Improv Metric

I’ve been toying with an idea in my head for a little while, and I can’t quite seem to get my mind into it. Let me explain. In chemistry, for instance, someone might ask me how much of a certain compound is in a solution. Easy, I figure out the concentration (using Science!), and give them the result. If they already knew the concentration, they could grade me based on how close I got to the correct result. This much I understand, but what I can’t, really, is how you judge an improv show.

I can ask a group of improvisers “What is the best show you’ve ever seen?” and “What is the worst show you’ve ever seen”, and will immediately get answers, but the harder question is “Why?” What would also be a fun experiment would be to compare the results of that brief questionnaire to a non-improviser, where you might be surprised at the disparity between the two tastes. My point is simply that there is a concept in science that expectation changes observation, which is kind of tied into Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. (That little gem says that we can never know the position and speed of subatomic particles because by the sheer observation of them, the impact of the light we used to observe them causes them to change. In quantum mechanics (This is an improv blog, right?), we only describe subatomic things by certainties, as in “It’s Friday, so there is a 75% chance that Chris George is at the movie theatre”, but never “It’s Friday, so Chris George is at the movie theatre, because he is lame (only 25% odds on that, ladies.))

But expectation changing observation goes further into the world than the mysterious tale of the quanta; the idea is that because we are looking for stuff (scientific term), we change what we see because we filter it through the current frame of mind that we are observing things. For example, when Gregor Mendel’s pea plant experiments (the hereditary ones that proved recessive/dominant traits) were repeated in modern day, it was discovered that Mendel’s recorded observations were closer to “theoretical” than to “experimental”. Did he forge scientific data? Maybe, but he saw what he wanted (or needed, maybe) because that’s what he predicted. (I may be a heathen, but I won’t call a monk/father of hereditary genetics a liar.) We can never fully, objectively observe anything, because we focus on the things that prove our point. (Experiment you can try at home! 1. Go to a bar and look for an attractive woman/man/woman-man/whatever floats your boat because we make no judgments here. 2. Catch her eye, and watch as you instantly misinterpret a “getting a stray eyelash” gesture for a “Come over here, sexy man/woman/man-woman/whatever. 3. Science!)

Therefore, if we can never truly observe anything, then we can never truly judge anything. Thus, my Grand Improvisational Corollary is: 1.) We are improvisers, so we have trained in classes, workshops, and rehearsals. 2.) The average audience member (excluding those guys who are also improvisers) has not. 3.) Neither side will ever observe the same show, because both have a different set of expectations. 4.) No non-improvisers write improvisational blogs, so we can get away with saying just about anything.

Shortform v Longform Part II

I have previously extolled the virtues of shortform improv on many occasions. It is still, in my opinion, a fine art form, and I have come to understand that each has its place. It would be ignorant and pretentious to presume that longform is the only improv worth doing because of this or that. And to be fair, shortform still has a lot going for it – it’s simple and fun, and most importantly, it is highly structured. Humans (pay attention here, aliens) like structure for the most part. We like rules, even if just to break them, and shortform has got rules in spades. Even better, shortform shows are not just four people goofing off on stage for an hour and a half; they’re presentations, especially the successful ones. Comedy Sportz, and I’m sure others, present some two hours of entertainment as a whole freakin’ show, with lights, sound, and an emcee (usually referred to and dressed as a referee) who dishes the whole thing as a big variety show.

Why do we need to do this? Because shortform is boring. I mean, not all the time, but most of the time. But each scene is referred to as a ‘game’ for a reason. Each game has a different set of rules and components, and it takes time to get them set up. Most importantly, with library of probably more than 200 games (although I can tell you from personal experience that improv groups regularly use maybe 5% of that, strange), it’s unreasonable, and probably impossible to expect the average audience member to recall the rules for even a small portion of the games. Heck, most people probably couldn’t accurately recall all the rules for Monopoly or Sorry, and those are way more common than Scene in Reverse. What this means is that for every scene, there is one to three minutes of informing the audience what the game is, what the rules are, what the catch is, and then finally getting the suggestion for the scene. That’s a lot of setup for three minutes of improv, especially given that for a longform show of several teams will usually do five minutes of set up in the very beginning, and an ask for before each set of thirty minutes. This makes the ratio of improv to setup roughly 10:1, whereas shortform has a ratio of more like 2:1. This means that if you pay 10 dollars for either show, you’re paying 3 dollars in the shortform, versus 90 cents in the longform, just to listen to people talk. Jason Chin famously hates setup; in his opinion, a lot of setup before a show is like a magician telling everyone how the bunny is inside the hat the whole time, and then doing it.

My own personal example is a show I did back in Mississippi with my college group. Our show design was that we had two competing hosts (I was one of them), each with their own games list, and the audience would vote on which of the two games they would rather see. The audience loved it, the performers loved it, but I hated it. Part of what everyone liked was the banter between me and the other host between games. While it may have been funny, it seriously cut into improv time, and worst of all, it involved setup up two games every time, just so we could not use one of them!

My reason for bringing this up is that I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the local improv house. It being the only real improv game in town, I’m keenly interested in getting on a team there, and I noticed a key problem with one of their games. In fact it’s not just any game: it’s their signature game (I mean if iO can have the Harold, then why not?). It’s called “Five Things”, and here’s how it plays out. One player leaves the room, and the audience is asked for five activities. When the player comes back in, the other team members have to get him to guess the activity using mime and gibberish. But of course, there’s a catch: elements of the five things will be changes (e.g. swimming, but instead of water, he’s swimming in tangerines! Are you laughing yet?), and the player will have two and a half minutes to guess all five things (the title of the game!) and the two-three changes per activity. Here’s the problem, and I’ve timed it several times now. The game will last two and a half minutes, that’s laid out in front. But the game requires a minimum of 15 ask fors, and upwards of 20. No only that, but you have to explain the game, and then the team giving the clues gets to pick the order, and then the host reminds the audience of all the “things” again. It takes between ten and fifteen minutes just to get a less than three minute game going.

Now, I won’t argue that the game isn’t funny, because it can be quite entertaining. (If you really want a rabbit-in-the-hat secret for this game though, in class we learn that because the same suggestions come up so often, the players have no trouble with them because they’re so familiar with the clues.) But the problem here is indicative of the whole problem with shortform. It gets in its own way all too often. This entire show runs just shy of two hours, with nearly twenty minutes of introductions, setup and ground rules before the players are even on stage. The entire show has barely ten games for the whole run. So, now the reason for the showmanship becomes apparent. In film presentation, there’s a thing called “persistence of vision”. Essentially, when you watch a movie in the theatre, half of the time you’re watching a black screen, because there’s a moment between each frame when the projector has closed off the light to move the film. We don’t see the gap in image though, because the image lingers on our retinas. The same thing is applied here; in order to keep the momentum going, the show has to be presented as a seamless act of energy in order to keep the image of comedy lingering on our mind’s eye.

So shortform figured this trick out a long time ago, but the lesson has not carried over to longform. My coach Danny Mora would chide us for not beginning a scene the second the previous was edited. If you don’t fill the space, the vacuum of an empty stage threatens to drown the entire piece. We spend a lot of energy getting an audience pumped up to watch us and to get performers pumped to perform it. If we don’t use that energy, we’re going to lose it to the atmosphere.

Keep that image alive, boys.