Improv with Me is Like… (Sex vs Improv)

There is a fun improv game called “Sex with Me” which explores the extended connections between the act of procreation with a subject the audience deems worthy of comparison. Who am I kidding? It’s a set of sex jokes, puns and innuendo. As I said, it’s great fun. 

“Sex with me is like a writing a blog post: You think about it a lot more than you spend actually doing it.”

Photo by Robin Straaijer

The game allows me a great introduction to a topic I have thought about since I first started improvising: the connections between sex and improv. (Actually, improv has many of the same similarities with any team sport, but sex is funnier than every sport except curling.)

“Sex with me is like an analogy: two things that seem different come together and are revealed to be more similar than at first thought.”

Apart from the obvious starting with “yes” and the fact they have a similarly addictive quality, there are many ways improv is like sex.

Take the whole shortform / longform argument. Some improvisers prefer the quick payoff of shortform, where it is concluded within a few minutes and there’s hopefully a great payoff at the end, lights out. But others prefer longform. This allows for a longer build-up and a much deeper connection with what’s going on. There is still a payoff, but it’s much more about getting there rather than the moment itself. With shortform, once it’s over, there is sometimes a short rest and then you’re off again, but with longform, once it’s done, that might be it for a week. (Note: performing schedules vary person to person.)

The most common configuration of performers is two people, but scenes of more than two also happen. It becomes trickier when there are more people. Giving focus becomes more important as is gauging when to enter and when to withdraw.

There are also plenty of tools and methods we can use to make our scenes better, if we want. Status – one player taking a more dominant or subservient role; the choices of being more physical or more emotional. Many people embrace playing a character other than yourself. And sometimes it is acceptable to use a gag.

Of course, it’s all about heightening. Start small and build. Build to a peak and end here or soon after.

Something we should consider is the audience. Because improv is something people watch too. So now, I guess the analogy has temporarily moved into comparing improv to porn. In general audiences prefer shortform improv. That’s not to say there is not an audience for longform, but it’s largely other performers.

Joking aside, I think the biggest way improv and sex are very similar are in attitudes to how we play. Sure, if you go into the scene intending that you yourself have fun, it can be a good scene. But when it really works best when you go in with the intention of pleasing your scene partner and they go into it with the intention of pleasing you. That’s when you can make truly amazing scenes.

“Sex with me is like an improv blog: it’s an oddly proud feeling when it’s out there for everyone to see.”

P.S. I realise that all this analogising, I am left with one further inescapable conclusion, that solo improv, something I love doing and like to think I’m pretty good at, is basically wanking.

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What similarities have I missed?

Two Shades of Funny

There are two sorts of funny in improv: Constructive and destructive.

Constructive comedy comes directly from the situations, characters. It comes from within the scene. It emerges from making natural connections with the information we have. It is discovered in following the story and the progression of the characters. Constructive laughs sweep the audience along with the story, make them connect with the characters more and make them understand a little more.

Destructive comedy comes from outside the scene. It comes from the ego of the actor and a desire to be the funny one. It comes from ideas and references that are being forced where they are not wanted. Destructive laughs, make the actors stop and following the story and characters. It makes the whole edifice constructed in the brain of the audience member to start to crumble, and in some cases become destroyed completely. It makes us care less about the characters.

Stand-up can embrace both forms much better than improv, because it is about the laughter. Comedic plays or films almost never have the destructive type unless they are absurdist or “screwball.”

Improv, as ever, falls somewhere between these two mediums. In fact one possible definition for short form and long form could be to which end of the standup-theatre line people are trying for. And of course, short form can take destructive comedy. Whatever you are doing it’ll be over in a couple of minutes, nobody is emotionally invested, so why not gag the hell out of what you (or someone else) started.

But if you are trying to do something longer, and want to bring the audience along with you, you don’t want to be destroying what you’ve set up. Because if you are fine with destroying it, why should the audience care anything about it? They won’t. You don’t care, they don’t care.

