Drawing upon your improv skills, even a "bad" suggestion can still be the basis for a great, imaginative scene. While it's good to know ways of rejecting suggestions that you don't like, you sometimes do your best improv by accepting them. Here are some techniques:
| • | If the suggestion is about body functions or something, explore the context of the dirty thing and leave the dirty thing in the corner. This is primarily what one does in improv, anyway. It just usually takes a more conscious effort to move your mind away from dirty stuff. For example, if the suggestion is "armpit odor", you can do an office romance in the accounting department at a deodorant factory. There is no need to even once sniff anyone's armpit or have anyone make faces to show how disgusted they are with someone's body odor. (See also: Outside the Box.) |
| • | If the suggestion is dull, pretend that it's exciting. Have a character be thrilled about it. For example, if the audience gives you "scrap paper", someone can be collecting it for a recycling drive: just one more pound and they'll win the trip to the paper mill. If the audience gives you "a nickel", it can be a rare 1938 buffalo nickel. Or the characters can be homeless people fighting over a nickel. "Hey, I need that nickel! I'm saving for my college education!" |
| • | If the suggestion is dull, explore the world around it (Outside the Box again). |
| • | If the suggestion is static (no action), then before you even begin the scene, brainstorm with yourself to think of ways to provide some action. You can increase the size and scale of things, or you can look outside the box. For example, if the suggestion is "pencil-sharpening", you could have a very large pencil sharpener, or a stuck pencil sharpener that someone needs to fix (and keep on raising the stakes), or you could be termites who live inside the pencil sharpener and eat the wood. Or you could just set the scene in an elementary-school classroom. There's a student who is sharpening pencils to curry favor with the teacher. Then he asks if he can clap the erasers together. Then he pulls out an apple. Then he offers to wash the teacher's car... |
| • | If the suggestion is offensive, your scene can honestly explore the underlying hatred. You can have a character who hates people of the given ethnic group, and you can explore what his real need is. Maybe he likes a feeling of power, and you explore his joy in that. Or you can have him lynched by people of said ethnic group. Or you can have him work in a big corporation that transfers him to the country where everyone is of that ethnic group. |
| • | If the suggestion combines too many things, just pick one element and start with that. If you don't get to the other elements later, that's ok. If you do manage to work them in later, it will be a wonderful surprise. |
| • | If the suggestion is vague, you can leave it to the players to make it specific. For example, if the suggestion was "possession", the players can do a scene about a brand of perfume called Possession, or perform an exorcism, or have a character whose most prized possession is a little sled that he named "Rosebud". A vague suggestion is actually easy to work with, because there are zillions of ways to use it, and almost anything you think of will come across as spectacularly imaginative and brilliant. Note: the emcee should not make the vague suggestion more specific. Leave that to the players. They'll have more fun and do better with something that came from their own imaginations. |
In most cases, though, the emcee should refrain from combining suggestions.
