantaneous “because I feel like it” response to stimulus we see most clearly in children. Note that, based on the definition, it need not be interactive. In other words, it can spring entirely from within you—a very personal feeling or desire. In improv, this is the kind of response that can feel good at the moment, but leave others wondering what the hell you’re doing. In general, I encourage people to be careful about following their immediate impulses, because often these impulses aren’t a response to the situation in front of them— the scene, the environment, the other player—but simply an isolated and individualized urge.

Next is instinct. Instinct has an advantage over impulse, in that while the source of an impulse is not specified, instinct arises from a natural—and hence more universal—sense of response to stimulus (as we know from the common usage of the term to refer to animal behavior ). Instinct inherently connects us more to the other player, the scene, the environment, etc., because instinct is a responsive mechanism. It responds to context and the situation at hand, but it still doesn’t involve thought.

Cognition first appears in the definition for intuition, which represents a break from the more simplistic stimulus-response brethren. And yet, unlike the fully “rational” cognition of intellect (“reason,” “knowledge”), intuition still stems from a deeper, more natural place. It sits on the edge between the instantaneous, natural urge and the carefully considered understanding. It acts as a fulcrum between your instinctive, animal self and your power of intellect, and it can leverage the best of both natures in the service of comedy.

And that’s what I want to focus on today—the power of intuition.

First let’s review, shall we:

Intuition is the key to making all of that conflicting advice I started with come together. It’s the best of both worlds. Intuition filters our impulses and instincts through a cognitive process that at the same time feels effortless and instantaneous.

Intuition is natural, yet it has boundaries. It’s not going to say, “Do whatever you feel, whenever you feel it. Feel like taking a dump (metaphorically or literally) on the stage? Go for it! There are no mistakes in improv!” It is effortless, but in a way that fits with the context of the scene and with what your team is building.

Intuition is cognitive. It’s smart, yet unlike intellect, it’s not so beholden to a protracted period of learning, processing, and executing that it will “get you in your head” and make your performance stilted or overly controlled. Intuition trusts what it’s learned before—the data it’s taken in, the mistakes it’s learned from, the beliefs it’s tested—and acts in the moment. And the great thing is, you don’t have to be “an intellectual” (or even “smart”, really) for intuition to do its work. Just by the sheer fact of your humanity, you are unconsciously and constantly taking in stimulus and rationally applying it to what you’re learned before, adapting and growing as an organism with each new data point and experience, and responding to future stimulus with that internalized knowledge.

In short, intuition is the perfect balance between the instinctual and the intellectual.

Now, there are some special players, I admit, who can play forever on instinct and do so with success. I’m not talking here about people who run only on impulse. They rarely have long-term success; they’re usually very difficult to play with—you never know what they’re going to do, and even their patterns of behavior seem to have no source other than their own very particular perception at a given moment. But these special instinct players, while just as energetic and seemingly “wild” as their impulsive peers, reveal a certain groundedness to their madness—a deference to a collective “nature” that makes their moves feel “right” even if you can’t pinpoint their source.

These instinct players are like little comedy animals, sniffing out the funny and letting their senses lead them straight into it. But these people are a special breed. And they’re not necessarily “funnier” than everyone else, either—they just get to their funny by feel. These are the people who you get in a scene with and it feels like you’re doing tai chi, just moving with their energy rather than trying to direct it or play against it. Maybe you’re one of these people. If you are, I love playing with you, because you keep me fresh and remind me how much silly fun it is to just play.

But I am not one of those people, and most likely neither are you. Most people aren’t—even the people who are naturally funny. And if you’re not this way naturally, no amount of practice or training can make you this way. It’s that elusive, “you’ve either got it or you don’t” sensibility that can’t, by definition, be taught. But we can practice and train to be intuitive players. We can learn to cultivate that balance between our intellect and our instinct—a balance we’re naturally capable of achieving, and one which will give us the most consistent and satisfying results.

And what’s amazing to me is that, in the moment of performance, you probably won’t be able to distinguish the instinctive player from the intuitive one (hence why we often interchange these words when we talk about “good players”), because on stage it should all look effortless and “mindless” (The UCB admonition “Don’t Think” comes to mind). But for me, the “not thinking” only comes—and I can only trust it—because I’ve built up a series of experiences, done “comedy experiments,” in rehearsal, in previous shows, in my everyday life. And so on stage we rely on the intuition gleaned from this experience.

And here’s what’s cool about the second part of the definition of intuition: “knowledge gained by the use of this faculty.” For those of you sharp about the logic of language, you’ll notice a certain tautological nature to this statement. You gain intuition, in effect, by using intuition. Like a muscle, you build it by putting into situations where it is challenged. But also, like a muscle, you can strain it or use it incorrectly—in isolation or with too little or too much weight. The trick is to work on your comedic intuition in situations where it practices what feels right, and builds itself in that direction. Then, when you get on stage, and the intuition kicks in, is reacts as though by instinct. And it doesn’t feel like intellectual “work,” because the work has already been done.

And that’s what I love about intuition, and why it’s one of the skills at the center of how I train improvisers—because it borrows from the best of our instincts and the most fruitful of our intellectual processes, yet it neither leaves us beholden to our whims nor stuck in our minds. It’s immediate, yet cognitive—and still 100% play.