Birdsong at the Comedy Theatre, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

And believe me, you are not reducing the comedy by not going for the destructive humour, not at all. Comic plays and movies are still funny. Not destroying the scene means you allow yourself the chance to find the constructive comedy. You allow characters to develop that allows you to find deeper comedy traits than simply a catchphrase or silly walk. It allows comic situations develop that are funny because they came about organically rather than just being contrived and forced on a scene. They allow us to find comedy in moments that are not inherently comic and still remain true to the predominant emotions in the scene.

In fact, I deliberately emphasised the destructive term because it really is that. It shuts of so many doors for things that would take a show from being merely funny to being amazing.

The Stage-Time / Space-Time Discontinuum

As a semi-professional academic of various performing arts, I have had much time to muse on one phenomenon that all performers have experienced no matter what their discipline:

Time on stage is different to time in the audience.

Two minutes as experienced by the performer can be ten minutes to the audience. Likewise ten minutes as felt on stage can sometimes be two minutes to the audience. Typically the audience time is closer to time as experienced by the clock. It’s very confusing to most new performers and a real skill to be able to accurately estimate how long you’ve been on stage.

It is the clearest example I have encountered of how relativity can be experienced by us.

The performer can be seen as being a moving object and the audience at rest. And performing is somehow equitable to travelling near the speed of light. Obviously, not exactly in physical spaces, but most performances are a journey along a story line, or through a fixed set of games, routines, sketches, songs, poems, ideas or points.

This analogy makes it clear that it is only natural, given Einstein’s assertions, that time experienced on stage is different to time experience off stage.

But it doesn’t fully explain how this experienced time can vary so wildly from performer to performer, from performance to performance and from different points within the whole performance. Obviously it depends a lot on the adrenaline in the performers body and the focus he or she has on it. Adrenaline speeds up the heart rate which has the tendency to make the outside world slow down. It’s the reason when you’re in a car crash or something similar, you often see it happen in slow motion. Focus on something has the opposite effect. Many of us have experienced the same effect off stage, where we’ve been so engrossed in something we haven’t noticed that it’s now the middle of the night hadn’t there been plans for dinner.

So the balance of these two opposing forces cause radical shifts in time-perception as we travel from the start to the end of a show. Had I time and a grant I’d love to measure both throughout a performance and also somehow record the performer’s idea of time. But I have neither. One day I will find the time enough to do some google searching to see if someone has already done it. But not until I get a grant.

I would also love to derive from this a comedy equation, an E=mc² for comedy relativity. Some of you might have noticed that even this equation shows that the energy of the room is that of the MC, squared. [1] Or that it is dependant on the mass of the comedian and the comedy constant c. C, in the old days of BBC radio, used to be known as the “speed of light entertainment.”

Enough silliness. Certainly, I do believe there is an equation that could be found using values for focus and adrenaline to calculate perceived time, but it probably wouldn’t actually help anyone to know it. Experience is definitely the best thing to be able to circumvent this problem. Experience not only allows you to control your focus and adrenaline levels but also allows you to be able to perceive or estimate audience time more accurately.

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[1] MC = Master of Ceremonies = the host or compeer.

Tension and Release

For a while, I've been thinking about tension and release. It's a very prevalent and yet difficult to define concept. We all know what tension is, but it's hard to describe. We know when it's there, but it's really hard to create it. It's a very important part of modern film-making.

semi-random picture to increase the tension.

I suppose one quick attempt to define the terms is this: Release is resolution or closure and so tension is the absence of that resolution, i.e. a situation requiring resolution. Clear? We get onto more concrete definitions in a later entry.

To think about it in terms of broad genre, drama is about the building of tension and comedy is about the release of it. Roughly speaking.

Below is a quick list I made of emotional situations which create tension and a possible release...

sadness - happiness
regret - forgiveness
anger - relief
loves me not - loves me
enmity - reconciliation
tragedy / loss - coming to terms with it
serious - laughter
hate - love
argument - making up

There will be more on this soon as it's something that's definitely on my mind. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this fascinating but underexplored area of performing. My thoughts are currently all over the place, as you can tell.

