I’m of the opinion that the best, most important book about improv comedy is Truth In Comedy.
Written by Charna Halpern, Del Close and Kim Howard Johnson, it was first published in April of 1994. A simply written book that you can blow through in an afternoon, it nonetheless pushes a powerful approach to improv comedy that surprised me when I first encountered it.
I hold the book in high regard and I am quite certain that I fail to live up to its standards more often than not.
The book tells you to not be jokey. It tells you to play your scenes realistically with honesty, bravery and integrity. It tells you to approach improv in precisely the opposite fashion of how I approached it in high school and college.
Recently I ran a few sessions at The Radical Agreement Project in which we focused on playing honestly. We worked on the exercise Park Bench of Truth, which asks you to play close to yourself. Essentially you have an honest conversation with your scene partner under fictional but not very theatrical circumstances (you pretend to be sitting on a park bench with someone you know from improv).
Something miraculous happens when you play Park Bench of Truth: Even though there are no gigantic comedy moves, very funny ideas still come up frequently.
The simple truth is that you don’t have to try to be funny in order to be hilarious in an improv comedy scene. All you need to do is be brave, be yourself, listen really hard and support your scene partner’s ideas.
You have to be brave, because it is very scary to get in front of an audience, tell them you are going to be funny and then just be honest instead. Afterall, why would being yourself be funny? It’s not like we all walk around braying with laughter at how funny our lives are all day, is it?
To each of us our lives, our thoughts, our opinions seem boring. That’s because we live with them all day. We fall asleep to our thoughts at night, exhausted by them. And when we wake up our thoughts greet us again in an endless cycle of monotony.
But to other people who have never walked a step in our shoes, our thoughts, circumstances and predilections can be a trove of comedy gold.
Here is a scene from one of my sessions that Fran and Leslie did.
You can watch the video or read the transcript. Thoughts and highlights are sprinkled throughout the below.
FRAN
Oh, I'm so glad you could meet me for lunch today.
LESLIE
Hey friend, it's nice seeing you.
Okay, so they start with a fiction and explain why they have come to be on the park bench. You don’t need to do that for this exercise. In fact it is often advised for players to start this exercise by stating an honest opinion they hold in real life rather than anything fictional.
FRAN
Yeah, I, um, I brought, uh, some, uh sweet potato fries, plenty of them if you'd like to have some of them.
LESLIE
Oh sweet potato fries. I'll taste one.
FRAN
Okay, here you go
LESLIE
Looks interesting. (Tastes one.) Not bad, okay.
FRAN
I love them so, but you know, for me, I think eating mostly vegetables feels good to me, so I'm always looking for new ideas with that.
The bolded portion of Fran’s line felt very true in the workshop and the class identified it as a funny moment after the scene was over. We’ll talk about how it can be used later.
LESLIE
Do you eat these like, um frequently, like every day?
Leslie asks an honest question that feels hilarious. Can you imagine eating the same food every day?
FRAN
I have been known to eat them every day for a while. Yes, I really like those, I get them Frozen and put them in the air fryer. I mean sometimes I cut them up from scratch but mostly I’m lazy.
Fran says yes! She eats them every day!
LESLIE
Yeah, yeah, I try to stay away from fried fried stuff.
FRAN
Well they're, they're not really fries because I put them in the air fryer so.
LESLIE
Oh.
FRAN
Yeah.
LESLIE
Yeah I don't have an air fryer. I’m like a pretty experienced cook.
An interesting statement. I guess in Leslie’s mind air fryers are for amateurs. This moment could be used as a way into a comedic scene and other class members found it funny too.
FRAN
Well actually, what happened is, I wanted an air fryer and I posted on Facebook, if anybody local, uh, tell me what kinds of air fryers you have cuz I was thinking about getting one. And so three people messaged me and said, I got one as a gift for Christmas and I don't use it at all so you can have it. So I got one of those. It was pretty surprising because I've used it like practically every day for two years. I put green beans in there and everything.
