IMPRO & THE COMPETITIVE MINDSET

AAARRRGGHH!!! impro comedy agenda! bad!

If you go to an impro show in say London, Paris or New York, you will see something that is extremely funny and slick, but is also, being now a standardised comedy product, rather predictable. The performers have internalised the comedic responses to well known things, and out they come at the push of a button. Scenes are never set in recognisable realities. You set a scene in a goldfish bowl. Or inside the mind of a Fascist Dictator. They are set in comedy hyper-reality. Nothing normal or boring is allowed to happen. Everything is spun, tweaked and generally perked, in the direction of hilarious comedy. Stories are mechanical, predictable, obvious. A lonely woman dreams alone in her room of romance and possibly sex. The floor opens and out jumps an available man! End of story! Which is of course funny, in a mad sort of way, but what relation does it have to the truth of life? In this story, it is as if we have life, with the feelings removed. Well, the negative boring feelings removed. Feelings like the frustrations inherent in actually being on the dating scene. Having to go and actually look for a partner. It not being, instantaneous.

So, funny and entertaining as it is, it is a dysfunctional model, which is presented to us. Like someone who ignores your sensitive feelings because they find them boring. An autistic sort of person like say ‘Sheldon’, in ‘The Big Bang Theory’, a very good comedy show on T.V. It is a bit like Frankenstein’s monster!

It has all the bits or mechanical parts, but lacks a soul. Frankenstein cannot function as a real human being. When in the movie he throws the child in the lake, a scene censored at first, it shows the monster’s complete lack of understanding of the human condition. What it means to be human. And yet. Yet. The monster is human, inasmuch as he is made out of the human. i.e., bits of people, and so he elicits our sympathy and compassion. He is like us, and yet he is not like us. Just to kill the monster seems somehow wrong. Unsatisfactory. And yet the monster is a monster. An aberration of nature. And this is not acceptable either.

Paradox.

Irony.

Dilemma.

The irreconcilable zen koan of existence. And we must start to solve it by accepting that the comedy impro Frankenstein we see on stage is our own creation. We made him. We can un-make him.

"Who cares if it rots your brain, saps your will and atrophies you soul?We all need a good laugh!"

(In the sense that we do need comedy, it is very important to laugh, but we must see there is no shortage of comedy, and it would be better if there was some balance in the impro world. A balance that meant there were shows that didn’t just go for the mindless comedy option. A product there is no shortage of! But allowed impro to examine some deeper more resonant themes.) And the place to start doing that is to look at our automatic competitiveness.



AUTOMATIC COMPETITIVENESS

(Impro Station Master.) "Look at this big comedy impro carrot of ego gratification & impro kudos! Yum!"

For some reason, everybody on stage wants to be the funniest person on stage, and it is unconscious. Automatic. It is as if all the performer’s were hypnotised by Derren Brown, before the show started, and now they simply have to compete. And it’s this which forces the performance down its predictable lines. Like a bunch of Darwinian cave men, all chasing the same Darwinian Carrot, and destroying it, and themselves, in the process!

And what is behind this. This hypnotism.? This automatic competitiveness? This Derren-like insanity? The answer is of course, FEAR. Fear of not being funny. Of not being good. Of not being useful to the group. Our peers. Whatever. Fear. FEAR!!!!!!!!

It’s a cut throat environment. Its dog eat dog. If you don’t get the knife in first, someone else will! Which is absurd really. This is after-all, the theatre world. A place exempt from the normal rules. Here we can be different. Experiment. Have fun. Relax. Let go of the conditioning and explore the unknown, for a change. We don’t of course. Our fear of not being funny or ‘good’ compels us to turn everything into a competitive exercise in funniness. The idea that performers are inherently good, is absent. Put another way, the idea that we have value, simply in ourselves, before we have done anything, simply because we exist, is absent. We can’t, as performers, have an inner value. Our only value is what we force an outer world to accept by virtue of being ‘good’ at something. It’s like our exam system. Businesses only perceive applicants as good, or worthy, if they have passed the right exam. They would never value an applicant, simply on his or her own merits, if it was a certain type of job. (But do not think I think failing exams is a good thing. Wrong.) Meaning in life doesn’t just exist, for itself, it must be created artificially; like…

Frankenstein’s monster!!!! Unless we find life, or performing, a painful struggle, we are not getting it right! (On the apprentice one guy got fired by Sir Alan because he was being nice to people! You can’t be successful at business and be nice to people as well! But why not?)

Now competitiveness is not bad it is good. It’s healthy. The thing is though there are two kinds. Unconscious and conscious.

Or automatic and considered. When we compete simply for the sake of competing, we act robotically, without feeling. When we are consciously competitive, we are empathetic. We act with feeling. The unconscious model is like the cave-man model, and it’s the one we are born with. The conscious model, the alternative model, of the ‘ideal realising person’, is our latent potential. We not born with that one up and running. We need to cultivate it. Nurture it. Work to make it a reality. All true learning is forced.

