Now That’s Comedy: Improv and Showstopper!

The older I get, the less I find myself impressed by comedic movies and plays. Maybe I’m prematurely an old fogey, but everything seems… derivative. Tired. Worn out. I notice that I turn more and more to the game-changers, the household-name originals like classic Looney Toons, Monty Python, and Terry Pratchett.

Or to say the same thing another way, there used to be a stand-up comedy place near our house in Kingston. Sometimes my friends and I would go. A lot of good performers passed through, but, enh, I never found one that really made me laugh, made me go, “Whoa, what a gift.” Not that they weren’t funny and talented performers, but… make me think of something new. Show me a different way to look at things and laugh at them, and not just the same boring things everybody jokes about, either, like dating or flying with commercial airlines. Sure, if this were a conversation we were having together, I’d be amused, but your routine is the result of weeks of your work, the best gems you could polish up. And this is it?

Don’t get me wrong, I like comedy. And my standards are admittedly much lower when it comes packaged with another kind of story — a throwaway remark on The X Files might make me giggle (although seldom the clever bon mots the writers put into the mouths of characters like Mulder or House who are supposed to be super witty — yeah, they’re funny, but I dunno… one-liners in that type of snappy dialogue always draw my attention to the writing instead of the story or the characters) when the same line on a show designated as humorous might make me roll my eyes instead.

So obviously, my hang-up about humour has a lot to do with context. For instance, a lot of the TV shows people have recommended to me recently are comedies: 30 Rock, Arrested Development, Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother. And without meaning to offend those who’ve made these (or other) recommendations, I seriously dread watching an episode, not because I don’t trust the taste of the friends who’ve suggested them, but because recommendations that come with declarations of quality* immediately kick my expectation-o-meter a notch in the opposite direction. Again, not because I think my friends’ senses of humour are stupid or that they don’t know what’s funny; to the contrary, I know our funny bones have a lot in common.

Instead, I dread watching these shows precisely because the context in which I’d now be viewing them is one that minimizes my ability to actually find things funny: “this is hilarious” = back-of-brain idea of super-awesome comedy that makes me laugh so hard I can’t stop = probable disappointment when humour scale fails to be maxed out, no matter how near the top the needle wavers.

And that sentiment is why I think I can point to my love of improv** as the key factor in my growing distrust of scripted comedy. The one stand-up comedian whose work I still can’t get enough of is Eddie Izzard, who famously improvises his routines. I’d watch Whose Line Is It, Anyway? until the cows come home. And if I stayed in the U. K. any longer, I’d probably find myself buying tickets to Showstopper! The Improvised Musical every Tuesday night.

(Oooh, segue!)

Showstopper, the amazing performance I saw last week, is a 70-minute improvised musical. It goes up every Tuesday night at the Ambassadors’ Theatre, London, UK, until the end of March, and if you have a chance to see it, what are you waiting for?

The company consists of three musicians, six actors, and (presumably) one quick-fingered lighting tech, all majorly talented. The performers have amazing voices and sharp wits; you could swear the musicians are playing from a polished score; and, man, props to someone who can make me not notice the fact that the person at the lighting board doesn’t know where the actors are going to be until they’re there. The show opens with one of the performers soliciting suggestions from the audience; those suggestions are then put together to create that evening’s show.

Our night’s masterpiece wound up being an epic political drama set in ancient Rome. It was entitled Caesar Salad (the guy soliciting the suggestions tried to discourage that one, but he was voted down), and it told the story of Caecilia, the poor daughter of an olive seller who must save the Roman empire when she unwittingly precipitates the murder of Caesar.

Yeah, I’ve done enough improv to know that the show is probably more planned-out than it appears, if only because the performers have worked together long enough to know who’s going to step in and take which part, which harmonies they’ll do for this song, what to expect each other to do, etc. My high school improv team probably would’ve accused them of opening with some “plug and play”****, since they seemed to begin with a familiar melody where each actor knew when it was his or her turn to contribute a line, but… um, that just makes it less “formless improvisation” and more a game like “Party Quirks” or “Three-Headed Broadway Star.” What I’m saying is, it was all impressive, whether free-form improv or not.

