Improv Nonsense

What makes a good game of the scene? I think a decent rule of thumb is to make sure your scene has two components that are kind of opposite or at least funny in contrast to each other.

1) James Eason described an interview his father once conducted with Mel Brooks. James’ dad asked Mel something like “what makes things funny” and I think it was supposed to be worded, for fun, so that it was basically impossible to answer. Like “I know this is a ridiculous question but ‘what makes things funny?’” But Mel said “Actually, I have an answer. ‘Juxtaposition.’ All comedy is juxtaposition.”

I thought of Young Frankenstein singing “Puttin’ On The Ritz,” of Broadway producers desperately WANTING a failing play, of a man walking up to another man and then punching out, not the man, but the man’s horse.

2) Earlier this year, Kevin Hines was teaching SIX classes concurrently. He was also coaching a bit. At the end of one of these exhausting weeks, after something like 40 hours of watching people do improv, he stumbled into my office at UCB looking wiped out, sat down and sighed “You know, sometimes I think every game is just ‘opposites.’”

I thought of my favorite sketches: super smart Ronald Reagan, Mother Theresa trashing a hotel room, a man politely insisting a dead parrot was alive.

Juxtaposition. Opposites. Two things, in contrast to each other.

WHEN GAMES GET THIN

Okay, so let’s say games are thin in two cases:

1) A scene has one fun thing, but it doesn’t feel like a full game.

So I look to add in a contrasting element.

Like maybe you’ve got three people on stage and because they matched each other they are all singing a Christmas Carol together, and that feels fun in the way that improv scenes are just fun — but there’s no joke other than it just feels a bit silly. What could we add to juxtapose with people singing Christmas Carols? Are they in prison? Are they a judge, baliff and stenographer all in a courtroom? Are they Jewish?

2) A scene WAS great, but now there’s been a tag run or a second beat and it feels thinner.

I’ll think back “what were the TWO components juxtaposed that made this thing work when it started?”

So maybe a character is yelling at another character for not being peaceful enough, let’s say. And that’s working. Then someone tags in and yells at the character for not being patient enough, and then someone tags in and is just yelling at them for being a jerk. So now it’s just yelling, whereas first it was yelling on behalf of things that were not at all like yelling. So you tag in and yell at him to whisper — to bring back the other component of the scene that was missing, comedically.

I won’t do this in the first 1/3 of a scene — that’s when I’m prioritizing getting on the same page and playing to the top of my intelligence. But once things are underway I’ll do a mental check — do we have two things here?

We say “only ONE unusual thing” but that’s because TWO unusual things do not juxtapose, they collide. ONE unusual but also ONE usual to contrast.

Rule of thumb, not a rule.