Kurt Vonnegut Story Equations

Today it is Freytag

The following is from Freytag's Technique of the Drama, Gustav Freytag, (second English Edition, 1896; Original: Die Technik des Dramas, 1863), p19.

An action, in itself, is not dramatic. Passionate feeling, in itself, is not dramatic. Not the presentation of a passion for itself, but of a passion which leads to action is the business of dramatic art; not the presentation of an event for itself, but for its effect on a human soul is the dramatist's mission.

This is a 19th Century way of saying...

Drama is not simply the depiction of action, events and passion. It's depicting a passion that leads to action; and depicting events and their fundamental effect on people.

Or condensed further...

Passion causes action causes change.

Storytelling: The Three Acts

The concept of three acts is at least as old as Aristotle. But one could argue that it's such a fundamental concept to everything – the concept of a beginning, a middle and an end – that it was there since before the beginning of time. (In fact the concept was created before the beginning of time, exists during the existence of time, and will disappear when everything all goes back to being merely inky thoughts in the mind of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

Below is a table showing how prevalent the concept of the three parts is in story-telling theories from all disciplines.

General Story	Beginning	Middle	End
3 Acts	Act I	Act II	Act III
Placement of the Hero	In place	Out of place	Back in place
General Improv Scene	Setup	Problem	Solution
Platform Model	Platform	Tilt	New Platform
Balance Model	Balance	Imbalance	New Balance
Routine Model	Opening Routine	Break the Routine	New Routine
Hero's Journey	Departure or Separation (from Ordinary World)	Descent and Initiation (to Special World)	Return (to Ordinary World)

Improv and The Graphic Novel Part 2: Jumps

This is the second part of my exploration of the useful things for improv raised by Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.



Comics, as much as films and books, love to jump in space and time. These jumps often use an extension of the previous topic, closure, for us to be fill in the gap or make the connection. Moving to another time or place in a story is a great tool. It allows us to follow multiple threads, skip bits of the story we don't actually need to see, see the causes or consequences of an event or behaviour, or see parallels between events separated by time and/or space. There's so much more it can do. Here's an example of a time jump used to reveal a truth about a character.

Many types of transition are common to most media. The square area at the top or bottom of a comic panel is the equivalent of the narrator or voiceover in improv and movies. Or a jump can be obvious given the context: often based on the last thing said, such as: "Okay, I'll meet you at noon and the OK Corral."

Comics and movies are especially blessed with being able to use imagery to indicate movement in time and space that doesn't mean we can't learn from them. We can simulate or allude to some of these jumps (or edits).

We've all faked the wobbling screens of a flashback, but how many of us have morphed from one scene to another or been in a split screen with our old and new selves showing how different or similar their lives were? Have we ever described effects as the narrator, the way a book would have to? "As he pushed the button, the whole room went blurry, our faces lost their distinctness and objects hung in the air awkwardly. We were in hyperspace."

The medium of comics is by its nature a medium of jumps. With occasional departures, all comic stories are made up of multiple panels that are essentially pieces of frozen time. So comics, being distinctly discrete, in their depiction of events get to play with time in a way we as improvisers (being physical beings and unable to be anything other than continuous) cannot. But that is not to say we can't also play with time. McCloud talks a lot about how much of what goes on in comics goes on in between the panels – i.e. in the mind of the reader as he or she connects each panel. We as improvisers only really have those gaps during edits, but that doesn't mean we can't think about the time between actions and dialogue; or think more about the connections the audience has to make during and between scenes.

McCloud identifies 6 panel-to-panel transitions.

