Sean London writes and shares about improv.
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I wrote before about straight-manning. In retrospect, I still agree with most of it, but I'd add the caveat that this kind of labeling is more just for fun. It's not so much "I'm this kind of straight man" or "I'm this kind of improviser," it's more like, "Oh this is one kind of way I can straight man that I may not have tried before; this is another."
Recently, someone on UCB Underground asked, "What are some ways the straight can heighten the absurd character's game?"
Not always, but often the straight man's dynamic with the absurd follows a similar pattern. Knowing this pattern is sometimes a good place to start when getting comfortable straight-manning:
1. Confirming the absurdity
2. Emotional Reaction
3. Decision.
At first in the scene you're just confirming they're absurd. This is the part of the scene where you're just like, "Am I being punk'd? // Wait did you say you think the current president is Abraham Lincoln? // What do you mean upside-down doctor?" All of this is justifying/contextualizing/grounding things in a way that makes the game clear and answers the audience's questions about the reality of the scene.
I love this Key & Peele sketch; the first 55 seconds is just about setting up the reality and confirming the absurdity:
Then, at some point, the game/absurdity is confirmed and the straight has some kind of emotional reaction. For example, in Curb Your Enthusiasm, it's that moment where one of them forms an opinion on what the other is doing and labels it. "You want me to say goodbye again? I can't say good bye again! That's a double goodbye! I'll look like an idiot!" It can also lean another way, depending on your choice. Are you scared/angry/happy/perplexed/jealous? Miles Stroth is an improviser who tends to get angry at the absurd. Sean Clements is an improviser who tends be perplexed by the absurd, questioning and breaking the logic of the absurdity. You can even join the absurd, and choose to represent the straight in your dialogue. Then there's intensity: is the emotion played heavy-handed? Subtle? Slow burn or blow up? All of these choices will explore the game differently from the straight position.
In that Key & Peele sketch above, the emotional choice (which is a kind of disbelief that heightens to a blow up) happens around :55 and 1:10. Once he makes that choice, all his responses are filtered through that emotion.
And finally, having had some emotional reaction, the scene will inevitably heighten to a decision your character has to make. Should I fire this weirdo employee? Should I call the cops on this crazy neighbor? Should I pull a gun?
In the Key & Peele sketch above, the decision is simply him yelling near the end, "Are you being serious right now?" which is a pretty full emotional heighten considering he's talking to a stranger in the scene (this tends to be the emotional climax/decision point of Curb Your Enthusiasm scenes too and most transaction/stranger scenes).
If this were an improv scene, the final alien move would be "finding a new level" of the scene, which is usually necessary after a major decision has been made. If you blow up at the absurd, whether by yelling at them or firing them or calling the cops, you usually end up forcing a move from them: either upping the absurdity (usually button-ing the scene) or justifying the absurdity (usually backing off the absurdity to be more honest).
(As I write this, I realize this might come off as more mathematical than improv actually ever is. For me, this is just a collection of patterns, of ways things often ending up playing out that seem make comedic sense for reason. When you're onstage, I do my best to not think about this stuff. When I'm practicing though, I like to think about these things, and train them into my reaction. Eventually, these patterns become unnoticeable; even Tim & Eric sketches seem to do some weirdo version of this.)
Hello Los Angeles readers! I don't normally like to plug on here, but I'm gonna this time. Tomorrow night at Wednesday Night Riot, WWE's John Morrison will be performing 2-man improv with MSW's Miles Stroth. It'll be a 25-30-minute set. Plus, we have a really great lineup, featuring fellow MSW'ers Longshot, indie favorites Phi Beta Negro, and of course the house team Reddit WTF doing improv based on weird stuff we find on Reddit/r/wtf.
We've been running Wednesday Night Riot with our new format for about 9 months now. Every week we perform the Reddit show, and I feel like we've sorted out the kinks and really hit our stride in the last couple months. And with One Night Stand, we have booked some of the most AMAZING guests to perform with Miles, including Dominic Dierkes, Alex Fernie, Jaime Moyer, Charlie Sanders, Will Hines, Small Men, Phil Jackson, Nicole Byer, Fran Gillespie, Curtis Gwinn, Mike Still and so many more.
