To Err is Improv Part 3

Our brains are good at making connections and finding patterns, but that is often all we do. We simplify the world around us into generalizations and stereotypes, we discuss things in probabilities and statistics, but as my friend used to say: “Statistically speaking, statistics are meaningless.” When we trade details for abstractions, we run the risk of missing potentially damming and useful information. The easy fix for this is to simplify. This may sound counter to my previous statements, but we really have to do a lot less work than we usually end up doing. Be blunt in the information you present, and it makes it easier to interpret it bluntly. Often we learn more from summaries of information, yet we still decide to overload ourselves with information, which, as it turns out, doesn't actually help us. (We also tend to focus on the inconsequential and easily observed.)

This is, for the most part, one of the great obstacles for a young improviser: humans dread finality. We prefer to think of our worlds as pliable and malleable, with options available to us, which interpreted into an improv scene is what Keith Johnstone referred to as wimping, Tom Salinsky called waffling, but you can just think of as “wiggle room”. It's the difference between a general saying we're in a missle silo, and the some dude saying we're at work. Put bluntly (here we go): “Hope impedes adaptation”. When you're stuck with something, you have to adapt and learn to live with it. In our current model, we can break it down a little more, and take the opposite form of “hope impedes”, and make it instead “decisions breed”, and make “adaptation” into “justification” (a wonderful improv word), and we get a fantastic improv mantra: “decisions breed justification”, which is (roughewn) Del Close's third “Kitchen Rule”.

Decisions, properly committed to will give you more defined, clear scenes. You can't fear mistakes and errors in improv. But to do so isn't the end of the world – you just learn more. Studies seem to repeatedly show that adults and children have trouble tolerating mistakes, which is the opposite of what improv teachers try to breed in players (Salinsky I think put it best: “This is going to be great! What is it?” Improvisers need to be made to see the perceived benefits of taking risks are worth taking them – the tightrope is where the tension is, not in the safety net.

“A pilot who doesn't have any fear probably isn't flying his plane to its maximum.” - Astronaut Jon McBride

I had an enlightening discussion with a fellow improviser a little while back; his argument was that beginner improvisers need a teacher to tell them how to do things correctly, and we ended up putting it into terms of skydiving instruction. The first few times you take dives, you are strapped to an experienced skydiver, and after doing that, you get to move up to heavily supervised solo jumps. Now, my friend's stance was that you need that instructor flying with you because otherwise you might die – a completely valid concern about skydiving. The problem with using the metaphor in discussing improv is that messing up while skydiving can at the very least seriously injure the diver if not kill them, but that doesn't really happen in improv. If your scene tanks, you and your scene partner don't slam into the ground at 120 miles per hour and get carted off in body bags, you go “that sucked” and move on. But fearing failure like the plague and relying on someone else to tell you the “right” way defeats much of the point of learning a craft. A better metaphor for improv is Legos: sure, the lego company tells you how to put the pieces together to make the pirate ship or the castle displayed on the box, and just doing that doesn't make you a bad person, but there is literally nothing stopping you from making the pieces into anything you want. Put together something strange, or unwieldy, or that falls over instantly? No problem – take it apart and start over. Want to make a pirate spaceship instead? Knock yourself out.

Never leaving a comfort zone means that you are potentially preventing yourself from discovering something amazing that may exist just beyond the bounds of what you currently know that works. I'm not saying that there aren't dragons out there, but you can't let fear of encountering them keep you from venturing forth.

To Err is Improv Part 2

So how do mistakes ruin a scene? I like to think of it this way: imagine your scene is a ship at sea, thousands of miles from home, no land in sight, driving into the great blue unknown. Now, any mistake made on this ship could potentially doom it: steering, navigation, morale, food, disease and any number of other things that could potentially go wrong. Now with your scene, you have an opportunity after each mistake to treat it as a gift instead; to make it an offer instead of an error. Small mistakes are easier to correct than others – calling a character “Tom” instead of “Tim” or “Bob” are relatively minor errors, in the same magnitude as maybe a minor miscalculation in navigation. An error that small can sometimes be ignored altogether; it doesn't really matter what the character's name is, and a small miscalculation might still get you pretty close to your destination, or at least not that far off course. The larger the error gets however, the harder it is to ignore and still keep the ship together, and the more the error needs to be justified and incorporated. Making multiple mistakes back-to-back without opportunities to justify them drive the ship to the briny deep much quicker (rotten food + off course + dangerous storm + disease = Davy Jones' Locker; rotten food – rationing + off course – course correction + dangerous storm – more beer + disease – medicine = OK).

“You learn more losing races than winning them.” - Frankie Avalon, Fireball 500

It's a little too easy to get bogged down in the details of failure – this is exemplified by what is called hindsight bias. Essentially, when you know the outcome of something, the events that lead up to that conclusion seem inevitable, and significantly changes how we perceive and remember those events. In retellings, irrelevant or inconsistent data is discarded for those data points which bolster the ultimate finding. But before we get to that final destination, the finality is obfuscated and buried in conflicting information – this makes sense, since after all, a good improv scene does not have a predetermined, fixed point prior to the scene, but afterwards all of the information presented make where we got to become the only available option. Which is a sign of a good scene – no conflicting information, or other possibilities, just a singularity of conclusion. The issue becomes that the more familiar we are with something, the less we tend to notice – we assume things as we think they should be, not how they are. The brain doesn't tend to notice a difference between an improv scene and real life, so when we step on stage, we don't tend to notice some things because on a subconcious level, we think we're observing real life, and we have a list of things that we do normally in real life. Except, these are imaginary situations we are presented with, and we need to pay a little more heed to pick up some of the abnormal minutiae. The noticing is what is important, usually as part of an active experience, not a passive one.