John Ratliff teaches improv at ColdTowne Theatre. He is a graduate of ColdTowne Conservatory and has trained at iO Chicago and the Annoyance Theatre. When he’s not performing, teaching, coaching, or discussing improv, Ratliff can be found editing copy, officiating weddings, eating some kind of Mexican breakfast, or lying on the floor listening to records.
My friend Michael Jastroch and I were talking about how a lot of the dramatic improv we’d seen (and, in my case, performed) over the past couple of years was more like melodramatic improv. We both like serious theater, but some of what we’d seen felt contrived and stagey instead of open and authentic. Was this, we wondered, just a function of bad acting? Or was it proof that improv only works as comedy?
Neither, I think. What I suspect we saw was a slightly different version of a perennial improv pitfall: selling out the scene.
We’ve all heard the note “Stop trying to be funny.” The more we perform, the more we realize that a joke, however hilarious, is usually not worth destroying the reality of the scene. (Well, *most* of us come to realize that.)
The same thing happens in dramatic improv … except that instead of going for the joke, we’re going for some kind of emotional payoff.
We probably get cut a little more slack for this than we should be. We’ve all been so indoctrinated with the idea of not going for the easy joke that we start equating “not funny” with “authentic.”
But what both situations have in common is that the improviser is doing something based solely on what kind of reaction she’s expecting to get from the audience instead of paying attention to what’s happening in the moment.
Of course, only the improviser herself can say whether she was selling out the scene. The same move (e.g., tearing up a note without reading it) might spring from a spontaneous realization (“I’m just done with him”) or from a contrived attempt to manipulate the audience’s emotions (“I thought not reading the note made it sadder”).
What Jastroch pointed out is that if you’ve decided to be dramatic, you’ll start ignoring obviously funny things about the scene in order to pump up the pathos, in exactly the same way that you start ignoring everything except the joke in a game-heavy scene. Either way, you’re no longer listening to what the scene has to tell you.
Aren’t we always telling our students that real life can be hilarious if we just pay sufficient attention to the details? So doesn’t it stand to reason that a realistically played scene, no matter how serious, might have some comic elements in it?
Last year I was cast in a show called Austin Secrets in which the scenes were based on secrets submitted by the audience. The director had explicitly told us he wanted a couple of serious scenes in each show. But what we found was that — with very few exceptions — even scenes played completely seriously started getting laughs sooner or later. Part of it was just the release of tension in uncomfortable situations, but part of it was the stubborn fact that comedy and tragedy are really just two ways of looking at the exact same material. I think we’ve gotten so used to deciding which one we’re doing and aiming for it that we forget about a third possbility: playing as truthfully as possible and letting the audience make up their own minds which it is.
My mother, who is generally very supportive of my improv, didn’t really like Austin Secrets. In particular, she didn’t like the serious scenes, because “I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel.”
Exactly.
Previous guests: Jill Bernard, Andrea Del Campo, Etan Muskat, Rick Andrews, Kristen Schier, Andy Eninger, Jeroen Van Dyck, Remy Bertrand, Caspar Shjelbred, Sean Michaels, Kareem Badr, RobYn Slade, Ian Parizot, Rachel Klein, Dave Morris, Alex Wlasenko, From the old blog