1. Moment-to-Moment: the next panel is a very short time later. Very little has changed and very little if any closure is needed to interpret what has happened.
   The gunman steps a few paces forward. The girl's smile gets bigger. The flying bird is a little further away.
2. Action-to-Action: one subject is shown doing one action after another; the actions are connected.
   A man drops a coin; he stoops to pick it up.
   A golfer hits a ball; he puts his hands to his eyes to look in the distance.
3. Subject-to-Subject: The subject changes, but the scene or idea does not.
   Someone kicks a ball into a goal; a crowd cheers.
   A monkey dances, money is dropped into a hat.
4. Scene-to-Scene: These are significant changes of time and space, but still there is some connection.
   Man and woman under a sunset say "Forever" to each other; we then see them both angry on different sides of a court.
   "We'll never know what happened to the Rajeeb Diamond," says a policeman; A caption says "meanwhile in Peru" over a bird struggling along with a large necklace in its beak. 
5. Aspect-to-Aspect: is where we see different aspects of a scene, idea or emotion.
   A set of pictures conveying the same place from various angles and distances.
   A clown, happy children and a smiling cat.
   
6.  Non-Sequitur: This is where pictures have nothing in common whatsoever. However the human mind is so adept of looking for patterns and connections, and so wants to find them, that it's almost impossible to have two things that aren't in any way related. Especially to improvisers who are trained in making these sorts of connections.
   

So let's look at them more from an improviser's point of view.

• Moment-to-Moment and Action-to-Action happen during a scene and are perhaps demonstrated best by that exercise where you break down every single movement into a simple, discrete steps. For example to pick up a piece of toast, you put your arm out; open your fingers; put them around the toast; close them; bring hand up. It's possible to divide this different ways and you can always break it down more (or less). You can think of how much you break something down like this as an indication of how important it is. For example, the moment the young man kills his first deer in a film or book would probably be shown (or described) in great detail and perhaps slow motion.
• Subject-to-Subject is usually demonstrated by focus shifting to other characters in the scene or by a cut-away scene. Or it could be done by a narrator adding some extra details or unseen actions.
• Scene-to-Scene is where most improv edits fall so doesn't need to be expanded here.
• Aspect-to-Aspect changes is usually achieved in a brief montage where we see three quick establishing scenes about Christmas. Or by one or more narrators or characters describing different aspects of a scene, event, etc.
• Non-Sequitur is either surrealist randomness or it's the gap between scenes in the first round of a Harold or similar collection of (usually) unrelated scenes. Although even then, there are usually plenty of connections if you look for them.

This list might not be directly applicable to improving your improv, but the more aware we are of time and space and how much control we have over it on stage the better. It can only help to make us stronger performers; more in control of every aspect of what happens on that few square feet of wood where we do our magic.

Improv and The Graphic Novel Part 1: Closure

I recently finished reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. I'm not really a big follower of graphic novels, but this book was recommended as being really about storytelling.



It certainly covers a good deal about storytelling, but mostly in the context of depicting said story in sequential boxes and it also has other line-drawn axes to grind . Having read it, like all good obsessives, I asked myself, how can I apply this to the thing I'm obsessed with? There is a good deal that can be applied here to improv.

What was good, was that the book was also written by an obsessive and it's great to see obsessives from other media especially those who have made a success of it. It's great is to witness someone enthusing about an art form that's very comparable to improv in that it's an art form often perceived as a hybrid, i.e. made up of other art forms. An art form that is often sidelined and looked down upon, yet is actually more adept at communicating directly to people than others that are generally more highly regarded.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to go over the concepts that I think can be readily applied to improv that this book brought to my attention or reminded me of. Starting today with...

Closure

Closure is the human mind's ability to fill in gaps in what it sees [1]. McCloud puts it as "observing the parts but perceiving the whole" [p63]. Or put another way, "if something is missing in an otherwise complete figure, humans will tend to add the missing parts." [2] Examples are usually given in terms of shapes. For example, circles drawn with dashes that even though it could be seen as series of curved lines, we clearly see it as a whole circle. But it's the same when we see just the front of a car or the end of a box of cornflakes, we assume with such conviction that the rest of the object is there, lurking around the corner or behind the other packets.