A true story that is hilarious. Three people didn’t want their air fryers! People are giving them, away. Students thought that was funny but also that it could be funny to do a scene about someone who never buys things, someone who gets everything most of us buy by posting on Facebook.
LESLIE
I'm learning something new. I do have an air popper.
Leslie, previously looked down her nose at air fryers, now reveals she has an air popper. People thought this was funny, myself included.
FRAN
Ohhhh, I Love popcorn.
LESLIE
Started that back in college.
FRAN
Oh nice.
LESLIE
It has empty calories though, you know, so I don't, I don't eat as much as I used to.
FRAN
When I do eat it though, I like to think, well it is a vegetable. I mean, it's pop-CORN right? I don't know what nutrition is in it.
Obviously funny. Using this logic, french fries are a health food.
LESLIE
Yeah, yeah sometimes when I just can't decide what to eat and I just kind of revert back to the air popper, eating popcorn like I was in college.
Leslie’s go to food is popcorn. People thought this was funny.
FRAN
Yeah yeah I have a lot of good memories. I was one of seven kids and uh sometimes my Mom would pop popcorn and bring us hot chocolate in the winter while we were watching something on TV and we always had so much fun with that as soon as she would leave the den we'd start throwing it. And then we had to go pick it all up before she came back so she wouldn't know we were having popcorn wars. I guess she probably knew.
The scene ended shortly after that.
Look at how many funny things there were in that scene! If you watched the video then you can tell that they offered each and every one of them without trying to be funny. It just came out!
Now sure, everyone’s sense of humor is different. Maybe you don’t agree that everything I highlighted was funny or that any of them were funny. Or maybe you noticed funny things I missed.
It doesn’t matter. The point is, there were many opportunities for comedy and they all stemmed from the actors being themselves; not from them trying to be funny, just from them being honest.
So we don’t ever need to go into a scene stressed about whether we will have funny ideas. All we need to do is be ourselves and listen really hard.
How to frame, heighten and leverage these funny ideas is for another post, but I do want to say something about why funny ideas that naturally (or organically) emerge out of your scenes are so powerful compared to funny ideas that are more coarsely inserted into scenes.
(Because maybe you are someone who can self generate hilarious ideas and insert them into scenes. Maybe you are, heaven knows I’ve met lots of people who are so funny they can.)
Ideas like the ones that emerged from Fran and Leslie’s scene are still better, partially because they feel earned and born of collaboration. But there are other reasons too.
One big problem that people who start their scenes from a jokey place face is the audience. The audience is filled with people who aren’t necessarily on your side. If you start a scene by telegraphing that you think you’re a hoot and that this is about to be very funny, a certain percentage of them, in some cases maybe a majority of them, are going to lean back into a “Prove It” stance.
It isn’t a good place for an audience to be.
Alternatively, if you start off with something sincere or heartfelt, they won’t know what is happening. They’ll think, maybe this isn’t supposed to be funny. Maybe this is more like theater than comedy.
That’s a great place to keep an audience. Then you can surprise them. They’ll be much more likely to laugh much more uproariously when you can catch them off guard.
Here’s another reason.
Improv scenes are like Marvel movies in that literally anything can happen and lots of what will happen is nonsense. Unlike Marvel movies however, there are no special effects. So your location, props, other characters, will all be phony.
You need big truthful elements to be placed next to the nonsense or no one is going to buy into the nonsense. That’s why all the explosions and spaceships and CGI is so important top Marvel. They seem so real they allow you to suspend your disbelief and believe a man from Australia is actually Thor, the Norwegian God of Thunder.
You have none of that in improv. So if you want the audience to believe a ridiculous improv premise, you had better embed it into a scene rife with truthful portrayals, reactions and relationships, because you have nothing else that is true!
If you doubt it, read through the Start Your Improv Scene Boring page, which offers many examples of this same principle playing out in sketch comedy.