Okay, one negative comment: I wasn’t too fond of the structure where the narrator/percussionist, who was supposed to be “writing” the musical in one night for a pesky producer, would occasionally awkwardly stop the action by stepping forward and announcing, “Hmmm, yes, and the next scene is a kicker where A, B, and C are in [a setting].” I was particularly unimpressed when he committed what I was taught to think of as the deadly sin of improv, saying, “NO,”*** by butting in with, “Actually, I think I’ll rewrite that scene – what really happens is… etc.” Sometimes, he’d even get giggles by deliberately giving the other actors a hard time (“You know, I think a poet in ancient Rome would be able to supply the song Caesar is referencing… in Latin.”)

But who am I kidding? I was laughing so hard I was crying the whole time. The only sad part is that it is improvised: I can’t go download the soundtrack or buy another ticket in the confidence of re-living all my favourite jokes. Worst, I can’t share them with anyone who wasn’t there. They’ll have to stay bottled up inside me, because how can I convey the theatrical gold that was the Bob Fosse-esque dance number of “It’s Tough Being a Barbarian/What Can You Do For Us?”, or the Lion-King-parody ah-oohm!s, or the line “We have a hundred olives – ” It’s as useless as me trying to explain why my cousins and I yell, “Potato!” and headbutt each other: the ultimate in you-had-to-be-there. But maybe that’s the price to be paid for spur-of-the-moment hilarity.

One last thought: all this probably seems disingenuous coming from the keyboard of someone who has occasionally been accused of writing in a humorous fashion. And when I work in narrative, I do like writing snappy banter, absurd scenarios, etc. How, you might ask, can I sit here with a straight face and claim not to be very impressed by most non-improvised comedy when I myself am guilty of it? Heck, you might argue (well, those of you who’ve known me since high school might argue), I used to write parody fanfiction! I wrote and filmed an X Files musical! (Two, actually.) What’s all this about scripted comedy again?

Point taken. But here’s the thing — I’ve never in my life sat down and been like, “Okay, time to write something funny! Now, what would be funny here?”  Occasionally, I will write as a placeholder in a story I’m working on, NOW CHARACTER X SAYS SOMETHING FUNNY, but what I mean is not, “Now X says something to make the reader laugh! Hahaha!” but “Now X says something flippant, to make character Y get annoyed/admire her/etc. but that is also clever, because I don’t want X to look like a lamewad douche.”

Even in these blog entries, where I admit to the occasional turn of phrase put into place to amuse myself, I’m never going for your laugh. I am building Lego castles for myself. I really don’t care whether you think I used the wrong colour blocks or shouldn’t have added those laser turrets, although of course I’m pleased if you do enjoy my design.

In fact, I’d argue, “trying to be funny” is the exact opposite of being funny. If your reader or audience or friends can tell there’s any effort whatsoever, the witty effect disappears. Although I’d never, ever argue that the stars of comedy put no work into what they do — on the contrary, most of the greats worked harder on their material and skills than anyone else — the end result was humour that seemed effortless, natural, like breathing. After all, isn’t that what they always say? The truly great performers, be they comedians, actors, athletes, orators, artists, writers — anything — are the ones who make you walk away feeling, “Wow, that was so awesome… and yet so easy! I could do that!”

What I’m saying is, I want to be in an improv musical. Who’s with me?

* As opposed to, “Yeah, it’s about X, Y, and Z — see what you think.”

** And, perhaps, my habit of finding things not intended to be funny much funnier than anything written to make me laugh. Sorry, House, M. D., The X Files, the Harry Potter movies… pretty much everything I’ve ever watched that wasn’t a comedy, ever.

*** Translated from Canadian Improv Games coaches’ jargon, saying, “NO” in a scene means rejecting the implicit or explicit contributions of your scene partners. This can mean anything from deliberately shifting the story in another direction (your scene partner has obviously just started a major plot about your characters falling in love, but you are determined that this scene will be an action-movie scene and therefore keep minimizing the love plot in order to jam in stuff about fighting terrorists); to purposely contradicting things your scene partner has said (she mentions that you’re in Alaska, and you loudly talk about the palm trees around you); to literally saying, “No” to others’ suggestions ( “I have an idea! We should go ask the wise old man about the prophecy!” “No.”).

**** CIG coaches’ jargon, part 2: “plug and play” means having some agreed-upon structure that incorporates audience’s suggestions without having them profoundly change the scene. For example, your team asks the audience to suggest an object. But you already know that whatever response you get, you will just do the same film-noir scene about Sam Spade that you’ve practiced a million times before, with him searching for “The Black [thing the audience named]”. Plug and play is generally considered bad form, like an Olympic gymnast stumbling while landing a flip.