How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth Read online

  How To Be The Greatest Improviser On Earth

  by Will Hines

  Preface

  When I say “improv comedy,” I mean: the art of making up comedy scenes as you go, on a stage. A group of people get on a stage, ask for a single suggestion, and then create one or more comedic scenes based on the suggestion. Generally, it looks like a comedic play.

  The Compass Players pioneered this style of improv in Chicago during the 1950s, and it has flourished in the decades since through theaters like Second City, iO, and the Upright Citizens Brigade, among others.

  You knew that, right? You better, or this book is just going to get more confusing from here.

  Introduction

  The problem with writing a book on doing improv comedy is that once you start thinking about it, all the advice starts to shrink.

  It seems that improv advice really wants to be small. I try to write something grand and transformative, but once I get it down and revise it even a little bit, everything reduces to taut little mantras and tips. “Follow the fear.” “Play to the top of your intelligence.” “If this is true, then what else is true?”

  There’s something humble and pragmatic about small pieces of advice, which I like. They’re little fistfuls of ideas you can carry with you on stage and shove up into your brain, without their taking up too much room. Isn’t that all you need? After all, if you really want to get better as an improviser, you don’t want a grand sermon so much as a few good tips—to get you over the hump of a bad scene until everything starts to click.

  Improv is not that complicated, really. You just listen to each other and make up a funny scene. Here’s every good improv scene:

  Do something inspired by a suggestion.

  Understand each other.

  Move the scene forward.

  Find/do something funny.

  Do more of the funny thing.

  Everything else that someone tells you must happen is either just semantics or taste.

  Still, good improv scenes always feel so much grander than what a small piece of advice looks like.

  I remember well the first truly good moment I had on stage. I’d been on one of the house teams at my theater for just over a year (yes, it took a year for me to feel I had a truly good moment). In the scene, Santa Claus had discovered his elves were actually robots, and they were mysteriously shutting down.

  I was watching from the backline and felt a stirring that I should be an evil villain who had masterminded this scheme. Rather than thinking too much about it, or trying to figure out what my character’s whole plan was, or even crafting an initial funny thing to say, I simply imagined myself into an evil being, stepped into the scene, and found myself saying: “Ha, ha, ha, Santa Claus!”

  And the damnedest thing happened, which had never really happened to me before: the audience laughed. Hard.

  What surprised me was that there didn’t seem to be anything special about my move. There wasn’t a joke, or impressive specificity, or anything particularly clever or surprising.

  But there was something in that move: It was spontaneous, simple, committed, connected, and lively. It felt... real. Something stirred in my gut: oh my God, I’m doing it. I’m doing improv, and I’m doing it right.

  With hindsight, I can see that the stirring in my gut was the sense of being truly present. I wasn’t trying to solve the scene or force an ending. I was simply doing what the moment seemed to call for, based on the moments right before. It was good partly because it was so little. It was vulnerable and without an agenda.

  You get into improv because you like comedy, but in moments like that you feel much more than simply funny. You feel connected to a flow. You’re not thinking; you’re just reacting and keeping an invisible ball in the air. When you hear a deep laugh from an audience like that, it doesn’t just sound like they’re saying, “That was funny.” It sounds like they’re saying, “We see you. You are true. You are real .”

  My first truly good moment was a small moment. But contained within it was a deeply rooted feeling of being what I’d always dreamed: a comedian.

  It’s powerful and addictive, that feeling. It’s what we’re all chasing when we do improv. Small, unplanned moments that feel connected to something grand.

  Small but Grand

  The famous, bedrock improv mantra “Yes and” is a perfect example of a small statement with a larger truth. At first glance, it’s just practical advice for how to improvise a scene without a script. You agree with the information and add to it.

  But we improvisers know there is a far more ambitious mandate buried in that phrase. We hear that word “yes,” and we know we’re being asked to be brave and adventurous, not just in our scenes but in our whole lives. We hear the word “and,” and we know we’re being told to make a decision, to take a stand, not to be satisfied with simply watching things go by .

  So many improv sayings sound like directives for your life:

  “Why is today important?”

  “Treat the audience like poets and geniuses.”

  “Speak to the most important thing.”

  “Don’t be coy.”

  “Find the love.”

  That’s why people who love improv obsess as much about the teaching of it as the doing of it. You can use a mantra like “if this is true, then what else is true?” as a simple tool, or puzzle over its deeper meaning as if it were a Zen koan.

  What Does Improv Teach You?

  In writing this book, I’ve thought back over my early years of improvising and tried to place myself back on the stage, to remember the way it felt. What were the big breakthrough moments, like the one where I became Santa Claus’s villain, when I could really feel improv changing me and giving me new strengths and abilities?

