Grounded 2-person improv
Week 3 of the iO intensive focused on scenework, particularly grounded two-person scenes and on faster second-beat scenes.
(scroll to the bottom for 6 weird tricks to improve your scenework)
Our teacher was Jason Shotts who is incredibly skilled at playing patient grounded scenes (TAKE A CLASS FROM HIM IF YOU CAN!). He taught at iO Chicago for years and recently moved to LA where he teaches and plays with a variety of groups at iO West including the charming duo: Dummy. Many of the notes in this blog are direct quotes from Jason.
This week was the most memorable improv training I’ve experienced because Jason drilled these concepts into our head. We had two full days of classes where Jason side-coached in excruciating detail so that we could experience scenes living up to his philosophy. This was frustrating but I am grateful for it. We will hear Jason’s voice in our heads years down the road helping us understand why some scenes work and others do not. Improv teachers are trying to shorten the road away from frustration
Improv is not “good” or “bad” but instead “easy” or “hard”. When it’s hard it’s because we choose to play hard scenes.
Jason’s Improv Philosophy
This class focused on a few the core themes to help make improvising easier and more grounded. I’ll dive into more details on each of these.
Ingredients: A scene is made up of three main ingredients:
- Humanity: helps the audience care about these characters, this is truth, how the audience relates.
- Flaw: what is unusual about these characters. This is equivalent to “my thing” or “point of view” or “deal” in Annoyance terms.
- Context: who are we to each other, where we are, what we’re doing. Context makes the audience feel comfortable, but is not the focus of the scene. Can be sprinkled in and forgotten.
Mechanics: How do you mix those ingredients to create a scene?
- Relationship: finding a boat that we can both fit in, finding “our thing”. Relationship is relatability. How do these characters relate to each other and to the audience?
- Importance: improv is a conversation with a heightened sense of importance. We want to dig one 6 foot hole rather than digging 6 one-foot holes. Make your scene partner the most important person in the world to you. Keep it simple.
- Reaction: you must react emotionally to what your scene partner says. This makes it important and makes you human. Everything they say affects you. A flaw often causes a character to react unusually, this is a source of the comedy.
- Defense mechanisms: natural habits that make improv harder than it needs to be managed.
We practiced many scenes combining these ingredients:
- (A) initiates with a truthful discussion (context sprinkled in)
- (B) reacts and relates, engaging in discussion (context sprinkled in)
- Continue honest conversation until either or both characters discover a flaw
- Players feed each others’ flaw to elicit reactions, continue heightening
- Rest the game, justify flaw, and be human with each other
- Continue playing 4 & 5 while heightening— analogy: spinning the three plates: humanity, flaw, justification
Then a second beat might be as simple as bringing back a character and forcing them to react to a new or heightened premise.
Ingredients
Humanity
The first major ingredient to an improv scene is building a human character; one who is relatable both to the audience and also by the second character in the scene. You can easily build humanity by bouncing back and forth in conversation, by reacting as a real person, and by playing to the top of your intelligence. A character should be a thin veil on you as a person. You gotta have humanity. You earn your crazy with humanity. If things seem too absurd in a scene you can always ground it by sprinkling in humanity.
Flaw
Comedic characters are flawed. We discover our flaw by heightening an odd point of view or behavior. If you find a flaw, try explicitly naming it or using a word or phrase or sound or motion to remind yourself and the audience. Repeat that out loud if you want. Remember to always react to the top of your intelligence based on your flaw. If you do react, you will be brought back for second and third beats. We love seeing a character with a flaw react in different situations. We love to give ourselves complex flaws but it’s easier keep it simple. Prefer simple like “my character has an unreasonable obsession with chocolate” over something overly complex “my character is intimidated by strong father figures”.
You can maintain this flawed character’s humanity by acknowledging your flaw explicitly: try being sad/embarrassed or angry/disgusted or proud/excited about your flaw. Acknowledge it, react, but keep doing it. You want to stop but you can’t. Both characters in a scene can be flawed. Second and third beats in Harolds often play with a character’s flaw and make them react to their own personal “heaven” or “hell”. But be careful, your flaw is not more important than your scene partner, always listen to them and react.
Context
The audience doesn’t care about the context they just need something to feel comfortable. Set the context and move on. Just sprinkle it in here and there.
Audiences will never care about premise if they don’t care about the characters. Premise is so prevalent in improv because we learn comedy from watching sitcoms, but this is not how you play in improv. You need some context, but there’s NO RIGHT OR WRONG with choosing context but you gotta make a decision. Don’t worry about being savvy or clunky just say something.
Don’t worry about narrative. Improv scenes don’t move forward they move backward. It’s almost as if the camera is zooming out expanding the scene to get a bigger picture view who these characters are and what they are doing.
Mechanics
Relationship
A scene is not a scene without a relationship. Relationship means characters relate on something. Make our characters human by making them relatable to the each other and the audience.
