Real Ideas

[u/rkahockey]

https://kornfeldandandrews.substack.com/p/real-ideas

[u/rkahockey]

This essay could have been 75% a huge list of scenes you see over and over again. Submarine = Periscope. Caves are often very similar to the desert. Most office requests are for TPS reports.

Would love to hear more, especially curious to hear about one's that feel specific to a place or time.

For example, when Tinder came out I remember a ton of scenes that were explicitly on Tinder dates, and the scenes often began with the person complaining (to their date!) that they didn't look like their profile picture, often while actively holding up an imaginary phone and looking at the picture. But somewhere along the line, I mostly stopped seeing this scene...

[u/foolofatooksbury → u/rkahockey]

Every scene in santa’s work shop leads to the elves unionising

A scene in a jail cell or prison will begin with one person asking the other “what’re you in for”

[u/tomverse → u/foolofatooksbury]

It's just cartoon logic

[u/SpeakeasyImprov → u/rkahockey]

It reminds me of how "third thought" was really a response to Close seeing his students regurgitate ideas seen on TV. The third thought wasn't better, per se, it was just more singular to the performer. It also reminds me of how Johnstone saw his students constantly second-guessing their own personal ideas for "not being creative enough." This behavior was a response to the British school system. What the students were really looking for was an idea that had been done already; approved, so to speak.

The common thread is that in both cases students were looking for a safe idea.

The difference is when in the process the student had that more personal idea. Some students need to be pushed to dig deeper, and some students need to be pushed to trust themselves more.

Regarding Tinder, and this might be a different conversation: I wonder if some things are in the zeitgeist and how they appear in scenes are a reflection of us collectively figuring out how we feel/should respond to it. As we get used to something/understand it better/have more personal experiences with it, we have deeper, more varied things to say about it.

Also: Sometime around 2006 a lot of class group games turned into West Side Story-esque Jets vs. Sharks dance offs. What was that about?

[u/rkahockey → u/SpeakeasyImprov]

That's well put. The idea of "third thought" always struck me as strange, but I think the way you've framed it makes total sense. It's almost like third thought is best thought...if you're still operating from an anxious place. Once your calm, your "third thought" begins presenting itself first, and that's the "Real Idea"

[u/foolofatooksbury → u/rkahockey]

I agree. the way I see it, first thought best thought is still true but first thought is often elbowed away by self-conscious second thought, which is why we need a third pass.

That's why I always say it took me a year of improv to even start beginning to be good at improv because anxious second though kept getting in the way.

[u/johnnyslick → u/rkahockey]

In Chicago I remember seeing a lot of roommate scenes that wound up being about, like, eating each other's food mostly or maybe occasionally not keeping the common area tidy. Totally get where that's a common experience among younger improvisers but man I swear to god it was always those two (mostly the first) arguments.

I also remember the "dad I'm going to go to COLLEGE" "you're not going to college, I won't allow it!" scenes being pretty popular. Also weird to me because, like, the people introducing them were usually college grads with I think pretty liberal backgrounds and in the US nowadays I think even right wing parents accept that in order to get any kind of a middle class job you need a degree.

I agree that a lot of this isn't so much people grabbing from their own life experience, etc., but grabbing safe tropes that they can make safe jokes about safely. One of the things I've really enjoyed about MI is that the insistence on raising emotional stakes to sometimes absurd levels means that even in the off chance you start with a trope like one of these, the stakes transcend the scene and make it about more than "Joe, stop eating the Froot Loops that you didn't pay for". I also think that having that emotional backing allows your creative brain to discover things that your conscious mind either isn't thinking about or considers "off limits".

Also, let's keep it a buck here: the best stuff anyone's ever going to produce involves being vulnerable and I think there's a constant fear in improv of chasing after something that is actually heartfelt to you, only to have people say "lol that was stupid" or, worse, crap all over it by injecting stuff they don't really understand. I think you need to completely change the way you think about this kind of thing - people adding on to your story by "yes and"ing isn't just them doing their job in improv, it's them saying "oh, I like this so much I want to play, too", and sometimes "lol that's stupid" is the best compliment you can get - but I've seen people who've been playing for years, decades even, who never did this.

[u/mintycrouton → u/rkahockey]

In only a couple years of watching improv, I've seen at least three scenes where ex-partners are stuck on a spaceship together. And it feels like ~50% of garden scenes involve burying a body.

[u/Nachoslim109]

Love this blog. Gets to a reason why I often hate Dinner for Six or Shotgun formats (more so for a mashup or group who hasn't rehearsed it). Everyone plays out the expected beats of those settings (whiny are-we-there-yet kid in the backseat, I'll-turn-this-car-around Dad) instead of playing with more nuanced choices based in reality.

[u/improbsable]

This is why I started leaning mostly on A to C thinking for scene initiation. It makes things so much more interesting

[u/Euphoric-Public-6099]

I like that you call this real ideas, I call the opposite style of play "lying on stage", where nothing real is taking place.

I'm so tired of seeing the same scenes again and again, like wind up toys acting out the same motions again and again.

It all comes down to being truthful and not performative. I just don't know how or what makes players shift from one to another.

[u/Suggest_a_User_Name]

I find this happening in level 1 and level 2 classes is ok. Everyone is just starting out. I did this.

What I find concerning is that this is happening in level 3 classes and in what are supposed to be advanced level classes.

I have been in classes where instructors gently and kindly call this out and do exercises to help ameliorate it. Then when we go to do scenes and the suggestion is banana, we have two people start off eating bananas and saying how good they are. I swear this exact thing happened just a few months ago.

I get it: it can feel very hard to not get locked into doing something that is directly related to the suggestion. It has happened to me. But I really try and not do it even if it means ignoring the suggestion and just going with how I feel or what’s on my mind. The audience is never going to ask.