Seattle Comedy Nerd

Just some thoughts on how improv scenes start.

We recently had a rehearsal wherein we had two people play “10 characters through a door”* at the same time and had those characters exist in a scene together for maybe up to a minute. I found that there were two types of people who played this game: those who went directly to their partners and those who went their own ways. In general, I would say that the scenes went, in order of amount I was intrigued by them: 2 characters that went their own ways, 1 of each kind, 2 characters that went directly to their partners. Is this empirical evidence that checking in creates worse scenes? Of course not. Some of the scenes with characters that immediately checked in were great, and some of the scenes with characters that went their own ways were disjointed and amounted to nothing.

I do think, though, that checking in is 90% of the time, a move made out of fear, and (coming back to the CENTRAL PILLAR OF MY NEWLY-FORMING PHILOSOPHY OF IMPROV) fear creates bad improv.

There is still that 10% though, and there’s a lot of power in the check-in that lives in that 10%. If you commit to a character who is dependent on the love/fear/affirmation/whatever of the other character who is in the scene with you, then it could make complete sense to take your character right over there and get your fix.

The fearful check-in is made out of lack of commitment, the fear of the free-fall of the first few seconds of an improv scene, the thought that someone else’s idea must be better than yours. Thus, the other character’s choices will intrinsically change yours, or make yours for you. It’s an easy way to fall into a “teach me how to _____” scene, or a scene where we both feel the same way about the same thing and to the same extent.

The 10% check-in is made after a commitment and so when you approach the other character, you already have something that cannot be taken from you, and is stronger than anything that other character could try to force on you. You’ll have to adapt to the situation of course, and the other character is going to present obstacles to overcome to achieve your objective, but that’s what we want out of improv anyway.

I think a problem in short-form that we often face is the opposing forces of taking your time and finding your place in the world versus the fast and furious, “get them laughs” mentality that short-form often has. Even after all these years, I find it truly difficult to utilize all those great things we learn in rehearsal when the lights hit and the audience is ready to be entertained. And that’s just the fear that I need to face: I have my nice comfortable short-form that I know works, and that consistently produces shows that I would rate a 7 out of 10. Certainly not a bad place to be, but there’s still those 8’s 9’s and 10’s that we could be doing.

* One actor walks towards a point. Once that point is passed, the actor must immediately takes on a character, lives in the character for a few moments, then drops to neutral and quickly resets himself, immediately walking towards that point again. Repeat until you do 10 distinct characters. Good for finding out the character types you tend to do and to force you into different physical spaces. Best done with vocalization allowed, but no verbalization (in my opinion).

This week’s rehearsal focused on verbal restrictions. I will say it was nice to have a theme to the rehearsal, but I felt like it still lacked intention. We were exploring an aspect of improv, but with no clear goal or purpose. Nothing wrong with that, certainly some of the best epiphanies come from straight up exploration. I don’t think anything happened for me this week, but we’ll see what comes from writing about it.

The first item after warmups was Emotional Explosion scenes, where we focused on having an immediate and emotional reaction and seeing where that led us. There was some confusion after the first couple of scenes about the emotional explosion coming too soon; that we weren’t finding the right time to explode and that our scenework was suffering for it. I think my confusion stemmed from my thinking that the point wasn’t to do good scenes, the point was to play the exercise of emotional explosion. 

I think this plays into the difference between workshop and rehearsal. I wonder if maybe I am in the wrong mindset for what Jet City Improv rehearsals are. In my head, JCI rehearsals are about making everyone a better improviser overall. This, in turn, will lead to better JCI shows. But perhaps JCI rehearsals are really about doing better scenes, which in turn, will also make for better performances. So while I am looking at rehearsals as workshops, maybe they are indeed rehearsals for a specific show, and they are not meant to make me a better overall improviser, but rather, a better Jet City Improviser. Certainly, that is the way that rehearsals tend to work for every other show. When I go to a rehearsal for Quiz Show or Funbucket, we don’t practice general improv skills, we practice the show. I don’t know why I have it in my head that this one is different.

We have had workshop rehearsals for JCI where we dis awesome stuff like clowning and Suzuki Method and such, so maybe I am projecting my personal desire to do more stuff like that onto my expectations for rehearsals each week. There. Epiphany achieved I suppose. Let’s move on.

As I said, the rest of the rehearsal was devoted to verbal restrictions, and we actually started off with as restricted as you could get: silent scenes. No gestures, no miming to attempt to talk without talking, just silent scenes.

