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.

Ask Fors

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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.)

Resolved

New Year's is a funny thing – tis the season for reflection, to paraphrase, and its around this time that everyone sets to reminiscing, remembering their top five things they did, movies they saw, trips they took et cetera, but it's also the time for looking ahead. And even though in reality there will be no difference between you when you woke up on December 31 and you when you wake up on January 1 (barring any body switching or magic spells, a la “Freaky Friday” or “13 Going on 30”, respectively), there does happen to at least feel like there is a certain finality or changing from the old into new involved. It's also at this time we make our resolutions lists, though for some reason, resolutions don't seem to be done as much any more as they used to. Resolutions, no matter how quickly we may cast them aside – most probably not past the first few weeks of January – are a useful tool. We like to think about who we are, and who we'd like to be, and our resolutions are a guide for reaching that goal.

“I resolve to go to the gym three times a week.” The problem is, we usually let up here and there (“Alright, I can't go three times this week, but I'll go two this week and four next week to make up for it”) and then we just drop them altogether (“Whatever, I can't go this month. I'll try again in February.”) Improv resolutions are no different (“I resolve to do some sort of mime work in every scene I'm in.”) It's good to make them, as it encourages us to work towards something, which in itself is probably one of the biggest sticking points most improvisers have that keeps us from moving forward. So this lesson obviously isn't about resolutions, because the best I could do is provide you some of mine, which won't help you, the reader out, save to find out where I think I am and where I think I want to go – instead, the lesson I want to impart is that resolutions don't have to be so absolute. New Year's is the holiday of resolutions, but we put a lot of burden on ourselves by making only day a year set aside for them. When we run into trouble in a few weeks, we abandon them altogether and just move on. If you make a resolution to get better – at whatever, improv or otherwise – I recommend this: if you miss your goal in a scene or forget or whatever, just note it, and resolve to do it next time. Just because you missed it once doesn't mean it's over, or to adapt a saying, improv isn't a destination, its a journey. Take some of the burden off yourself, think about what you'd like to improve on, and just keep at it. You might forget the first few times, but such is the nature of adapting a new habit (or breaking an old habit, which is even harder). This really just falls under the more general heading of making your resolutions more reasonable. The guy who wants to go the gym three times a week when previously he went none is in trouble, because that's a huge jump, and the bigger you make your goals, the more willing you have to be in giving yourself slack.

“I resolve to be more willing to take risks, both on stage and in life.”