The suggestion or
“ask-for” lies at the very heart of the improvising endeavor.
The ask-for is our way of proving to the audience that we are
authentically creating stuff on the spot. The only group I’ve ever
seen get away with not taking a suggestion is “TJ and Dave”, and
even they have to open shows with the line “Trust us, everything is
here is completely made up.” Alternatively, I once played a show
where we tested out a new guessing game, but didn’t take the
guessed item from the audience. The player just picked one in his
head at the beginning, and audience members were convinced that the
piece was rehearsed.
The ask-for is, an
ultimately very tricky element; we want interesting, and most
importantly, unique suggestions on which to base our pieces. Because
we built improv around the concept of suggestions, it almost doesn’t
operate without it. The suggestions are our inspiration; our clay
and muse rolled into one thought. And while in theory no suggestion
has ever been the reason for failure, truth is some ask-fors are
better than others. In shortform, we hear a couple of suggestions
constantly: Tourette’s, dildo, and Michael Jackson. It’s not
that we don’t like these suggestions or that they can’t be used
more than once (Well, dildo maybe. But the rest?), it’s that we
would like occasionally to explore new ground. (For a fun social
experiment, at the next show you go to, listen to the proposal and
then silently make your response. I guarantee you that you will hear
your response from at least one other person, and a good 75% of the
time it will be the one selected.)
Part
of the problem is that even though we’ve performed a Michael
Jackson with Tourette’s talking to a dildo scene a thousand times
(roughly), the audience hasn’t. Also, short form audiences tend to
be kind of dicks. They’re filled with a bunch of people who want
to shout the most disgusting things possible. Why? Because they
think it’s funny. (They are at a comedy show, after all.) To a
typical shortform audience member, the suggestion is 90% of the joke.
And most shortform troupes rarely deliver beyond the suggestion
anyway. Longform largely minimizes this effect by only taking one
suggestion for a thirty minute plus show. Suddenly, the onus is on
the audience to make it good. In either case though, it is important
to respect the audience’s responses. That whole ‘no mistakes’
thing in improv extends to audiences as well.
In
a show this past weekend, I saw probably the worst example of ask
fors I have ever scene. After the proposal (name a foreign country),
the team just allowed the audience to shout responses for a little
while, and then cherry picked what they felt was the best one. This
goes strongly counter to the entire idea of asking for a suggestion
at all. Heck, you might as well just pick all your ideas in the
green room before the show. That isn’t improvised any more, at
least not in the truest sense; it’s more like herded improv.
I’ve
been privy to a number of ways to procure those precious ask-fors
over the years; some simple, and some downright complex as hell.
There may never be a perfect way to obtain our suggestions, so we may
have to live with what we’ve got for quite a while, but the
important thing is that every suggestion is a gift from the audience.
We must treat each and every one with respect, because we never know
where it might take us. (Probably to Dildo.)