The biggest thing I took away from watching these scenes was something I already knew, but was worth reminding myself of. In silent, or verbally restricted scenes, the only way to affect other people is to affect yourself. It is probably good advice for any scene, regardless of restriction. I saw a lot of people come in to scenes and try to affect them, but the only people who did were the people who focused on their characters and what was going on with them.

Example: there was a scene involving a birthday party. The main characters were a sad little kid, an overly happy clown, and a basically comatose older man. The clown character was so focused on DOING and making things happen, that he ended up not affecting the scene at all. The old man, on the other hand, just sat in a chair and basically slept, but since his action was so simple that all the other characters in the scene gravitated towards him. The sad kid attended to him and tried to feed him cake, and a nurse entered with a cart full of medications and gave him a shot. Meanwhile, the clown ended up being carried off by helium balloons, and no one seemed to care. By committing to one thing and making sure he took care of that one thing, the old man pushed the scene’s plot forward more than all the hijinks and plot that was happening to the clown.

And this theme repeated itself through all the scenes. The characters that affected scenes the most were the ones that affected themselves. They became the protagonists (or antagonists) immediately, because they were the ones the audience (read: me) was interested in watching.

Next up were 2-person scenes where one person was restricted to the phrases “Yes”, “Thanks”, “Sounds good to me”, and one other, chosen by the audience. This seemed like a good exercise for beginning-intermediate improvisers, as it forces agreement, but the restriction seemed to put the onus of the scene on the non-restricted improviser, which is weird, since we just finished scenes where no one was allowed to talk at all, but I suppose the asymmetry of this one changed things. I will say that I particularly enjoyed one scene where the audience-chosen phrase was never uttered, but rather, formed the basis of the restricted improviser’s character. Far more interesting, and an excellent use of suggestion as suggestion, rather than suggestion as audience mandate.

Tangent: a friend and I were recently talking about how much more interesting asymmetrical games are, compared to symmetrical ones. That is, games where different players have different rules/strategies/goals. While it seems true to me that most good improv scenes are going to be asymmetrical from within (different characters have different objectives and different tactics), I wonder if there are fun improv games that are asymmetrical from OUTSIDE, wherein different players are given different rules. I have tried playing games like that, where one player is restricted to a certain number of words per sentence while another is entering/exiting off of a specific cue word, while yet another speaks only in rhyming couplets, but those tend to the clusterfuck end of the improv game spectrum. Symmetrical games in improv seem to work better, but I don’t think that that has to be a hard and fast rule. So let me know if you think of any.

Finally, we ended with another 2-person scene where one person started with 10 words per sentence and counted down to a 1-word sentence, while the other started with 1 word and worked up to 10. We only did a couple of these, but the concept was very interesting (and asymmetrical! I didn’t plan that tangent above to work so well here, but look at that). We agreed, for the most part, that the person counting up from 10 was unnecessary, and that if anything, both people should be counting down from 10. Or perhaps that there is a shared pool of words. That is, you get a number from the audience and each successive sentence in the scene has 1 fewer word—regardless of who speaks it—until you end with the 1 word sentence. The mounting tension that was created by fewer and fewer words was definitely great, and was also definitely diffused by the person getting more and more words per sentence. So there’s another asymmetrical game where the asymmetry works against the goal rather than with it. And also, there’s another great endorsement for an economy of words. Fewer words create greater tension, and more words can diffuse that tension, so you can build it back up.

And that is pretty much it. I got a lot more out of this rehearsal than I thought I did at the time (and the time immediately after at the bar).

Rehearsal was preempted last night by a photo shoot. No complaints here, it was one of the most fun nights I’ve had in recent memory: hanging out and talking to some of the people I enjoy the most in this world. But, since I have this time blocked out to think and write about improv, perhaps I can use it to get back to that post about warmups I had been meaning to write like a month or two ago.

The catalyst: To recap, the reason I had been thinking about warmups recently is that the warmups we do at our weekly rehearsal had not been working for me. 25 people in a circle doing exercises that, upon reflection, seem to be well-designed for a group of 6-8.

And I think by “well-designed for 6-8 people” what I really mean is “passive”. Games like Wordball, Categories, and Superheroes where another player must give you permission to play the game. In Wordball, you do not speak unless spoken to, so, in a group of 25 people, if the game is played perfectly equitably, you will do one thing every 45-50 seconds. With time like that in between interactions, it is very easy for an improviser to stop paying attention, start talking to friends in the circle, or finding other ways to occupy his brain. So efficiency is very low, to say the least.

Not all warmups are like this, of course. We did a great warmup called Scenes in a Circle, which was basically like if 3-line scenes and La Ronde had a baby. This one was great, even with 25 people, because you were not called upon by another improviser to take part in the warmup, you took part when you were inspired to. So yes, you still might not actually do anything for minutes at a time, but you were always engaged with what was happening in the middle, because you were always looking for the inspiration to start the next scene.