If you haven't been to Wednesday Night Riot, I'd love to see you. We do brand new bits every week, we curate great guest teams, One Night Stand is always spectacular, there's wine and beer and whiskey, it's every week, and on top of all that, the show is free.
This week's a really cool one, so come check it out!
Will Hines is on the show! You know him from The Smokes, Your F’ed up Family, The Stepfathers, Play by Play, and the bitter rival podcast to my own, Long Form Conversations. Today will and I talk about… a lot. I was having trouble focusing on one thing. Will is a wealth of information, and I know we didn’t even come close to covering all of his wisdom. But, maybe I’ll convince him to come back in a year, and we’ll do better the second time. Rate. Subscribe. Comment. Share. Enjoy. Oh! I didn’t record an outro. Well, Happy Improvising, Be excellent to each other, Golden Age of Improv.
Listening is an art not easily come by, but in it there is beauty and great understanding. We listen with the various depths of our being, but our listening is always with a preconception or from a particular point of view. We do not listen simply; there is always the intervening screen of our own thoughts, conclusions, and prejudices. To listen there must be an inner quietness, a freedom from the strain of acquiring, a relaxed attention. This alert yet passive state is able to hear what is beyond the verbal conclusion. Words confuse; they are only the outward means of communication; but to commune beyond the noise of words, there must be listening in alert passivity. Those who love may listen; but it is extremely rare to find a listener. Most of us are after results, achieving goals; we are forever overcoming and conquering, and so there is no listening. It is only in listening that one hears the song of the words.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life (via probablysean)
Posted this on my personal tumblr, but it seemed relevant here. I started taking Miles Stroth’s workshop again, which is getting more and more philosophical as it evolves, and he said something similar: “Thinking is noise.” All that thinking is me trying to push the scene into some direction. What’s actually required is a state of readiness; “Put yourself in a state of reaction,” as Miles said on day one. Don’t think at all; rely on your reaction; do the first thing that occurs to you. Listen and react. First, listen.
"When you’re thinking, you’re not listening." Maybe Miles and Jiddu should trade notes.
“Don’t try to sneak in through the window. Just come boldly onto stage, like come right through the door with your choice. Kill the judge in your head and just take action.” - Mick Napier
The improv community in NYC is pretty amazing. I don’t just mean that people are awesome and exciting work is happening on stages (or whatever is available) all over the city 7 days a week. I mean it is, well, large. And gets larger every month (even counting in those that feel...
Hey guys! MSW's offering a one-time, 3-hour improv workshop this Saturday. The instructor is David Avcollie who has taught improv for 40 (!) years. That alone is usually enough to make me throw down some cash for a one-time workshop, but I like that it says the class "makes improv fun, easy and will demonstrate how you can enter a scene with absolutely nothing, and still have the ability to connect with your scene partner and have a strong impact on your audience." I've been doing a lot of premise-stuff lately, so this sounds good to me. I'll be there.
From the website's class description:
Have you performed in an improv show and found yourself not having fun? Have you found yourself thinking a little too hard? David Avcollie has seen your shows, and now he’d like to help.
Join David in a one-time only, 3-hour improv and acting workshop that is designed to help players within the moment get out of their head and into their body. David has all of the tools to make your improv fun, easy and will demonstrate how you can enter a scene with absolutely nothing, and still have the ability to connect with your scene partner and have a strong impact on your audience.
David is old school, and even pre-dates “old man” Miles Stroth. Whether you’re a beginner, intermediate or advanced, improvisers and performers of any skill level will benefit from the wealth of information David has.
David is the former head of Voice and Speech and Acting at The Theatre School At DePaul University and co-founder of Chicago Playworks. He has been teaching, directing and coaching for over 40 years. Former students include: John C Reilly, George Wendt, Judy Greer, Zach Helm, Rachel McAdams, Jeremy Sisto, among many others.
Hey LA peeps! Will Hines (UCB's F'd Up Family, writer of nonsense about improv) is doing twoprov with Miles Stroth tonight at Wednesday Night Riot. Plus we have Phi Beta Negro, High Concept, and The Reddit WTF Show. And it's FREE (we accept donations of course). Should be fun!
Great improv is one of my favorite things to watch when I need inspiration. When you're stuck, the creative process feels impossible and unfun. Improv is the entire creative process, from beginning to end, from inspiration to writing to performance, unfolding at its easiest and most fun. Improv reminds you that it's fun to create things.
