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8/21/2004 08:03:08 AM
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LIFE, I LEARNED IN IMPROV CLASS
"I was making pancakes, and then the phone rang, and my friend said she had a puppy for me, and so she came to this window here and I reached out and got the puppy, and then I fed it pancakes."
We had been "mirroring" each other in improv class, which means that two people had faced each other in silence, Partner A leading the motion and Partner B following Partner A exactly, like synchronized charades. I had just taken my Partner B through a mind-bending sequence of disparate motions and was now explaining to the class the storyline of what we'd been doing. Other teams had focused on stories like changing a flat tire, putting on makeup and starting a lawnmower. When time was up, the Partner Bs had to guess what they'd been led to mime. Most Bs guessed fairly accurately. My B, not so much.
Out of some fear that I needed to be kooky, I had created an untenable situation -- something my B could not have been expected to follow well -- and in improv, that's Lame (yes, with a capital L). Because the whole point is that, unlike a stand-up comic, for example, you're not alone. You are part of a team, and you have to make each other look good. You start things that can be continued and work with whatever comes your way. If your partner says that he is a stripper with a tattoo of the Virgin Mary, and his tattoo has just begun crying tears of blood, then by God, that's what's happening -- even if you don't know how to react. If your partner offers you a cup of coffee, then you start there, even if you can't for the life of you figure out where the scene is going. You ask for cream and sugar. Your partner is out of sugar. You borrow a cup of sugar from the neighbor. Who is an agoraphobic and deaf and 87 years old and screams while tossing the sugar at you through the mail slot.
I'm doing it again, not letting things be simple. See, what I meant to say was, your scene could just be this: That Partner B is making a cup of coffee. You ask for cream and sugar. B is out of sugar. And then you both start defining yourselves. You and B are making it all up out of thin air, on the spot, without any prior consultation. So you could be anyone. And B could be anyone. All you are doing is stirring your mimed cup of coffee.
So you say, "That figures." And B says, "Look, I can't always be perfect." For two seconds (which feels like 10 minutes) it thrums in your head, this who-are-we-what-am-I-doing-here. Then just make it up -- you say, "I guess now that you're a bachelor again, you don't need to keep sugar around. I looked in your freezer. Nothin' but Lean Cuisine in there." And then you have a scene. Pretty soon, B is your ex-husband Bill, who left you for a 19 year-old, and he really, really doesn't know how to cook.
Apparently there are a million and one philosophies of improv, but at least according to what my school does, it's really important to define your relationship and be someone to the other person. The second step is coming up with a "what" -- an idea to center your scene around. In this case, maybe we focus on the 19 year-old. Maybe we focus on the cooking. Because otherwise you're just two random people doing a string of random things, with no glue to give context and make it seem real.
You have to construct a past and a future out of thin air, instantly. And -- so I learned last Monday -- you don't worry about whether or not it's funny. This, to me, sounded counter-intuitive, but it makes sense that when you're trying too hard to seem funny, it's forced, it's fake, it's a cop-out. The scene should just become funny on its own, not necessarily because you come up with one-line wisecracks or you're pretending to be a professional banana juggler. It's because of the way the ex-husband tries to weasel out of the conversation, and the ex-wife sends him dagger stares as she stirs her coffee, and the 19 year-old comes in obliviously at the end with a freshly microwaved frozen dinner.
Anyways, this avoidance of fakeness is really pretty ironic, of course, because it's all fake. We haven't even been using props. We're just holding the air like it's a coffee cup or a steering wheel or a lawnmower. Which, for the moment, it is. But like any work of imagination, there can be a logic inherent in even the most oddly mutating story, something that other people can latch on to. You're a crazy Bible salesman in rural Georgia. You knock on the door of a woman with a wooden leg. You seduce the woman and take her out to the barn, where you steal her wooden leg. Of course.
I would love to say that this basic intellectual understanding of my improv class has brought me great comedic success, but sadly, it has not. You will still find me, more often than not, inventing puppies and flipping pancakes, looking blankly at my partner when he tells me his tattoo is bleeding, trying to figure out if that person is sweeping the floor or rowing a boat.
But that's fine.