Everything is Process

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:06:00 -0500

I’ve written about the rehearsal process before in terms of the ways on can break down rehearsal and create both goal-oriented and skill-oriented “lessons.” And I’ve talked about the importance of setting up rehearsals in a way to allow players to take risks and feel safe so that when it comes to showtime, they’ve done the work and it doesn’t feel scary. But I want to go back and stress something about the relationship between the work you do in rehearsal and the work you do on stage, and it comes down to this:

Everything is process.

Rehearsal is process because there’s no audience to observe your outcomes. But, by the very nature of improv, performance is process as well. The product is, in itself, a kind of process. Consider the following analogy:

When you watch a professional basketball game, you know the range of skills you’re likely to see, the match-ups between players, the rules by which it will be played. But you’re not guaranteed a certain product. Just because you went to see Michael Jordan play doesn’t mean the NBA can ensure he’ll score over 40 points, or dunk the ball, or shoot the buzzer-beating goal. You know those are possibilities, but they are not guarantees. Whereas if you see a different type of presentation of athletic and acrobatic skill—say, Cirque de Soleil—the athletic prowess of the performers is not only assured, but their every move has been choreographed and rehearsed to provide you with a consistent and repeatable audience experience. If you see the show twice, you will see the same performers repeating the same skills with the same level of expertise.

Put in this kind of stark contrast, it almost seems crazy that we’d ever purposely watch something that wasn’t guaranteed to be predictably entertaining.

And yet, just like improv, the “product” of the sports game is the display of skill, and the spontaneous outcomes that result from the range of variables present in the game itself. The rules of the game help limit those variables to a manageable amount—otherwise we’d find the proceedings chaotic and unenjoyable (In fact, if you’ve ever watched a sport the rules of which you are unfamiliar, you may have sensed that feeling of chaos as you try to make sense of the game).

Sometimes I think we forget this in improv. We forget that the audience wants to see the spontaneous generation of combinations of characters and objects and ideas, not a particular outcome. They’re not videotaping the show to watch it over and over again later.

And sometimes we even extend this overemphasis on the finished product to rehearsals themselves. We want our scenes to “go well.” We want our teammates to laugh at what we do. We want to be able to say of everything we do, “That would have been great if we did it in a show.”

And I think that this is damaging to the rehearsal process. Not that our peers’ laughter isn’t a helpful indicator that we’ve hit on something good, or that doing an amazing “show-worthy” scene isn’t a great feeling that can translate to on-stage, success, but when we start treating the process of the process like a product in and of itself, we risk losing the benefits of the work at hand, which is the creation of a safe space in which to stretch our skills and abilities—a process by which we grow, individually and as a team, without regard for a finished product to speak of. So go ahead, bomb that rehearsal scene. Take a risk that blows up in your face. Would you stretch yourself that far in a show? Probably not, because people are counting on you to be somewhat consistent. But in rehearsal? Rehearsal is the place to try and fail and try again—to push your limits just beyond the brink of failure, and expand your limits in the process.

Of course, sometimes your coach has an agenda that involves solidifying a certain skill or move as a team. And at those times there is a certain goal in mind within the process. But even then, your coach isn’t expecting perfect execution, and it’s often the failures that teach you and your coach more about what needs work than the successes.

The bottom line: that perfect “spread eagle” dunk that’s immortalized in the MJ statue in front of the United Center in Chicago? That’s an ideal, not a guarantee. And, in fact, it was more common to see that “perfect” execution during the highly controlled Slam Dunk contest than in an actual game. And the joy of seeing Michael Jordan, or any great athlete, play in an actual game, is less based on the hope that you’ll get a glimpse of that ethereal dunk or that perfect serve and more based on the surety that what you will see will be the result of the spontaneous interaction between the player and his environment—the other players, the other team’s strategy that night, the terrain, the weather. We watch because we are engaged in the experience as it unfolds in real time, only once and never quite like that again. The product is the process itself.

Guest Writer: Rachel Klein (Boston)

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:42:34 -0400

montrealimprov:

Here’s the second guest piece in our new weekly series. Each Monday we’ll have a new guest dropping by with some thoughts on improv. So, ladies and gentlemen: Boston’s Rachel Klein.

Rachel Klein is Head of Improv at ImprovBoston and player-coach of Maxitor, one of IB’s Harold casts. Before moving to Boston, she trained at the Second City Conservatory and iO Theatre in Chicago, and performed with the Harold team Chopper at iO. In addition to performing, coaching and teaching improv, Rachel’s comedy writing can be seen on the websites The Smew and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. You can read more of her improv musings on her blog, The House That Del Built.

My college best friend’s then-boyfriend (and now husband) once said something to me that, at the time, seemed sort of nice but trivial. What he said was this: “I can’t decide if you’re funny because funny things happen to you, or because regular things happen to you and you see what’s funny about them.”

My response then was, “Well, probably both…or something.” And then we probably ate some pizza…or something. But the comment has stuck with me all these years, which (my odd propensity for remembering minute details of my life aside) suggests there might be more to it than I gave credit for at the time.

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A little House That Del Built-style love for my Montreal improv brethren. Thanks for making me part of the guest writer series, guys!