I Hate Improv Class

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(Author's note: I wrote this essay around February 2009.)

Since moving to San Diego, my once weekly fix of improv with my long form group has yet to fully satiate my improv hunger. I decided to sign up for classes at the local improv house. It's a short-form in the style of Comedy Sports kind of place, and even though I don't particularly want to do that kind of 'prov again, I was so hungry to do some improv, any improv, I was willing to go back to “class one” again. Additionally, I'm hoping that I can get a place performing at the theater regularly when it's all over with, and get some stage time and start building a group of improv friends to hang out with. (What can I say? I'm lonely.)

I signed up for classes no problem (though, to my surprise, almost the same price as a session of classes at the iO in Chicago, and only six weeks instead of eight), and as I was driving to the theater, I noted a distinct knot in my stomach. I was nervous. I was dreading going to class - I was honestly afraid of getting up on stage and making a damn fool out of myself. Now, I have never been afraid on stage. I have proudly stepped on to many stages and have been animals, people getting sexually molested, doing the sexual molestation, and inanimate objects (that are being used for sexual molestation). But this class, and as a matter of fact, every single class or workshop I have ever taken, I feel nervous right before the first one. I am constantly afraid that this class is the one where I will completely screw up, and no one will ever want to improvise with me ever again. And, I would argue that this nervous feeling has gotten worse the longer I've been doing improv.

While most people would say that after they've been doing it longer, they've gotten more comfortable because they're more experienced. For me though, I feel that the longer I've been doing improv, the less of an excuse for screwing up I have. When I took my first class at the iO in Chicago, I was bold as hell (probably too much, my teacher Andy had me rope it in a little bit) because at that point I could have screwed up, and just said: "Oh well, I've only done improv at college". Now though, if I screw up, people can only say: "I thought this guy did improv in Chicago!"

A failure on stage is almost always the result of no support, etc. But I can't fault new players for messing up. A flub now will definitely support the theory that I have no business doing this. As a result, I find myself working ten times as hard for everything, just to keep my head above water (it also doesn’t help that I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and I’ve only liked maybe 5% of all the improv I’ve ever done). I feel the need, the absolute life-ending need, to prove myself every time I’m around a new group, and especially a new teacher/coach. I hate improv class for the exact opposite reason that people take classes: wanting to prove that I’m good enough. I’m a student! Shouldn’t I feel comfortable enough to make mistakes in class?

Unfortunately, I now wear my Chicago improv tutelage like a weight around my neck.

The Worst Show

(Author's note: I originally wrote this article in August 2008.)

I recently had a very bad show. Bad and then some. And excuse the hyperbole, but it was quite possibly the worst show I have ever been a part of, which is saying something. What went wrong in this show, you ask? Well, what can go wrong in any show? People not listening to each other, ambiguous people, relationships, and locations, focus issues, low energy, direct and indirect denials, and an all around lack of playfulness. That this show was an iO graduation show, and that it is supposed to showcase everything we have learned in the last year (improv-wise) is itself perhaps telling.

Of course, the only thing worse than a truly horrendous show, is the backlash immediately after it. Because while a horrid (I will, in fact, use every synonym for bad I can think of) show lasts only twenty five minutes (despite the fact that it feels longer), the ripples of it can last much, much longer. This was one of those shows that everyone just sort of hangs their heads afterwards, and one that everyone knows was just bad. Even that one guy in every group who can find something positive about nearly every show (it's usually me). A show so atrocious that everyone immediately starts trying to come up with ways to fix it.
Let's run through the usual list: switch coaches, find a new practice time, required "hang-out/non-improv" time to achieve group trust/synergy, radical form changes, and a list of basics/guidelines/fundamentals/rules/commandments for what will make good shows.

It's interesting to point out that improv groups are much like bureaucracies: they are always fighting the battle they just lost.

This brings me to my point, and one that is especially resonant given that just seven days earlier, we had what was probably one of the best shows I had ever been in. Improvisation is a risky business. Perhaps the riskiest. Nothing is guaranteed, and every time you step on stage, you could easily be stepping on to your worst show, ever. Improvisers constantly tout that their artform is the purest, and the most interesting, because anything can happen. This is true, but to paraphrase a great scientist, the door swings both ways. This is the lure of the unknown, and the reason why improv is so interesting. Shows can be transcendental, entertaining, and intriguing.

They can also be boring, mind numbing, and unwatchable.

To paraphrase someone else, we deal in the unknown, friend. This is our business, and it is challenging, unique, and unpredictable by its very nature. We love it for the same reason we hate it.

So how do we deal with shows then? Can we do all the things mentioned above, and achieve success? Sure.

Can we not do any of the things mentioned above, and achieve success? Why not?