And this, I think, segues nicely into my main point for this post: warmups, like everything else in improv rehearsals, benefit from directorial intention. You need to match the warmups you do before a show/rehearsal to that show/rehearsal. There are no magic bullets that always work. There are no rules that say every warmup must start with Wordball. I used to be terrible at this. When I taught classes/directed shows, I often let the students choose what warmups to do. After all, I thought, the warmups are for the students/actors benefit, why should I force them to do something, when they can do what helps them most?

I changed my mind on that subject when we were rehearsing Unspeakable Horrors, an H.P. Lovecraft-inspired longform. Things were dragging and inspiration was slim. I don’t know if I came up with this or if it was the Assistant Director, but the suggestion was made to play the game Superheroes, with the twist that rather than a superhero name, you gave yourself a Lovecraftian character archetype (e.g. “The Overly Curious Scientist”, “The Swarthy Arabian Merchant”), spoken in that character’s voice. Immediately, new characters were popping up all over, those characters made their way into the rehearsal shows, and I think we really reached a milestone in the show’s development. All from one little warmup. I highly recommend it to any genre deconstruction-type show that benefits from specific character types.

During another rehearsal process, for our Quiz Show…err…show, we ran up against a warmup that was interesting and challenging, but did not fit the show at all, and most of the cast felt it and therefore did not take the exercise seriously. Thus, it tended to make subsequent rehearsals WORSE if we played that game. After identifying the problem, we eliminated the warmup from our routine, and things picked up.

Lost Folio, our Shakespeare show, spent 90% of its warmup time creating impromptu Elizabethan dialogue replete with metaphor and bawdy innuendo. That was the hardest part of improvising Shakespeare, and our warmups forced us to be thinking about it nonstop, much to the improvement of the show.

The last show I wanted to talk about regarding this is Funbucket: a structure-free show. It’s basically just a short-form show where every game is an open scene and all the suggestions come from objects rather than from shouting. Warmups for this show are both tricky and super simple. Since there is no structure for the show, you cannot pick warmups that support that structure. Recently, we have found that Word-at-a-time Fortune Cookies (complete with horrible Charlie-Chan-esque accents, of course) really are a great warmup for the show. But also, anything that is organically started and just keeps going because it is fun is just the best. It gets the whole cast united and thinking in the same way. Two weeks ago, most of our warmups consisted of the cast singing songs and replacing one word in the lyrics with the word “dong.” I can’t tell you why, but it was the best thing for us to do to get ready for our show. “Dong Spot” I think we ended up calling the game.

So there we go: match your warmups to the show you are performing (or the lesson you are trying to teach in the case of a workshop), and you will go far. Play the same games rehearsal after rehearsal regardless of show/intention, and you risk one of your players overthinking the whole idea of warmups and writing a lengthy Tumblr post on the subject.

We played two games in rehearsal. First up, Irish Drinking Song. Here’s what I got out of it: 

Fucking commit. This, of course, goes for every improv thing ever, but this game highlighted this universal truth. At the top of the game, there is traditionally a little spiel from one of the players setting up the universe for the game:

1. we are Irish; 
2. we know thousands of drinking songs, and
3. (after interviewing an audience member) we just so happen to remember one of those songs that is about a person just like the audience member we interviewed. 

So here’s where the lack of commitment really did damage to the game: if your Irish accent sucks (and let’s face it, most of our Irish accents suck), and we take time to pause and highlight how it sucks, then I’m already out of the universe that you have set up. You lost me at point #1. You aren’t Irish, you are an improviser pretending to be Irish.

If, on the other hand, you commit 100% to your shitty accent, then either I don’t care that your accent is shitty or it is even funnier how bad your accent is. It is the same principle that guides improvised singing (and really improvised anything). I would much rather see a bad singer who is singing their heart out than a good singer who is holding back out of fear of judgement.

And then there’s the song itself. You said at the beginning of the scene that you all knew this song. You remembered it after talking to Steve the pediatrician or whatever. So that means nothing in the song can take you by surprise, shock you, or in any way make you tilt your head at your fellow performers. This happened in a couple songs, but most noticeably in a song that ended up being about some pretty dark stuff, lots of kids dying, etc. Sidelong glances and disappointed head shakes regarding the content of the song that your fellow performers are singing tells me two things:

1. You lied to me. You didn’t know this song at all. If you did, the fact that kids are dying in it wouldn’t surprise or disappoint you.
2. You care more about the audience knowing that you the actor disagree with the content of the song that you care about you the character. It is basically the easily-offended-Seattleite version of mugging to the audience.