I've always wanted to write something like this and last night's show was so fun and eye-opening, that I thought this would be a good time to go back and try to dissect what went right, why, and see if I can replicate those things going forward while maybe dropping some of the stuff that didn't help me. Maybe this will be fun?
Mindset
Matt Besser has always talked about the importance of mindsets going into the show, and he's completely right about that. When you're improvising, you're completely on instinct (ideally anyway) and you can really color those instincts with the right mindset.
I've been in a rut for awhile and not having a lot of fun, so I was a little anxious going in. I ended up sending a long rambly message to my good friend Char, who gave me the most amazing advice: It is through joy good things come. It's not "If I have a good show, I will be happy"; it's "IF I'M HAPPY, then I'll have a good show." (btw, Jesus Christ, Char. Changing my life and my improv in one fell swoop)
So. Point #1 was to bring joy with me to the stage.
Simultaneously, in preparation, I went to UCB's Search History show the other night, and it was really great. They do an opening where they interview an audience member about the search history on their phone. There's some interview stuff, some riffing---pretty similar to what we do at Reddit (we look up weird stuff on reddit/r/wtf and take a suggestion from the audience for stuff search for). Nicole Byer had this REALLY great, simple initiation. In the opening, it came up that someone's boss didn't like to throw out food and he'd get mad if you did. So Nicole Byer just steps out, gets into the lower part of her voice, and goes, "Where the fuck are my beans?" That's it! The opening suggested a character and she simply embodied that character. From there, her scene partner just straighted her and they were off.
Warm-Up
The show started around 8:45 and we were up at 9:30. We wouldn't have time to warm-up, which is fine because I don't really like to do warm-ups anyway. But you do have to check-in. Billy Merritt once (okay, many times) said that the Smokes would warm up by tossing a water bottle around and talking. And I think that's all you need.
Our cast right now is just me, Nick Luciano, Emerson Dibley, and Alex Nelson, but we were lucky to have Landon Kirksey, Dan Amerman, and Tim Chang guest with us. Some of us didn't know each other, so instead of warming up, we just took about (literally) 30 seconds to introduce ourselves, make eye contact, and make fun of the fact that I forced them to make eye contact. That was a good warm up.
The Opening
So I've been forcing myself to host the opening because I've been a really terrible host in the past and I don't like that. I remember maybe a year ago Sean Clements started doing the interview at Shitty Jobs and at first seemed a little nervous, and this guy is one of my heroes. But a few weeks later, he got more comfortable, then he started doing podcasts, and kept doing the interview, and he just got hysterically funny at it in no-time. So I thought ok, anybody can have trouble with something and get better at it.
Miles Stroth the other night noted how relaxed Jason Mantzoukas is onstage, and I took that to heart and tried to embody that when I hosted. Plus, I remembered point #1: bring joy with me to the stage. I just ran up to the stage, full energy, and just engaged the crowd like I would a person, didn't think at all, and really just enjoyed what I was doing. It was a full crowd. The music was loud ("I Ain't No Joke" by Eric B. & Rakim). Cossbysweater had just performed before us and they were completely delightful. There was no reason not to enjoy myself! So I did and the opening went great.
We took two suggestions, as we do, "All we need to get started is a suggestion of something you'd like us to look up on reddit.com/r/wtf!"
1. Florida (thank you)
2. Tentacle Porn (thank you)
We took the top-voted links off each and came out with:
Naked woman on a bike at a Florida Wal-Mart
A shirt that said the Gunshine State
A dead kid's skull found in a pool in Florida
A "sexy" woman terribly photoshopped (and touched up!) with tentacles
An old Japanese painting of a woman having sex with a squid
The Show
By the time the show started, I felt completely great. The opening got a lot of laughs, which is always helpful, so when I announce that we'll take them to "an improvised version of the weird things we found on Reddit/r//wtf", it felt really momentous and like a show. I was happy about that.
I'm never in the first scene (because hosting), but Dan and Emerson started (Emerson always starts like that; I love that) and played a great game. "So I found something in your pool." (lots of laughs already; clearly found a way to make the dead kid thing funny)
I wanted to jump in quick, because we only have about 15-20 minutes left and 5 things to get through. I quickly thought to "be simple" and tagged in: "So I found something in your sandbox."