  Here is my list of lessons. If you practice improv, you will learn to:

  Be Present

  Be Changeable

  Fight Well

  Be Brave

  Play with Difficult People

  Be Authentic

  Be Funny

  Be Healthy

  These are the principles that get at the heart of what makes improv special. These are skills that the real world burns out of you. You’re socialized to think ahead, stay rigid, be careful, and often be false. Many are never taught to be funny or healthy.

  This book includes exercises to help practice these skills. Some are classic, and others were developed by me or another teacher I know. Of course it’s very easy to come up with similar exercises independently, so perhaps you have already run across similar ones.

  There are many examples of real scenes throughout this book. I went to shows, recorded the scenes, and then transcribed them. I occasionally leave out a few lines, but generally I’ve tried to depict the scenes as they happened. This means the examples aren’t perfect. They wander off topic, and players change their minds and adjust, or sometimes digress away from the main point of the scene. But these imperfections make the scenes feel immediate. They give the scenes a feeling of danger. I left them like this so you can get a feel for how scenes really play out.

  Depending on where you are in your improv development, you’ll probably find some of the lessons in this book helpful and others not so much. Then if you check back after a little while, you’ll find different ones helpful than you did before. I ask that you try them on loosely. Sometimes you’ll be looking for practical tips, and other times for a grand ambitious mantra. Almost everything in here can be either.

  Some Terms

  This book is not going to teach you the basics of doing improv. It assumes you’ve studied the fundamentals, either thro
ugh a theater or another book. But even the most basic terms can vary from theater to theater, so let’s explicitly define a few phrases and make sure we’re on the same page.

  Yes And

  This is the big one, the one that everyone knows. It’s the mantra that explains how to do improv. On a practical level it means: when you are doing improv, you confirm the information that has already been said, then add more.

  Denial

  This refers to either an out-and-out rejection of something stated as fact (e.g., “Put down the phone? But I’m holding a sandwich!”) or the rejection of the implied, unstated context of something (“You want me to dance? But this is a restaurant! ”). Denial is a cardinal sin, despite the unfortunate truth that it can be extremely funny, which is why very veteran teams indulge in selectively denying their scene partners.

  Top Of Your Intelligence

  This means, “Don’t make your character dumber than he should be.” All things being equal, you play your characters as smart people who know as much as you would know in that situation. Lots of people, when they feel the pressure to be funny, make their character arbitrarily stupid. Now, there’s plenty of time for selective stupidity—where there’s a method to the madness—but don’t be broadly dumb just to get things going.

  The Unusual Thing / Game of the Scene

  “Game of the scene” is a term coined by the Upright Citizens Brigade, and it means (very roughly) “the funny part.” The funny part starts when we find something that’s different from what we expect: “the unusual thing.”

  There’s the real world and how things normally go—that’s the scene. And then there’s a weird part that is unusual—that’s the game.

  If you improvise a boxing manager who tells fighters to never throw punches, then the boxing match is the scene, and the manager’s insane advice is the game. The two fighters shake hands , someone rings a bell, the fighters dance to the center—that’s the scene. And then one drops his arms to his sides and lets himself get hit in the face, because that’s what his manager told him to do—that’s the game.

  There are many semantic arguments about the “game of the scene.” That’s because the game addresses the comedy of the scene, and analyzing comedy with terms and categories is a dicey, imperfect business. The most common argument is over the difference between “an unusual thing” and a “full game,” which is an unusual thing heightened and explored.

  For the purposes of this book, a game is the unusual thing. What you do with it, how long you play with it, and how far you take it are all matters of taste.

  When we use the term “game of the scene” and emphasize its importance in this book, it is because we are presupposing that we want our improv scenes to have a funny part and not just be dramatic scenes. Was it funny? Then it had a game.

  Funny improvisers can be said to “get game.”

  Justifying / Saying Why

  Improv scenes often involve someone doing or saying unusual things. Very often the character with the unusual behavior will be challenged to answer, “Why are you doing this?” We call explaining your weird behavior “justifying.” It’s usually not a sensible explanation, and it may be something that makes sense only to someone looking at the situation from an odd perspective. See this scene between James Mannion and Cory Jacob

  James: “Roger, why did you write your reports in blood?”

  Cory: “I wanted you to know I care about this company.”

  If This Is True, Then What Else Is True?

  Once you have something funny, you ask, “If this is true, then what else is true?” If a priest decides that he is an atheist, maybe we see a scene where his choir has been instructed to sing the R.E.M. song “Losing My Religion.” What else might he do? Perhaps he’s replaced the crucifixes with statues of Albert Einstein.

  Answering this line of questioning in your scenes is also called “playing the game.”