Sometimes we just have bad nights, things don't click, a smidgen of anxiety or apprehension slow a show down, and things just go awry. Not anyone's fault; just the name of the game.  When these shows come along (and they will) the only thing you can do is just keep on truckin'. Learn from your mistakes, keep working hard, and don't get too down.

Relax; after all, it can't get worse than rock bottom, right?

The Rule Breakers

When I was in high school, I tried out for the part of drum major for the band, which was an altogether fun experience – I didn’t get it, but it was fun nonetheless. One of the things I learned for the tryouts was how to spin a mace. A mace, for the uninitiated, is the long pole, about five feet in length, with a large silver orb on the top of it. The mace is largely ceremonial, probably its only original purpose was to be a shiny object sticking above a marching formation so that the members can keep rhythm. Somewhere along the way though, some drum major got tired of just holding this thing, and after probably attempting to use it as a sword, decided to start spinning the thing around. Modern drum majors will almost always be seen spinning this ungainly monster of a baton (or sometimes two) causing it to dance, spin, and fly through the air to the delight of the crowd.

The band director who was showing how to do mace-work (his term) explained that there are two approaches to mace spinning: an east coast and a west coast. The east coast, he explained, was all about performing the mace-work with ultimate precision; every single move should be text-book perfection according to the east coasters. The west coast he summed up with a simple mantra: “Hey, check out what I can do.” The west coast wasn’t concerned with doing things according to any “official” pattern; instead they did their mace-work for fanfare and showmanship (and a heavy dose of one-upmanship). In other words, do things so unbelievable that no one else can copy you. The east coast was like a game of Horse, and the west coast was an “And 1” tape. It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized that this didn’t just apply to mace-work, but to everything – music, food, scholarly pursuits. Maybe it’s the weather.

In improv there is still those two different rules of thought, what I like to think of as the rule-followers and the rule breakers. A rule follower is always trying to improve upon an idea: that form worked mostly, except for this, so let’s fix that for next time, or that didn't work at all, let's scrap the whole thing and go in a new direction. Followers are about form and technique, so they focus on drilling basics and fundamentals and attempting to follow the rules. These would be the same rules that were published in “Truth in Comedy” many, many years ago and have since become more of a burden on the improv world than they’ve helped. Mick Napier denounced them in “Improvise”, and there are even rumblings all throughout the iO that the rules are not all they’re cracked up to be. The problem? The rules are largely negative in their wording (e.g. “Never ask questions!”) and they make improvisers think too much. “Oh, am I doing this right?” “Is this following the rules enough?” Give a man a rule, and he will do his best to follow it.

Except of course, for the breakers. Rule breakers cast aside simple notions like classes, workshops, and improv books in favor of a more customized approach: “Watch what I can do.” Even the greatest improv teacher in the world can only take you so far and at some point you have to be ready to come to a Zen level of connectedness with form, technique, and structure. At risk of sounding any more western (or Californian, heaven forbid) a “one-ness”. All improvisers are, for lack of a better term, artists, as the outcomes on stage are the result of our unified point-of-view and interpretation of the world around us.

The rules do have their place; they are the foundation for a basic appreciation and understanding of the art – but don’t be afraid to spin improv in your own way and maybe show it off, all the while screaming: “I dare you to follow me!”

Character Arrested Development

I still occasionally get emails from my old college improv troupe, and I'm always excited to read ones where they're discussing improv theory; I love it primarily for nostalgia, but also because I like reading how the philosophies of people I trained and performed with have evolved. For a lot of college troupes in the hinterlands, each group is its own little microcosm of improv exploration, and as a result, they're generally limited to things they learn through books on the subject.
 

My favorite pops up like clockwork once a semester: the "character development" email. It goes like this: "we had a rough show, we need to work on fundamentals, so next week we're going to go over character development." But why do we pick character development over things like scenework, being "in-the-moment", or a bajillion other skills? It's the improv scapegoat. Had a bad show? It was probably bad character development. Why? Because I have no idea what it means, so I probably don't have it. It's a term that falls into the same category of "process development", "synergy", and "paradigm shift" of abstract things that sound great on paper, but have no real definition. I don't even remember how the term entered into our vernacular; I've never read it in a book or heard any teacher use that exact term anytime since. It was always just there.

For years, I broke the term down to define it. "What is character development?" someone might ask me on an improv game show. "Why, it's the development of a character arc throughout the course of the scene!" I would answer proudly. While it's true that that kind of character development (which is probably more likely to be called emotional development, scene development, or some other such acting term I'm too ignorant to know) is important, that's not what's meant by character development. The problem with trying to do it that way is we get a bunch of scenes where person A is trying to change person B in three minutes! 

