My current Improv 501 class at UCBNY, taught by Chris Gethard, has been busily working through keeping scenes real and our reactions truthful. Gethard is a huge proponent of keeping scenes as truthful as possible and the more I follow his direction, the more I find my scenes go beyond my abilities as an improviser into something much more profound. Playing my scenes as realistically as possible has given me a lot more confidence in taking the stage because while I may not always/ever have something funny to say, I will always be able to react truthfully to a situation.

Let’s not get caught trying to be funny.

Chris Gethard

However, the impulse to be “funny” in a scene is also very tempting. As any improviser can attest, a minute on stage without a laugh can feel like an eternity. I’ve been in class shows where we have “funnied” it up for an audience’s enjoyment at the detriment to our scenes. Unfortunately a lot of this “if you’re not getting laughs, you’re failing” comes from my own insecurities as a performer. We are performing improv comedy right? Comedy is about laughs? Laughs are about jokes? Without laughs you’re just two people in a big black box standing in front of an audience right?

Cue mug out to the audience.

Yes, we are trying to perform comedy, but I’m starting to change my opinion on what comedy is, or more to the point, how the comedic element in improv operates in scenes. Is it enough to throw funny lines into a performance? Develop a funny character? Put the scene on mars in a log cabin with robots? Or do we want to build up the scene, through truthfulness, into something which fundamentally emotes humor, pain, and pathos?

Yeah, that’s right I wrote “pathos.” What of it?

And so, in my daily troll through the IRC I found a thread that addressed just this issue entitled Realistic Improv. While the post goes off on a few tangents, the most distracting being the supposed difference between NYC improv schools, it does have some wonderful words of wisdom, the most profound of these by Anthony King, UCB NY’s Creative Director.

In my opinion, good improv should not be about winking to the audience or just focusing on laughs — not ever. However, it’s also not necessarily about being “real.” It’s about being “truthful.”

Now, the types of characters/relationships/situations/scenes the improviser is choosing to be truthful about, and the truths an improviser chooses to explore, as well as how that truth is explored, ultimately comes down to style and sense of humor. The best improvisers I know can play fast and slow, they can play “realistically” (as you define it) and broader (as I presume you define the opposite). Some improvisers are also better actors than others (Christina Gausas, for example, is an excellent actress and she is able to use those tools in her improvisation). Some shows also lend themselves to slower, more “realistic” play (Gravid Water, is definitely one of these shows because a huge majority of the scene is already defined by the actor’s scripted lines — which are, more often than not, incredibly “realistic.”)

But UCBT’s focus on the game of the scene has absolutely nothing to do with these choices in style of play (game is about what we play, not how we play). And good, interesting games are not math problems — they are patterns of behavior that arise out of this truthfulness.

I know I often encourage my students to start their scenes in more recognizable, “realistic” situations (say, a mother and son talking in the kitchen on a college break) rather than more strange, clever situations (say, an alien and a Q-tip playing Plinko) because it’s easier for us to play the truth of a situation we find easily relatable than a situation we have to strive to comprehend, and therefore easier to build patterns of behavior. But there’s equal truth to the Q-Tip’s desire to win Plinko as there is to the mother’s desire to connect with her son, and both of those truths will be decided based on the sense of humor of the improviser, and hopefully the improviser will play them both as “truthful” as possible.

I won’t make the claim that you never see bad improv from performers who should know better. Sometimes the temptation to get that laugh is very high and I have seen a lot of hilarious bad improv. But that old Del quote is right, “Just because they’re laughing doesn’t mean we’re succeeding.” And I think you’ll find that the majority of good improvisers may not always play “realistically”, but they are striving to play “truthfully.”

He then continues.

I think it’s important to remember two things:

1. Everyone you see performing at UCBT (and other stages in NYC) are still learning. You can learn equally from success and failure (both while performing and watching). Hopefully our performers succeed more than they fail, but if they are failing because they are taking risks and working to learn new things — that’s pretty awesome.At its core, the UCBT teaches truthfulness and game. That doesn’t mean both of those things are always present on stage (they are, afterall, the ideal), but it’s what our performers are striving for. The main requirement for staying on a Harold Team at UCBT is a obvious, active desire to continue to learn.I remember being in Level 3 and having ridiculously long IM conversations with people centered on, “has an improv scene ever made you cry?” Some improvisers are really interested in that kind of improv. Some are not. But there is nothing about UCBT’s philosophy that excludes it — which I know is true because there is no way you’re ever going to cry if what you’re watching is not truthful and rooted in behavior (i.e. game).
2. This shit is an artform, yo. That means we’re all going to have different, sometimes clashing, opinions about how to approach it. As you improve and learn more, you’ll have all kinds of opinions about this approach. That’s awesome and necessary. Try them all. Get as much varied experience as possible. Find what works for you. Then get really good at that approach. Discuss it with everyone who will listen. Get in arguments about it. Then try someone else’s approach and work to get really good at that too. The last thing you want to do, though, is cut yourself off from other people’s ideas too quickly.

*Highlights added by me.