Improv Nonsense

The trickiest case I think is when someone is making an offer for you that requires you to ignore reality. Then you have to make a really tough choice: do you support playing at the height of your intelligence, or do you support your partner’s offer? Like this:

• Initiation (in a broad, hammy, wide-eyed musical theater but bad delivery): “These pens! These pens are so expensive! My wife is going to leave me!”

And let’s assume this big energy is not like a fun genre choice. You can’t just blindly match energy. It’s just aimless and silly noise. So you’ve got a problem: your scene partner is over-acting, and is being guided by unrealistic logic. And it’s confusing. What do you do?

I would advise: accept the offer first, and then as the scene goes on do work to make it more realistic, without ever refusing anything. The scene won’t be great, but you will keep your improv muscles proper. And actually, if your partner is a just someone having a bad moment, your cooperative acceptance will snap them out of it, and things will get better quickly.

• Response: $500 a pen? Are they crazy? They’re going to ruin our lives! We gotta get some nice pens!

I haven’t solved any of the problems of the scene ignoring reality, but I showed my scene partner that I accept what he/she is putting down. The actors are connected, there’s a chance to save this scene.

If you can think of a justification to make things make sense, do it. But it’s gotta be something still accepts what is being offered. In other words, it can be this:

• Response: $500 a pen! It’s our own fault for not bringing pens on the plane! Now we gotta buy them here in the airport!

I know, it’s not great. But it’s way better than this:

• Response: Calm down, you are so crazy. Pens are not that expensive. You can buy a really great pen for $10, here’s $10.

Because the initiator is not offering that he’s crazy. I mean, he IS being crazy. But that’s not the dance he’s starting. He is starting a dance about pens. If you’re a top tier Olympic improviser, you will dance with your partner in the way he/she is expecting to be danced with. Metaphors mixed, I know.

My point: A better approach is to accept first, and deal with reality second:

• Improviser 1: These pens! These pens are so expensive! My wife is going to leave me!
• Improviser 2: $500 a pen? Are they crazy? They’re going to ruin our lives! We gotta get some nice pens!
• Improviser 1: I know! We’re so screwed!
• Improviser 2: We’re so touchy about how good we look in our offices! (justification offered)
• Improviser 1: That’s what we get for working at a law firm (scene maybe starting to make sense?)

It’s not great. But it shows what I think is a more productive process: agree first, accept first — then work from there to improve the reality, the justification.