Improv
Anything can happen but there is one governing rule in improv
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
I couldn’t believe it! [Curse word.] I was already tired and having a hard time getting the mojo to go after the high intensity workout I wanted my body to do [without my conscious awareness] and now the blasted DVD sound wasn’t coming out of the tv! Something was all messed up. My mind immediately leapt to the music we’d been listening to the night before using the tv’s soundbar. A vision of Gary with the remote in his hand instantly came to mind. He must not have switched it back! I knew it. [Wrong; he did. Blamer.] Now I was left on my own to deal with technology. Historically speaking, this was not going to come out in my favor.
Fine, I shouted inside my head to the very dumb tv. I’ll just do the DVD without sound! I was not happy as I joined the unusually quiet DVD team in warm-up neck rolls.
Was it something about rolling my head around that jostled the memory of the podcast on uncertainty I’d been listening to while driving home last night? Whatever jarred the thought loose, the Primary Law of Improv Comedy they were discussing came back to me:
Accept and build.
Stewing in my DVD frustration, something about “accept and build” hit home [even as I had utterly no intention of ever setting foot on stage]. It made sense in the world of improv that you would take whatever random declaration your improv partner throws at you and attempt to build something fresh [and hopefully entertaining] out of it. Otherwise, why are you there?
But in her early years of improv, the comedian being interviewed would do everything she could to avoid the risk of the unknown by trying to control the situation. She’d essentially try to script the scene by getting very specific in the lines she returned to her improv partner.
“Instead of just giving an offer and then letting my scene-mate build upon it, I would, to exaggerate a bit, get onstage and say, ‘Hey Betty, my sister, how are you? It’s great to see you here in this candy store.’”
Locking down what was supposed to be a spontaneous exploration of possibility doesn’t give you very much room to go anywhere. It also doesn’t mirror life where anything can happen. Absolutely anything and that is terrifying to some of us. [Maybe it’s all of us though it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like some people manage to walk around impervious to the proven fact that disaster can drop from the sky on our heads at any moment.] But what we can know for sure is that random happenings will mess up our plans.
I’m not a fan of my rigid, safety-controlled plans being messed up but as soon as the recollection of “accept and build” got jostled into consciousness while rolling out my neck. I got surprisingly happy. Somehow just knowing that the law of life is to accept and build made my mission clear. The DVD wasn’t dumb! Random things were supposed to happen to give me the opportunity to accept and build and hone my skill at life.
Life is clearly improv. Absolutely anything can happen. But it can go down hard or it can go down easier and I’ll tell you what: putting myself in the accept and build mindset made the high intensity work out I was doing [actually not very high the way I was doing it] go down a lot easier. And with way more laughs!
To easier. Accept and build out there today!
E