You have the opportunity to make a different choice.
This has come to define the philosophy behind the way that Justin and I perform and teach. Take a workshop from us, and you’ll hear us repeat this often: you have the opportunity to make a different choice. You have the opportunity to make a positive choice, to care about your scene partner, to listen and react. And it’s never too late to so.
Over the past year, this turn of phrase has come to define my own work as an improviser, both scenically and in the larger, professional sense. And I think it could come to define yours, too.
Success is a difficult thing to measure in improv. All at once, we’re taught to follow laughs from the audience as our cue for where to go next in a scene, while seemingly at the very same time being told to ignore them completely. It can be a very disorienting and confusing thing, to pay for comedy classes and then be told not to try to be funny. On paper, it sounds like a total scam, and, well, it actually sort of is.
Then, a peculiar thing happens: we begin to surprise ourselves. You, like me, probably remember the first time you got a completely unexpected laugh in a class by saying something that wasn’t even remotely funny. I couldn’t tell you the context of the scene itself in my case, but I can tell you the feeling: complete exhilaration. That first feeling of, “oh *that’s* what this is” is the best thing there is. I can’t say for sure, but I bet that your first unexpected laugh came because of the way you said something, not what you said, from an emotional or physical choice you made in a scene, rather than a witty aside while standing outside of it. It almost certainly came from something you created together with your scene partner.
That first unexpected laugh we get, that fleeting feeling of exhilaration and surprise, over time, becomes something that we chase, instead of something that we allow to happen on its own. And unfortunately, sometimes the chase pays off, which, to my mind, is the worst thing that can happen to an improviser: to figure out what “works” for us as individual players. As veteran improvisers, without realizing it, we become severely limited by our own “good” scenic choices, and we start making them all the time. It’s at this point that improv stops being improv, and turns into a party trick. Before making these moves on stage, you may as well turn to the audience and say, “Hey, look what I can do!” while also turning to your scene partner and saying, “Hey, no matter what you say, I’m still going to do this!”
As experienced improvisers, we often confuse playing confidently with playing comfortably. Confidence has a place on an improv stage. Our own personal comfort does not, and it is at the heart of all of our go-tos and why we keep going to them. I know, because I played comfortably for years during my time on house teams. Justin and I both did. I found my comfort zone, and the choices that existed within it that “worked” for me. Playing dumb. Playing assholes. Making smart references. (Ugh.) Playing some version of myself, most of all. (I got *so* much mileage out of my witty, smart, always-knows-what-to-say Kelly Buttermore character, you guys. That gal is a real firecracker!) Over time, my identity as an improviser because completely defined by my own “successful” choices. I, like you, said to myself proudly on more than one occasion, “this is how I play.” No, I didn’t plan exactly what I was going to say or do ahead of time, but deep down, I always knew how I was going to react to what my scene partner gave me: with one of a few, very specific, Kelly Buttermore choices. I became the master of my own particular brand of party tricks, and somehow managed to still convince myself I was doing improv confidently, rather than comfortably.
But even the funniest go-tos in the world will only work for so long. Have you ever complained, or heard others complain, about being in your head? Of course you have, it’s one of the most commonly-used expressions in improv. You know what “being in your head” really means? It means, “I don’t understand why the choices I always make aren’t working right now.” By the same token, have you ever walked off stage, and thought to yourself or, worse, said aloud, “I had no idea to do with my partner’s initiation?” What that essentially translates into, “I couldn’t figure out how to make my own shit work with what the other person was saying or doing.” Often, these feelings of being in one’s head, of being lost up there, of not knowing what to say stem directly from our own internal limitations, the ways that we have told ourselves that we play. Once we get into these so-called slumps, when our shit stops working, what follows next is either we either start making no choices at all on stage, completely frozen in fear, or wild, unpredictable ones that we think maybe will garner a reaction of some sort. These things, predictably, don’t work either, because they also aren’t improv.
You have an opportunity to make a different choice. You’ve always had this opportunity, but you’ve convinced yourself it’s not yours to make, or worse, that it doesn’t exist. What do you do now?
The first thing you have to do, and I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you have to drop your shit. You have to let go of your go-tos and step out of your comfort zone, and you can only move forward as an improviser if you do. Kill your darlings, as they say, and perhaps more violently, take that improviser you told yourself you were, and throw that person off a cliff. It will be hard at first, I know, because I just spent a year doing it, and it was the hardest fucking thing I have ever done. I still have to check my impulses from time to time not to say something smart and witty or play myself in a scene. In order for us to become the duo and the collaborative unit we always suspected we could be, Justin and I had to literally throw away years’ worth of everything that had ever worked. Every zany character, every overused physical stance, every urge to make a reference and show everyone how we smart we were, every impulse to sit down in chairs. Every single thing. It was only when we did this that we first got a glimpse of all the wonderful choices we had in front of us that we never knew were there. *This* is how you play.
Once you’ve started to do this, the next thing you need to do is to recognize that your only job in a scene is to listen and react to your scene partner. That’s it! Yes, it’s deceptively simple, but it’s the truth. Many improvisers, especially advanced ones, confuse reacting with responding. They’re not the same thing. Let me reframe it: react, *then* respond. And really, really react. Listen to what your partner just said, literally the last thing they just said, take a breath, see how it makes you feel, and then respond from *that* place. Having a big emotional reaction to a piece of information, no matter if it’s big or small, is a choice that is always yours to make, and the beautiful thing about it is that if you do it, and you commit to it, the words that follow will begin to feel more natural. You will inevitably start to feel those feelings of surprising yourself again. I know because I have watched it happen time and time again in all of the workshops Justin and I have taught together. I have also experienced it firsthand in my own play.
Finally, you always have the opportunity to make a positive choice, to care deeply about your scene partner. I could write an entire blog post (and I probably will!) about conflict in improv scenes, and how and why it becomes the dominant choice of players over time. Suffice to say, at the heart of scenic conflict is fear and lack of trust in one’s scene partner. It’s sort of impressive how often improvisers can turn “yes, and” into “fuck you, you idiot” and I almost want to commend them for it, if it didn’t piss me off so much. You can always, always, turn this around. You can choose to love the person you’re with, and love the place that you are. Our default settings as humans in the real world is dissatisfaction and displeasure, and that often finds its way on stage, too. We play out scenic relationships the way we’ve seen them portrayed most often. (When was the last time you saw two people depict a blissfully happy married couple on stage? I rest my case.) We play out locations the way that they feel in real life: on stage, we hate being at work, our coworkers are idiots and so on. We don’t have to do this! The beautiful, magical thing about improv is that we can choose to react positively to something or someone that in real life would make us angry or upset. We have the rest of our lives to be annoyed at the DMV. On stage, we can choose to view the DMV as the best place we’ve ever been.
This philosophy gets at the heart of the workshop that Justin and I teach most often, called Love the One You’re With. The principles behind it are simple, as described here. Take the choices you’ve always made, and put them down for two hours. Instead, choose to listen, react, and care about the other person. This worked for us, and it can work for you, too. You have the opportunity to make a different choice. Let us show you how.
Justin and I are teaching this workshop in New York next Wednesday night, July 15th. It's two hours of complete exhilaration. If you're around, you should take it. You'll walk away from it remembering how it feels to surprise yourself again, I practically guarantee it.