After it got swiped, I felt a slight pain because I didn't embody anyone when I tagged in and quickly thought to fix that. To be clear, this sounds think-y, but these are kinda quick, normal "thoughts" as opposed to "thinking," if that makes sense.
A little later, Nick and Tim pull from "gunshine state" a store that only sells state shirts with weapons on them. Tim is a customer. I choose to play a second customer in line, and this time I play a nut that I think would actually shop for Texas t-shirts with nunchukus on them. It felt a lot better doing the character.
(fun fact: the scene ends when someone mentions that the Ultimate Warrior died and I thought it would be funny to point out that he was a known racist. APPARENTLY IMPROV AUDIENCES REALLY LIKE THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR BECAUSE I GOT SWIPED ON SILENCE. NOT MY PROBLEM, AMERICA.)
At some point, they do the tentacle scene, where there's a sexy tentacle actress who's kind of a diva, in as much as she eats the craft services people. At some point, the whole cast joins in to create the tentacle monster. IMPROV!
I tag everyone out and play a guy living in her stomach. This one I definitely used point #2: embody the character that's implied. So I don't know, but somehow I knew that the guy who lived in her stomach was a weirdo who sat cross-legged and ate cereal?
Haha, it actually didn't quite land, because I didn't properly set up that we were inside the stomach (d'oh) but a line or two in, that fact kinda squeaked out and it worked (I think?). So I gotta remember to orient the audience on tags. Sometimes when I'm playing I feel my head move two steps ahead of the audience, which is one step too far.
Happy to say we had a good closer on the show, which I attribute purely to Miles Stroth's level 2 class. He talks a lot about "the piece" which is his way of describing a set as a whole, like a piece of art. And he's always saying that you want to see a story, the audience likes for things to wrap up.
When we're closing up the show, and we've gone through all of the stuff from the opening, all of our cast is thinking about closing the show. Alex initiated a second beat of the dead kid thing with Dan and it played great. I popped in behind Dan and played tentacles bursting from his body. Everyone else came in behind me to play more tentacles, and finally, Landon, as the lighting guy came back and gets eaten by the mom who killed her kid, and the mom turned out to be the tentacle monster. Story!
Conclusion
Well, I'm glad I wrote this. I don't know if anyone read all the way to the end. But I'm glad I wrote this. The show went well, I see where I could improve, without being too hard on myself. After all, how many notes can you really give yourself and still actually take action on them? So I'll work on my tags and make sure I'm establishing where I am. And I'll make sure not to over-think my tags on the backline; stay one step ahead, not two.
But mostly I want to focus on what went right. Improv is not about a series of actions in which you avoid a certain number of problems you have. As Mick Napier says, we just want to know "What do I do?", not "What do I avoid?" I'm glad to know that finding the joy in play works. I'm glad to know that when you embody a character you can think less and have more fun. I'm glad to know being relaxed helps hosting. I'm glad to know to be simple. I'm glad to know that even if things are hard at first, you get better with time.
I'll let you know how next week goes.
-Sean London
Coaching | Twitter
Related Posts:
Don't Reach. Have faith in Discovery.
Is Improv Inherently Meta? / Commitment at all Levels
Here's a simple way to justify that will work almost any time you have a simple offer or game up top:
Justify with something simple and honest, but do it anyway and deny it up and down.
You've probably heard some variation of this in class before, but the important thing to remember is to do it anyway and deny it up and down, because that's usually where you get the laugh (not on the justification itself).
Here's an example from a class scene that went well:
Improviser 1: “Mr. President, that was a great speech, but can we get one more take, and this time, could you not make kissy faces at the First Lady?”
Improviser 2: “Sorry about that, it’s Michelle’s birthday and I thought maybe I could squeeze in a little birthday greeting.” [simple, honest]
1: “Yeah, but it’s showing up on camera. Let’s just get one more take.”
2: “Sure. (clears throat) My fellow Americans (makes a kissy face), I am here today to assure that the NSA is not storing data.” [do it anyway]
1: “Okay, you just did it again.”
2: “No I didn’t.” (deny up and down)
It's a nice, clean way to justify something without inventing at all but still have a lot of fun in your scene. And if you feel the need to justify again, you can just stick with that same justification. "Sir, you just did it again!" "Did I mention it is my wife's birthday? I thought I was very clear on that." Then the game starts to become sticking to that inane justification and that's fun.