“Finding our shared boat”
Building a relationship is like finding a boat big enough for both characters to stand in. It’s a belief or point of view they can agree upon. Finding this requires some back and forth discussion just like in real life.
Improvisor 1 initiates “I love camping.”
Improvisor 2 is in one of 3 camps: (A) already agrees (B) disagrees or (C) knows nothing about the subject.
- If (A) then great, you’ve found your boat so the response could be “Fuck yeah. Camping brings me my bliss.”
- If you’re in (B) or (C) you need to keep trying to find your boat response could be “Boy is nice to be outdoors.”. Maybe “being outdoors”is your boat. Depends on improviser 1’s response.
If you found your boat, you have a relationship. To find the boat faster, skip differences and focus on similarities: e.g. instead of “Naw, camping sucks, but boy is nice to be outdoors” just say “I love to be outdoors”. There’s something on which you can agree and therefore have a scene. If you don’t have a shared boat you cannot have a scene because these characters have no reason to be interacting. This shared point of view is your “road” you can always veer off it but you should always come back to it to ground the humanity.
“Truth and Examples”
Finding a shared boat can be done through truthful offers of point-of-view. Dangle a (true, or close to true) opinion and see how your scene partner relates. Try pulling real details from your own life. We want to hear your personal examples. Real examples from your life. Be vulnerable. Be excited about this truth and bring energy up up up, talk fast to get out of your head and allow yourself to discover.
We want personal examples not philosophizing. Empty phrases like: “it sure is good to have friends like you”, or “people are fundamentally lonely” are empty bullshit phrases they mean nothing! If you hear yourself rattling off philosophy stop and give an example from your life! A 50-year-old audience member doesn’t want to watch a 25-year-old improvisor lament “boy is it tough getting older” but hearing a personal anecdote will always be interesting.
Importance
Improv is a bunch of adults making things up on stage, if we want an audience to believe anything we need to make it important. Make it count. This means react if your partner says something. That will tell the audience it matters. You gotta be invested in everything. The characters are real and they are really saying it. If an improvisor says “I lost a friend recently” then be sad, be upset, empathize.
Always empathize instead of trying to fix. Saying “it will be OK” or “i’m here for you” are denials and takes the importance away from the statement. You don’t want to solve the problem, you want to make the stakes higher. Instead, empathize: “I get you, man, that sucks”. Don’t try to change your partner.
One way to make your audience important is radical agreement. When TJ plays with a student he will always wait for the student to initiate while at the same time smile run behind them on stage and smile and start doing object work. Nodding with his head and whole body to make everything the student says extremely important.
Reaction
If your characters do not react they are draining away importance and humanity. If you don’t react the audience doesn’t believe it. If you don’t react you are denying your partner. If you don’t react you make your partner look like an ASSHOLE.
Reactions can be from humanity or from flaw. A reaction from a place of humanity reinforces the believability of your characters and helps ground them out. React honestly and truthfully to return to humanity if things are getting crazy. A reaction from your flaw adds to the absurdity and comedy. Figure out how this character’s buttons are pushed and figure out how to push your scene partner’s buttons.
Emotion is more important than content. Body language and emotional responses will pull the audience in more than anything you say. This goes for all sorts of public speaking. In TED talks, what matters is 7% words, 93% tone of voice and body language.
One weird trick to build connection and a shared history, react with “Yeah.” Instead of “Yeah?”. For example A: “I used to climb the old building on the old Atlanta plantation farm.” If player B reacts “Yeah?” it’s ok because they are agreeing, but if they answer “Yeah.” or “Yeah!” it’s better because it seems like player B knows about the “old plantation farm” even if they as an improvisor do not.
Defense mechanisms
Many of our blocks on stage come from biological defense mechanisms. We don’t want to be vulnerable in front of strangers and that gives us bad habits. Try to counteract these to be vulnerable, human and relatable.
- frowning, or other closed body language => SMILE, open your arms, look into your partner’s eyes
- being an asshole to your scene partner => be positive, agree to everything your partner says, have fun, don’t be an asshole
- ranting about things you hate => talking about things you love
- saying dialogue as if it doesn’t matter, shrugging as you say it => avoid shrugging, say dialogue with meaning and emotion
- not reacting to scene partner => react and let their words affect you 5x more than real life
- trying to “win” => allow yourself to lose
- turn negative emotions against your partner and starting a fight => turn negative emotions against yourself and feel it
6 weird tricks to improve your scenework:
- If it gets crazy, fall back to humanity: tell a true story. React honestly.
- If it gets vague, sprinkle in context; it doesn’t matter what, just decide!
- If stuck in your head, react big to the next thing your partner says.
- Explicitly name a flaw or repeat a word, phrase, or body movement.
- Nod with your body, say “yes!”, make your partner most important person.
- Avoid defensive body language: smile, open your body, touch your partner.