Our character development practice became, every semester, two hours of scenes about breakup, love, or death. They were boring and uninteresting, and we would immediately go back to doing other things the next week.
What we all meant (but were unable to articulate, and, even worse, unable to teach) was creating rich, unique characters. Characters that were more than just a funny voice or a strange bodily affliction. What we wanted was to create characters that the audience would be interested in long enough to want to see a character arc.  (Something compounding the problem: improv shows like "Whose Line" rarely, if ever have richly defined characters.  Their scenes tend to, unfortunately, be just a funny voice or strange bodily affliction.)

So if we're not trying to negotiate a character change, what is character development actually supposed to be? The now-me, on the same gameshow, would answer "creating a character on the fly that can survive on his/her own in the universe we've created". What you need to take away is this: a character needs at minimum, two things to survive. One, a point of view, and two, a want. The other stuff (occupation, mannerisms, etc.) is good, but you've got to leave that to be discovered. And most importantly, just relax in the scene and remember that this is the universe that your character inhabits and to try to react as that character would.

How To Be Friends and Act Like Idiots - Toolkit

Back in December, I talked about my realisation that characters are interesting when they are being human – namely, that they are flawed, and act on those flaws. The human condition will always be endlessly fascinating and intriguing, and funny as well. My group has been working to try and capture some of the capacity for this kind of play, so I present to you now some exercises that dovetail nicely into “Being Friends and Acting Like Idiots”. As a sidebar for when working on this type of exercise is that everyone should be in the mindset of being affected majorly by everything that other players offer, and also that characters are human and are fallible and do have flaws.

“It's Tuesday” - this exercise is all about overaccepting offers; split the group in half onto opposite sides of the space – a person from line A steps forward and offers any line of dialogue, preferably something fairly mundane, and a person from line B overaccepts that offer. This could be thought of as yes anding in all capital letters. Players should be encouraged to make the overacceptances intensely personal in nature – it is very easily to fall into the trap of accepting an offer in a way that doesn't invest the players on a personal level, or to be dismissive but in a big way. Alternative: That's a great line because; A steps forward and initiates with a minimal line as before, only now B steps forward to the audience and says why this is the best initiation that could ever be given in the history of the world. After a two line exchange, switch sides. After a few goes, repeat with A delivering rich lines.

Character Monologues – player steps forward and delivers a character monologue about a subject, specifically detailing the character's opinion about the subject; good/bad, and most importantly why this subject is that way. Players should not be hesitant about playing characters with ridiculous opinions or ridiculous motivations or reasonings. Stupid or irrational characters make for great theater.

Two person opinion exchanges – forgive the rather clumsy title; as before, A steps forward, only this time, giving an opinion about a subject to B. B can then choose to agree or disagree with the opinion, then both sides provide supporting arguments or additional details for why they feel the way they do. Remember to maintain a balance of agreement and disagreement scenes, and also that both parts have to try an maintain their points-of-view in each scene, and continue to dig deeper into their supporting arguments.

Party Scenes – Four players, and each player silently labels the other three players with how they feel about them: stupid, smelly, and attractive (so one of the those labels to each other player). These four players now treat each by those silent labels, and the scene is that all four characters are at a party. It is important to maintain a level of treatment that allows the scene to proceed (treating someone someone as stupid too strongly, for instance, can alienate the character and grind it to a halt. The location being a party is because there is an obligation to be polite given the social situation – remember that you're not trying to solve the problem of someone being smelly or stupid, you need to find civilized ways to deal with it.

NPC's – one of the key elements of these types of shows is the interplay between the main players, but it is contrasted by the existence of, in role-playing game parlance, a non-player character (NPC). These are characters who are not part of the main group, have distinctly lower or higher status, and are ones who behave more reasonably that a PC. They often have everyday functions in the real world (e.g. cop, lawyer, boss) and act as foils to raise the stakes or frustrate the PC's. Playing with NPC's can be accomplished with the two person opinion exchanges as above, by either a) when a shared opinion has been reached, by acting as the opposing opinion (expressing it in a non-extreme way) or b) with an opposing opinion, but having the “b” player be more rational than his counterpart. As another tangential possibility, having any NPC act as a heavily characterized person (e.g. heavy accent) is usually a surefire way to make someone outrageously more extreme than a PC.

MAAP(ing) – the remaining element is to heighten the language that the characters talk in; this is done by deploying: Memory, Aphorism, Analogy, or Philosophy (MAAP) in the dialogue. Memories are any remembered thing that happened to a character (they usually being with “Remember the time...”). Aphorisms are colloquial sayings, e.g. “A stitch in time saves nine” or “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Analogies compare something to something else, usually using like or as (to quote “The League”: “You're like a gay Iron Man.”), and philosphies display a person's viewpoint on the world (to quote “League” again: “Hey, I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make it not have sex with me.”). It's best to try deploying these one at a time, so have two players step forward, and do a scene where they only have to worry about doing one of the MAAP elements. After, you can have the players use them ad libitum.

Good luck friending!