It also works in the written and spoken word. Ellipsis, where parts of a sentence are omitted (and sometimes replaced with three dots called an ellipsis), is often an example of this. E.g. in "He gave Sheila the coat; and Gavin the knife," "he gave" is omitted before "Gavin" as the meaning is clear without it. It even works for parts of words as in the flowing examples: "Look out for the skellton!" "I hope I've may my point."

Great closure example (c) 2009 logopond.com

In terms of storytelling, closure in this sense means things that are omitted that are filled in by the audience. For example: a guy goes sleepily into a room and then emerges rubbing and opening his eyes. Here we automatically assume he's been to sleep. We didn't see it, but we know the normal sequence of events and this fits the pattern.

For another example, Jack shouts angrily at Allan; In the next scene Allan is lying on the floor and Jack has a clenched fist. We know Jack just thumped Allen without even having to see it.

Horror films use it a lot. Especially older or low budget ones or those going more for suspense than gore. We see the shadow of the creature approach the terrified girl, and then we cut to a tree. There is an ear-piercing scream and the birds fly off. We know it was the girl who screamed and that the creature has got to her. In fact even seeing the shadow of the creature involves closure, because we don't see the actual creature but we know shadows don't move about without the thing they are the shadow of. (Mysteries and thrillers actually take advantage of closure all the time. Often to throw us off the scent or make us think the story is going down one path. It's something we might deal with later.)

So closure in stories involves the audience filling in things or events that they don't see either during or in between scenes. It's very useful. It means we can skip whole chunks of things that the audience knows are going to happen or that are obvious from what is already happening.

It has great benefits for improv. It means we can don't have to show every single little thing to the audience. There is scope and precedent for omitting scenes or chunks of scenes. Especially, for example, later in a long form when we're racing towards the end or when a character has to do a lot of preparations. Take the situation where the hero suddenly needs to go and get a hat to get into the Hatters' Ball, we could simply have him declare he needs to get a hat and see him in the next scene proudly putting on his new hat. We don't need a scene of him entering the hat shop, choosing and buying that hat, delaying what we really want to get to. A less dramatic and more common improv example of closure is starting a scene in the middle.

I could fill a whole book with examples of this from movies, but all we need to know is that where the audience can easily fill in the gaps, we do have the scope to miss obvious parts of the story out and jump to the more interesting bits. It takes some practice to be sure, you're missing out bits the audience will assume happened and not need to see. Otherwise what the audience thinks is going on and what you think is going on might be radically different. And that's not good.

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Scott McCloud has since written a new book much more about the storytelling and I hope to have a look at that soon.

Patterns

A lot of improv and storytelling in general has a lot to do with the setting up, continuing or building on, and completing or breaking of patterns. Most games found within a scene are a continuation or building up of a pattern. A satisfactory ending to a story is often the bringing of a pattern to a pleasing end or bringing it back to the start. Any surprise ending and the punchlines to many jokes are all breaking a pattern.

Humans are very adept at spotting patterns. We use it in our interpretation of speech and writing, and the recognition of objects and faces. Our personality and behaviour is a set of patterns we unconsciously adhere to. A (daily) routine is a set of patterns we perform regularly. When a routine is upset, the pattern is broken. After a period of confusion or chaos, a new pattern emerges. Even if patterns don't break, they usually evolve. The habits you had 5 years ago will probably have changed into new ones. Maybe they are completely new, but often they are toned down, exaggerated or changed another way.

We can exploit this feature in our characterisation. And use our innate pattern-matching ability to spot games, common traits and hidden links.

It is quite possible, I'm sure, to define improv entirely with reference to patterns. It would somewhat remove it from the practical realities of performing it but be a very useful intellectual and even educational endeavour. If I get round to doing it, you'll be the first to know.

What is Improvised Comedy?

It's fair to say, if you are reading this blog, you probably have an idea what impro is. Maybe you call it improv, I know I do about half the time. But whilst you probably know what it is, it is instructive to have people define it. You can learn a lot about people's approach and passion to something by their definition of it.

Often it's easier to define impro by what it isn't. It isn't scripted theatre and it isn't stand-up comedy. It isn't pantomime and it isn't avant garde socio-political monologue. But it does combine elements from all of those.

Jochem Meijer as Yeus, God of Improv by Rick vd Meiden

When telling an audience what it is, I say it's "the noble art of making stuff up on stage." But to a more scientific audience, such as yourselves, I would say it is "a form of comedy theatre using simple techniques to create new scenes based on little or no initial information." And now it doesn't sound fun at all. So let's get a bit more artsy, "a system of theatre using listening and positive play techniques to build scenes and stories using a combined imagination." But quite frankly, once you are an advanced improviser, who has absorbed so many of the general improv guidelines and for whom the core rules of listening and agreeing are habitual, you could describe it as "dicking around on stage." The problem is that for a tight group of advanced improvisers, dicking around on stage is like watching wonderful theatre. Lesser performers can't just dick around on stage because it just looks like dicking around on stage, and nobody wants to watch that for an hour unless you already really, really like the performers.

So if I had to give one definition out of all of these it could be "The noble art of dicking about on stage to build stories through simple listening and positive play techniques" But I'd like to go with something simpler, that I'm sure has been used before:

Stories from a collective imagination.

Playing Real

Frequently in rehearsals, I enforce the no-gag and no-comment rules in an attempt to get people to play more realistically. As I see it, comedy can basically be played two different ways:

1. Straight – characters are realistic. That doesn't mean they are serious characters, but it does mean that if the characters are jokey sorts of people, their jokes are in character and aimed at the other characters and not the audience. Laughs mainly happen to characters and through the story and situations.

2. Knockabout – It's all very jokey. Jokes come from the characters or, often, the actors.

A lot of improv shows end up playing the second way, but the first way is more entertaining, deeper, richer and ultimately more satisfying for everybody.

The second way doesn't have to be taught. In fact it usually has to be untaught. So I like to rehearse playing straight because everyone can do the knockabout, but acting realistically is a skill.

Playing knockabout becomes a particular problem when playing genres. For example, you can't do drama as knockabout, it doesn't look any different to the rest of the show and it certainly doesn't feel like drama.


I'm a real believer in trying to play a genre as real as possible. Don't aim for parody, aim for genre itself. As comedians, you'll find the funny and it will probably become a parody anyway. Remember that the best parodies are pretty close to the genre, sometimes indistinguishable to those who don't know the genre. Try to recreate a Western; don't mug to the audience and simply state that this location ain't big enough for the both of you. The most awe will come from a Western scene that feels like a Western scene rather than a bunch of people goofing on Western clichés. Unfortunately, in improv the biggest laughs often come from dicking around, however such scenes will rarely inspire anything more than big laughs.

And even if simply dicking around for laughs is the goal for your show, the more you rehearse real characters, realistic relationships and playing genres straight, the more ammunition you'll have. And if you do aspire to more than this, if you do want shows that contain awe, definitely try rehearsing without emphasising the funny.

The Origin of Scenes

Improv could be thought of in terms of evolution, where every tiny little yes-and adds to the scene, so that it starts as a simple suggestion and ends up as something complex and fantastic. The "environment" that shapes the scene in this situation refers to the audience suggestions and people in the group, as well as the world the scene has created for itself. Not all offers create things that are useful to the survival of the scene, but these usually become less important than those that really help the scene take off. Obviously some scenes end up going down an evolutionary path where they become extinct or peter out to audience indifference, but even scenes going in these directions can still learn to adapt. It seems then that, when starting a scene, we should aim to end up with dolphins or humans, not dodos or dinosaurs.

Anyway, this is the latest hair-brained theory I am toying with and I fully expect disagreements from fundamentalist Christian improv groups who believe scenes are given to them fully-formed by God. Although we've all been in scenes we know did NOT come from God; or if they did come from God, then God's one sick mother mofo. Anyway, feel free to expand or refute my theory and also discuss if the picture really does represent the worst improv scene ever? (Hint: The worst thing about it was that the Dodo and the Dildo didn't even know each other.)