  Suggestion Initiation Walk-Ons Tags Edits

  Suggestion: Most long-form improv sets begin with a word or a phrase from a member of the audience. This serves as the jumping-off point for the start of the set, not necessarily as a major topic to be explored.

  Initiation: The first line of a scene .

  Walk-On: An entrance into a scene already in motion, i.e., by someone other than the people who started the scene .

  Tag: An improv convention in which an actor who has not been in a scene walks up to and taps a character on the shoulder. The person who is tapped leaves, and is replaced by the new person. Whoever else was not tapped remains. It’s implied that, once the new person enters, the scene changes to a new location (related in some way to the original scene).

  For example, let’s say we have a job interviewer who is yelling at an applicant. An improviser who has not been in the scene walks up and tags the applicant. The applicant leaves. The new improviser takes his place and addresses the interviewer, “I understand you’ve been yelling at our applicants.” It’s implied that we have moved into the future, and now the interviewer is getting scolded by his manager.

  Edits: An agreed-upon convention for players to signal to each other that a scene is finished. The most typical edit is the “sweep,” where one player runs across the front of the stage, as if a curtain is being closed.

  Gifts Endowments Pimps

  When someone declares something new about another actor’s character, it’s a gift. “You look happy.” When you essentially assign someone a role, it’s an endowment. “You must be my father.” Gifts and endowments are good, and those terms are often used interchangeably.

  A pimp is when you go too far and you make it so your scene partner has to perform a stunt. “Weren’t you going to read a poem? In Spanish?”

  Del Close Openings Second Beats Harolds Connections

  Del Close: An improv director in Chicago during the 1960s–1990s, who championed long-form improv as a performance art and not just a tool in rehearsals.

  An Opening: A ritual where you take a suggestion and expand it into ideas. It should feel like an overture before a musical, in that you hear snippets of ideas to be expanded upon later. They are artsy, abstract, and hard, and there are many different kinds.

  Second Beat: During a set of multiple scenes, a second beat occurs when your scene revisits characters or a situation from an earlier scene in the show. Usually you try to revisit whatever made the original scene unique, rather than just continue the story. If you are revisiting a scene for a second time that’s called a “third beat.”

  The Harold: An improv structure developed by Del Close when he worked with Charna Halpern at the iO Theatre in Chicago. Played strictly, it goes like this: suggestion, opening, three scenes, group scene, three second beats, group scene, three third beats.

  Connections: When characters or ideas from one scene show up in a later scene that had been otherwise unrelated. When the various stories of a sitcom overlap at the end of an episode, they are “connecting.”

  Now that we have our terms, let’s get into the skills you need to take your improv to a higher level.

  Be Present

  If you were to take the fear that a new improviser feels, tear it from her soul, and condense it into a sentence, it would be this: “What do I say next?”

  Next. Later. The ending. New improvisers are constantly looking ahead, trying to see a clear path to a nice, satisfying ending.

  You’re going to have to forget that.

  An important step of becoming a great improviser is letting go of the future and choosing to BE PRESENT.

  And all you need to do in order to be present is to ignore one of the most basic human instincts you have: you need to stop thinking ahead.

  If you are a human being who has survived past the age of zero, you are not great at being present. You wake up, and you’re already worried about when you’re going to get to the post office to pick up that package, or what you’re going to get for your friend’s birthday on Thursday, or if you’ll have somethin
g cool to say at your 50th high school reunion in 20 years.

  Someone walks up to you at work and says hello, and you immediately start scrutinizing her face to guess what’s coming next: “What the heck does this person want with me? Is she gonna try to get me to sign a birthday card? Is it too late for me to pretend to not see her? Also, what am I gonna say at my 50th high school reunion in 20 years?”

  As soon as you start watching a movie, you’re trying to guess the ending. When the TV goes out for one second, you’re picking which relative you’re going to rescue if it turns out that a zombie uprising has started.

  As soon as you’ve decided that you are going to ask someone out, you start wondering what kind of couple you’d be, how long you might last, how many children you’d have.

  You won’t be fooled, your instincts assure you. You will be ahead of it, way ahead.

  But the present moment is huge in improv because improv happens on a stage. The audience are people who are in the same room as you. They can hear your breathing. They can see every little change on your face. They can pick up on every little piece of nonverbal information you’re putting out there. If you hear your ex-girlfriend in the audience sigh, your eyebrows will perk just slightly higher, and the whole audience will know that something is up.

  There is always a lot going on in the current moment if you’re practiced at paying attention to it, but new improv students are always worried about the future. A new improv student looks at their scene partner and thinks: Maybe my character is going to fall in love with this other character. They make that choice. I’ll start planting seeds now that we will someday be in love. And they say out loud, warmly, “Nice day, isn’t it?”