So instead of the sidelong glances, which are actor moves, find other ways to react to the story that are character moves. React emotionally to the story being sung, and react in character: get sad, or get off on the bloodshed, or whatever, just make a choice and commit.

Next up: Shakespeare. We were playing this one because, as always, the game goes very long in shows. To me, this is not a problem, as long as the scene is entertaining to the audience, I don’t care if it is 15 seconds or 15 minutes. But Jet City Improv has a lot of constraints to its scenework, and scene length is one of those constraints. We did a little exercise on speaking in metaphor: getting an English phrase and translating it into flowery metaphor. This helped a bunch of the Shakespeare-phobes in the group, and it was certainly a cornerstone exercise in our Lost Folio rehearsals. We had a big discussion on what exactly a Shakespeare scene should and should not be in a JCI show, which I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it is always good to get the director’s thoughts on how the show should be performed (is it just a scene that is performed with Shakespearean language and conventions, like a style parody, or is it a short snippet from an actual Shakespearean play, etc.). It is nice to know that thought is being put into it. On the other hand, and this is a more personal hand, the constraints that are put on the scene seem to do little to ensure the success of the scene while doing much to put the fear of failure into the performers of that scene. Which brings me back to that dead horse that I seem to continue to flog: fear is the #1 cause of bad improv. To be fair, I think this is quickly becoming the central pillar of my theory of improvisation, so I excuse myself for continuing to return to it.

No need for intros: it’s another rehearsal diary. If I had to pick a theme for this post, it would be parallels between music and improv, mostly in the realm of tempo/volume. And with that idea just hanging out there like so much overripe fruit, let’s get into it.

We started off this rehearsal with an oddity: a potential addition to our ensemble played with us for a while as a callback audition. Nothing much in the way of epiphanies from this part, as we were just demoing several games/exercises and then he would play that same game/exercise with us. I had done something similar to this with another group, wherein callbacks were basically a series of scenes played with the members of the troupe, mostly to see if they could hang with the big kids, as it were. This wasn’t so much a test of whether he could play with us, so much as a callback audition where he was the only hopeful.

Anyway, moving past that to the meat of the rehearsal. It was a game workshop rehearsal, which tend to be my least favorite, but one of the directors gave a good reason to do it. It wasn’t workshopping the game because we wanted to play that specific game in a specific way, but rather workshopping the game because he felt that that was a great way to get everyone playing with the same physical language. So it was more about a general cultivation of hive mind mentality and trust among players than about the rules of the game. I have had problems in the past with rehearsals that focus on game rules, as they seem like they are more for the company than for the improvisers. They also seem to stifle innovation and creativity with the game, since it says to me “there is a right way and a wrong way to play this game.” A concept I touched on near the end of my last rehearsal diary. Suffice it to say: I am happy because it feels like we are learning about improv, rather than about Jet City Improv.

The game in question was 5 Things, a guessing game. We focused on using the game to create interesting stage pictures and high-energy team-based storytelling, rather than focusing on individuals giving good clues to the thing we were trying to get our fellow player to guess. Again, great. Way more interesting. We saw some examples of things that did work and things that didn’t. Keeping it simple, of course, really helps. Guessers committing entirely to a guess even when they know it can’t possibly be correct: also great. And, as per usual, fear makes everything worse: unsure guessing because you don’t want to look stupid in front of the audience by being wrong, half-assed pantomime, joining in because you feel like you have to rather than because you want to, etc.

Now here’s where that whole music theme comes in. While I think the rehearsal was good and appreciated that there was an underlying purpose and everyone was on board with that purpose, I think it could have been made great with a little musical shaping (tempo and volume). With this rehearsal, we workshopped 5 Things, and in order to do that, we played the game many times, learning something from each iteration. Fine, but you are jumping in at full blast and hitting the ground running. That gets monotonous after a while: both in music and in improv. Fortissimo doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have a mezzo-piano to compare it to. I would have loved to have started with some exercise that was even more elemental, get some good epiphanies/lessons in using that, and then build on that exercise to a new thing, taking those lessons with us to a slightly more complicated related exercise, hopefully pick up some more lessons, and then end the night by playing the game once or twice and ending on that super fast, super loud note.

I realize that between warmups and the callback process, we had a very truncated rehearsal, so exercises may not have been possible due to time constraints. But I did get a good sense of how I would like to shape rehearsals and workshops of my own in the future. Rehearsals, like shows, benefit from variety and intention, and monotony is the enemy of learning.