One more example:
1: Hey man, quit cheating off my test!
2: I didn't study last night, bro! [simple explanation]
1: I don't care just stop.
2: Fine.
(beat)
(beat)
(beat)
(very slowly leans in)
1: Frank!
2: What???? [deny up and down]
Of course, it's worth noting that these kind of scenes also work if you don't justify them at all. Because the justification is not really the thing that's explored in these type of scenes. These scenes tend toward exploring some simple absurdity. Instead of giving your reasons, you can just say, "No I wasn't."
1: "No I clearly saw you making kissy faces though."
2: "Well, I'm the president."
1: "[sighs] That's right, Mr. President. Well, let's just get one more take for safety."
Again, a lot of Key & Peele sketches are like this, and a lot of Will Ferrell SNL sketches are like that. Why does Walken need more cowbell? He's just gotta have it. Who knows why.
A lot of improv dialog tends to settle into a regular rhythm, a ping pong back and forth that we encourage in new students. I say something, you listen, pause briefly to consider what I have said and respond. Then I pause briefly to consider what you’ve said and respond to you. This is one way to build a scene, but if this rhythm continues throughout the scene, it can be deadly boring—one polite…
Bill Posley created a new webseries about improv called Improversations and it's really great. They're 3 episodes deep, each better than the last. Normally inside-baseball (improv) jokes don't really go deep enough or do the work to be really funny. Usually it's more like, "This is a reference and thus you should laugh if you know the reference," but Bill's series is genuinely funny and he goes DEEP and finds something genuinely hilarious and truthful about our little world.
This improv stalkers episode is so good it made me uncomfortable, so much so that I WOULD LIKE TO FORMALLY APOLOGIZE TO JASON MANTZOUKAS, SHITTY JOBS, AND EVERY UCB NEW YORK IMPROVISER I'VE HARASSED IN THE LAST THREE YEARS. YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THAT EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT YOU IS FROM THE IRC WIKI, AND YOU REALLY END UP BUILDING STORIES IN YOUR MIND ABOUT WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE AND HOW GOOD POLICE CHIEF RUMBLE IS AND WHEN YOU FINALLY SEE THEM IN REAL LIFE IT INCITES THE MOST EMBARASSING, MUMBLY, WEIRDO PARTS OF YOURSELF.
Hey guys! Just saw this. There's a v-day jam at UCB today in an hour with Nicole Byer and Sasheer Zamata! I can't be there because work, but that sounds super fun.
Hey dudes! I help run a show called Wednesday Night Riot and I'm trying to book some new acts. We've had a great run of teams doing fun, inspired things onstage, including Jetzo doing some truly AMAZING Kabuki improv, Power Up! doing beatbox-inspired improv, Twilight Zone-prov doing Twilight Zone stuff and making me laugh like crazy, and I just LOVE this stuff.
If you're on a team who's doing something fun or cool or weird or experimental, LET ME KNOW! I want to put up your show. If it's good, we'll probably have you back regularly.
OH! And if you're from out of town but you're in town: Let me know about your show! I might be able to put you up if you let me know in advance. And even if you let me know last minute, who knows?
A little bit about us:
Wednesday Night Riot is an indie-ish improv show that's run almost a year now. (I say indie-ish, because we're part of the Miles Stroth Workshop shows but MSW is not a theatre nor does it have an artistic director or any say-so in how our show is run. Miles is a really great guy like that.) We have two house teams, including The Reddit WTF Show (which does improv off of weird stuff found on Reddit.com/r/wtf) and One Night Stand (in which Miles improvises with a new improviser every week).
We've had special guests like NICOLE BYER, BEN RODGERS, CHARLIE SANDERS, REBECCA DRYSDALE, and others do One Night Stand with Miles, and upcoming we have some more great players like Ben Siemon, UCB Artistic Director Mike Still, Eugene Cordero and lots more. If YOU want to perform with Miles, just come to Riot and put your name in the box, and if selected in our monthly drawing, you can perform with Miles too.
So that's us, but we still book two guest teams every week and we want to see COOL STUFF. So if you have a team, and want to perform at WNR, just send an email to wednesdaynightriotimprov at gmail, with your:
