In stand-up, you talk about stuff.
In improv, you do stuff.
Here are two common patterns of stand-up comedy:
| • | The comedian demeans himself in front of the audience. For example, the standard bored, bitter, cynical loser who isn't getting any sex. |
| • | The comedian insults people who are not present. For example, the "sarcastic" sort of comedian who points out that people's attempts to be hip and attractive are failing miserably. ("Ha, ha, look at those women who are too old to wear low-cut Britney Spears jeans.") Or the "observational" comedian who coolly points out the hypocrisy of conventional manners. ("Ever hear someone start a sentence with, 'You're a great guy'? You know what's coming next. 'But' and then a detailed point-by-point breakdown of just how bad you suck.") |
The first pattern makes audience members feel better by comparison with the comedian. "My life is pretty awful, but at least I'm not that bad."
The second pattern makes the audience feel better by taking other people down a notch. "Ha! Those people who think they're so much better than me. They're not so great. Good thing I'm on the same side as this comedian."
Many comedians combine both forms of derision. A standard form of stand-up comedy is to act "naughty": to say bad words or engage in childishly disrespectful behavior toward people who are not present. For example, Bart Simpson dropping his pants to moon a principal who's not present. Naughty or disgusting behavior insults the people who, in normal life, attach tangible consequences to violating conventions for respectful and refined behavior. Because it's disgusting and self-indulgent, it also demeans the comedian. So the audience experiences both forms of uplift: seeing someone worse than them and seeing their betters taken down a notch.
These are timeless and effective forms of comedy. They're familiar in every human culture. They go back to court jesters, ancient Greece, and beyond.
And they are disastrous in improv.
The reason these patterns fail in improv is they don't give your scene partners anything to build on. The skills involved in executing them don't create a reality. They neither create nor capitalize on opportunities to move a scene forward.
The skills for self-demeaning give you little or nothing to add to a scene. If something happens in a scene, like a washing machine goes berserk, the self-demeaning persona can't take it anywhere new. Typical responses for a self-demeaning persona would be standing back and saying, pathetically, "I don't know anything about washing machines" and hoping for a laugh at your own expense; or explaining your incompetence with something like "My mother never let me touch the washing machine", thereby taking the action off the stage and into the past.
The skills for the insulting-others style lead you to undermine the reality of the scene. A sarcastic comedian might say, "What a wuss, can't you deal with a household appliance? What's the matter, mommy never show you how?" and contemptuously fix the problem--Canceling it before anything can happen, and waiting for your scene partner to say something else that you can shoot down. A look-at-those-feet-of-clay comedian might say, "That's no washing machine. That's just Greg trying to get a laugh."
These sorts of lines, called Gagging, sometimes get laughs, but they spoil scenes. They change the action on stage from a fascinating imaginary reality taking form to a bunch of people on stage desperately trying to be funny. Nearly all Improv Skills are concerned with creating that illusion in the audience's mind, of real people doing real things that really matter to them--taking the audience's imagination on a ride. The main stand-up skills concern shooting things down, undermining the suspension of disbelief, or clogging up the works by pretending to be incompetent.
Improv Skills would lead you to let the washing machine take you someplace new: "I'll try to placate the washing machine with some raw meat" or "It wants suds! It wants suds! Call the concierge!" or "Wow, it really doesn't like that paisley tie. Let's see what it thinks of taffeta." These all add to the reality of the scene, triggering your scene partners' imaginations. The scene is going somewhere, not muddled in people holding themselves back.
Unless you're the rare improv style of comedian (Eddie Izzard, Robin Williams), much of what you've learned that's made you successful in stand-up will bog you down in improv. But there is hope.
Two other aspects of stand-up can get in the way of improv. One is the use of repeatable or planned gags. These are lines or twists that play more to the culture than to the specifics of a scene. For example, with a little practice, anyone can learn to reinterpret anything as a homoerotic come-on. You can play that twist in a scene at an airport gate, a crime lab, a perfume factory, or anywhere. Some audiences will always laugh at it, no matter what the context.
The problem is precisely that insensitivity to context. The magic of improv is the way the scene is really unique, really emerging from the players' imaginations right then and there as they deal with a new situation beyond their control. The best improv has an amazing "you had to be there" quality: every line is woven into the context of the scene and wouldn't make sense or be funny anyplace else. All to build that rich reality in the minds of the audience.
The other aspect of stand-up is the fact that a stand-up comedian is in total control of the room. A stand-up comedian can rehearse and refine a set and deliver it with studied nuance. A stand-up comic can have a plan and execute it. When the set is done, the comic knows who got the laughs: "I did."
In improv, you don't control the room. Improv happens when you give up control--the more totally, the better. Everything that happens in improv triggers your imagination to create whatever it creates in that moment, and you simply deliver it. It doesn't even seem that "you" are doing anything. It seems like your scene partners are just handing everything to you.
But that magic only happens if you're listening and allowing the scene to go wherever it goes--not driving it along a plan that you envision leading to a funny outcome. Stand-ups are particularly prone to interrupting constantly, talking over other players--trying to grab laughs for themselves and not Listening to the other players. Thus the synergy of improv never develops.
None of this implies that accomplished stand-up comedians can't also do great improv. Indeed, stage experience of any kind adds enormously to a performer's ability to performed relaxed and at his or her best in front of an audience. The talent and imagination that got you into stand-up is exactly what improv draws upon. The difficulties above just mean that in order to get good at improv, stand-ups need to recognize that in some ways, they start from scratch. They need to learn new skills as well as draw upon familiar ones, and there are a few skills they'll need to learn to avoid.
Improvisers transitioning into acting face similar difficulties. Improvisers typically exaggerate their characters, get "big" on stage, "indicate", and deliberately stir up the pot to produce humor quickly. When acting, especially for film, the same exaggeration and deliberateness usually makes you look like a caricature, not like a real person. Cleverness, in particular, trips up improvisers. As long as the actor is being consciously clever, a real and believable character can't emerge. Improvisation develops a lot of acting skills, but to do good acting also requires that some of those Improv Skills stay in the tool belt.
To learn improv, then, stand-ups just need to focus on the same basics as anyone else: Adding Information, Advance the Scene, and especially Listening.
A big advantage that stand-up experience gives to an improviser is that gut-level awareness that you don't dare lie or fake anything on-stage. You have to show your real self unconditionally, not the public mask that we all normally wear to hide things that would get us into trouble.
The core difference between standup and improv is that in standup you are working alone with the audience trying to be funny (see Gagging). On the other hand, in improv you are trying to create the illusion of a world shared with the other players that just happens to be funny; humor arises naturally from the scene.
Version 4 2006-Sep-09 02:11 UTC
Last edit by Chad Howard
