huh. argue has trained me to work at the top of my intelligence?
Good improvisers are people who best deal with their panic than are clever, funny or witty people.http://www.jesterjournal.com/IntMantzoukas.htm
Here's what really attracted me to improv in the first place, and this was really what solidified it for me: no matter what you know in life it counted on stage. It was all useable on stage. In my teenage years, I was kind of of Jack of All Trades, master of none. I liked the idea that I didn't have to focus on just one thing. You could use anything. Anything you were able to do. Anything you knew came into play, and you explore it in this process. That's what Del gave me.http://www.improvinterviews.com/2006/11/miles-stroth-111606-part-1.html
It took me 2 more years before I felt confident in doing things on stage. I was not a particularly clever or funny person. I was interested in this idea of process and exploration. Some people come in and they're very clever and they're very funny and they succede very quickly in improvisation. I wasn't like that. What was good about that for me was that I figured out formal things that other people weren't paying that much attention to, because I had to figure out how to survive on stage without being funny or clever. I just started noticing what made pieces work, making an edit on time, playing support to someone else's character; these things that to me were more like math. I understood the form of the piece that I was in. I held onto that for a long time, that was the wonderful side-effect. With long-term study of improvisation, you wind up a clever or funny person, because you're surrounded by them. You can't help it.
JF: What were some of the things from other improvisers that you tried to emulate? MS: Everybody has something. Adam McKay was, I still believe he is, the most inventive improviser I'd ever played with or ever seen. I started thinking 'how is he doing that when he comes up with these wonderful, crazy things? Where is that coming from?' Part of it came from the things that he read. Part of it was these strange connections he would make. I started thinking 'what is it with those connections? What is it to make a strange connection?' I would make up excersizes for myself and sort of train my brain to make connections it wouldn't normally make. I would sit in my room. I lived with my parents until I was twenty seven years old. I would sit up in the attic just saying disparate words and try to create a mental image of them. I would sit there alone and be like 'cat. Clock. How do I put those together?' then I would imagine a clock made out of a cat. I would just put strange little connections together constantly, training my brain to be open to the idea of making a connection with something I didn't expect.
At first you start by randomly connecting things to that moment and that's interesting enough, but the more you do that the more you sift through all these random connections the more you realize 'wow, there are some random connections are are just really pretty and are really interesting.' What kind of random connections are those? For example, way back when on our team, [The Family], it was different kind of animals. We all hung out after the shows and drank and did bits. We would go like 'a puma is a cool animal. A dog not so cool. But if it's a dog with wolf yellow eyes then that's kind of cool.' What are the cool animals? What are the not so cool animals? A tarantula is funny in a way, but, to me, a brown recluse spider is funnier. It's kind of what it's called. It sounds more sinister. That's the thing. In a lot of ways, you're training yourself off-stage. You're filling your arsenal. If you're thinking about funny connections and about things that strike you as funny all the time, they're going to be in your brain available when you go on stage. If you're not doing that, they won't be there. That's one of the things I've always said, if you want to be a better improviser, be a more interesting person. It's who you are off the stage that you bring to the stage.http://laist.com/2009/01/20/interview_cult_comedy_heroes_convoy.php
Fernie: Anyhow- an improv scene's like being in a haunted house, only instead of people jumping out and screaming at you, weird ideas do, and in that sense it can be startling, but in a good way.http://www.improvinterviews.com/2007/02/ian-roberts-part-2-21607.html
In comedy, you’re showing the day that broke the pattern. The only memories you even have in your life are the days when things didn’t go the way you would have them go. You remember the day that you got the crazy cab driver or you made a fool of yourself or you messed up the dinner. So, when you’re playing a game, don’t now go into some freaky comedy acting. Just respond. Just be a human being. It goes on both sides. When you are kind of driving the game and exhibiting the unusual behavior, realize no one sets out to be an idiot. If you agree that people are pursing pleasure and avoid pain, that’s the best choice they could make at that moment.
A lot of times I compare it to handball. You need to be a wall for somebody, a solid wall. If someone hits the ball and you don’t come back with what you would do, the ball just kind of trickles off and the other person is left hanging... When someone’s kind of driving the game, they’ve got some sort of unusual behavior, they believe in that. If you respond to it, if you resist it, if you are shocked by it, if you challenge them on it, you give them something to do. They believe in that. They’re going to continue pursuing it. But if you don’t give them what realistically they need back, the scene dies.
Well, here’s what yesanding is: implicitly agreeing with what that person says or even the reality, and adding to it. Then I came up with an excersize to break down yesanding to help people yesand better. This is based off of this belief that there’s this flash that happens. For everything you hear, it conjures up something unique to you, because your experience, what that means to you. So, they’ll say a line to you and you say back ‘That makes me think of…’ You’re just reporting what happened when that line got said. So, someone said that line to you and it brings up the image of a high school cafeteria from your past. ‘That makes me think of my high school cafeteria where this was this woman who used to shake. When she brought the fries to the plate, you’d lose half the fries, because she shook so much.’ Then you develop a fictional line that uses that specific information of yours. The hope is that you drill that enough that when someone says a line to you you’re in touch with your specific reality of what that brings up to you, and you fictionalize it. What’s that going to do is it’s going to give you a yesand line that’s unique and has specific information in it that only you could bring to do to the scene. When they do that and do it well, working from a one word suggestion in open scene work, not based on a monologue, bringing no premise to a scene, within three lines something comes up that’s unusual and specific that gets them on the path to finding the game.
What happens sometimes with people working from neutral in improv is you get a minute and a half of yesanding with no comedy. Nothing unusual has happened yet. I think that’s because people are yesanding too generally. They’re not using their specific reality. They’re not yesanding very well. But with this exercise you’ll find invariably, there I go again, there’s some slight variation, they’ll get to the unusual thing in the scene within five lines maximum and so often three. If you can get good at that, you can be consistently a better improviser, because you’ll have scenes that will be funny really quickly.
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