Now you may well say but why should I think about this? If I am happy with the impro I see, or with the impro I perform???

Well Horatio, you must understand that the thing that drew you towards impro in the first place. That very first impulse that made impro attractive to you, that thing still exists, and yet it has been over-ridden. Overlaid by another agenda. Yet it is still there. Under the surface. And this is fact that impro is essentially to do with freedom.


FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM


This is what first attracts us to impro. Not the idea of being funny, but the idea of being free. Free from a script for example. Free to do and say anything we like without some director telling us it is wrong or inappropriate!!!! Free to be stupid. The freedom even to do something meaningful and uplifiting! Something self-developing. Something not necessarily 100% obvious and understandable to an audience!!!!!!!!!!!!

So this is what the comedy demon feeds off. Your freedom! And do you want that? Is freedom really so unimportant to you????

Is it?????????

The answer here is that you have simply never thought about it.

Or never really allowed yourself to think about it. You were hoping that these things were just inbuilt into the whole scene and you would just get them automatically like presents under your bed at Xmas! Doh!

Following on from this, you could say that impro such a minority thing that it can’t have such far reaching implications!

(Freedom? But it’s impro! It’s just fun!)

And in view of that we should look at something more conventional and common. In response I’d like to draw attention to 2 things one of which I already mentioned.

1. SPONTANIETY

Obviously the main thing impro hopes to recover is spontaneity.

How successful it is at doing that is another issue. Question is though, what is spontaneity? Why is it so important? To answer that we must look at no less than creation itself. According to the Big Bang theory, (A very funny T.V. comedy!)  the Cosmos suddenly jumped into being from nothing. When I say nothing I mean from a place or condition that didn’t even contain nothing. Something we really struggle to conceive of. Yet out of it sprang creation.

BINGO!

Now I am not a Cosmologist and my description is a bit weak, but nevertheless, we can all see that in this model, nothing actually made it happen. There was no preceding cause that instigated the coming into being of creation itself. It just happened! BINGO! Which means of course, life the universe and everything, WAS SPONTANEOUS!!!!!!! And so spontaneity, is built into the fabric of existence itself. It is our heritage. It is what the Cosmos built on! So no matter how stuck, atrophied, inert, fixed we become, the ability for us to regenerate still exists, as this spontaneous coming into being is the first condition of everything! A fact of course, that being in life quickly dissuades us of, and yet it is nevertheless extremely true. Which means of course, if we can work at our impro in a disciplined way, for a period of time, with the right guidance, we can and will get back in touch with really what is the centre and essence of it.

With the spontaneous freedom of being!

2. THE SCRIPT.

Obviously the other main thing is to work without a script. Again FREEDOM! Now what is a script? What does it stand for? Well ultimately it stands for something set in advance. A self protection device. It protects us from the uncontrolled. The spontaneous unpredictable stuff that life is made of. The fact that scripts, like Shakespeare, can be extremely good, is a separate issue. If you have a script, no matter what it is, you are constrained to follow it. So fact is that scripts preclude any kind of spontaneous development simply because you cannot write a script for reality, for say going to the shop. You could get close but you could never get it right, for even though it always contains say 99% the same elements, it will still never happen in exact same way twice. That annoying 1% is bound to crop up. Reality is spontaneous. Self-generating. It is un-scripted! Now as I said, it’s not that scripts are bad. No. It’s just that we are very imbalanced. Before we started impro we were in a position of everything being scripted! Everything! It was all planned in advance. Then we did impro and it all became unscripted! All of it! Now this is an imbalance. What it should be is 50% scripted and 50% impro. That would be balanced. In this way we would reincorporate the spontaneous element in our work and not lose the obvious benefits of working with scripts. What happened was we through the baby out with the bathwater! It’s simply the seductive power of anything new. Any script ever written was improvised as it was written. Again polarised thinking demands that these things are entirely different. Script and impro.


As a footnote one example occurs to me. Experts studying fire disasters came to the conclusion that people were killed because they followed an internal script. In one case people suffocated in a restaurant because their script said you cannot leave until you have paid the bill and yet unfortunately the manager and staff had fled so they couldn’t. In another example of a tube fire people insisted on taking a certain escalator because their script said so. This again led to the loss of life. Here it is having such complete confidence that following script the only way to do things that proved disastrous, for the time came to drop the script but it didn’t happen.

But then of course, we do need scripts! We need a script for example in a restaurant. Without it, it would be just chaos! The problem occurs when we become too strongly identified with that script. For it is only a script!!!!!!

Bad script thing: You are constrained to follow it.

Good script thing: It forces you to channel ‘deeper’ less acceptable feelings.

Good impro thing: It can go in any direction.

Bad impro thing: It encourages playing everything just for ‘fun’.

So we can see, in end, it all swings and rounabouts.We can see that the ‘bogus entertainment agenda’, in impro, is that if we take things at face value, and do not make any effort, for personal reasons, to look below the surface of a particular thing, we are endangering our freedom!

FREEDOM

And freedom is precious!!!