Just to hammer home how funny being truthful can be, here is another example of Park Bench of Truth for you to watch and read through, this time performed by Duane & Jennifer. After this scene we’ll discuss one last point about using your truth in comedy.
DUANE
Hey thanks for meeting me on the bench here. I wish summer would never end.
This first line included an honest opinion from Duane, and a hilarious one at that.
JENNIFER
Oh my God, me too. Summer is my favorite, like it can never be warm enough.
Another hilarious but true sentiment. Jennifer really believes she believes this. But what if there were really a character who thought no amount of warmth was ever too much?
DUANE
Yeah and right in the middle of it when I'm, you know, running or something, I say oh God it's so hot, my heart rate is spiking and all of this kind of thing, but I know that as soon as the temperature drops I'm going to say, ugh, it's over.
JENNIFER
Oh my God I know that's why I moved to Florida. I mean, although I will say that this summer maybe was a little too hot for the first time ever.
DUANE
Really? That's that's a first, that's a first. So actually it lasted too long and it was there was too much of it.
JENNIFER
Well I didn't say it lasted too long but it was just like it it was in the 90s plus, like every day.
DUANE
Yeah it started to get like that for me too here in at Atlanta and still in the back of my mind it was like, and then there would be a second or two that I would say, Ah man I wish we get cold and then, nope. Voice. Nope.
JENNNIFER
Right yeah I know and then I think but that's the thing then I went to Chicago and it was 80 degrees the week before I went so I brought all kinds of stuff to wear that was for summer and it was 60 degrees and I'm like, oh no no this is way too cold can't do this.
DUANE
Yeah um one day it actually got kind of cold in the morning and um I went and the dogs were outside barking. I didn't want them to disturb the other people that were there. So I went out there barefooted in, in and in my underwear. Standing out there and it was like in the, in the 60s. I said, yeah, this feels good. But that's what we've got now. Right? We've got this cold now, well here in, in Atlanta, anyway. I mean it was like, I don't know, you know, 58 this morning. Yeah, and I'm, I'm getting used to it now and I, I'm used to it now, but I still wish that summer never ended.
JENNIFER
Right, I do agree with that.
DUANE
And I think when you're a kid you don't care right?
Here Duane insists kids aren’t affected by temperature or maybe all weather? Potentially pretty funny if we imagine a character actually believing this and taking corresponding action.
JENNIFER
Well…
DUANE
I know when I was little I, I didn't care. Now, it's like, ehhhhhhhhh.
JENNIFER
I still wasn't a fan of winter when I was little, but I grew up in Wisconsin, so it was cold.
DUANE
Cold Schmold. I grew up in northern Minnesota. Oh baby yeah. I felt like a, like a kid from the um uh from South Park, going out to meet the school bus in the morning, you know just this bundle with a head on top.
Duane’s dismissal of cold weather in Wisconsin was found funny by several students.
JENNIFER
Right, like what's what was that, um Christmas Story right, with Ralph with the big snowsuit where he can't even stand up, yep?
DUANE
Yeah,right, right, right that was me and then and that was normal. That was like normal.
JENNIFER
Oh right and now I mean global warming truly must be a thing because look at look at the whole fact of now they don't get snow sometimes until December. We used to get snow in October and wear snowsuits on Halloween.
Jennifer uses anecdotal evidence to prove a global trend, could be funny! (No politics please.)
DUANE
Snowsuits! Snowsuits, oh my God, snowsuit, a one piece kind of like a, what do you call them? A Unis or? You know that with a well with a hood so that there's a face sticking out and then the rest is just like one piece. That's what they wear in Norway even during the Summer. Summer in Norway, it's got to be Hell.
Duane became very excited about snowsuits and what to call them, which struck a lot of the class as funny. Also saying Summer in Norway is Hell struck many of the classes students as funny.
JENNIFER
I have not been to Norway, but I've been to Alaska.
DUANE
Oooooo, it's almost as cold as Minnesota.
Okay, so first of all, I just want to point out that Duane starts with an honest opinion (wishing Summer would never end) and from that we have an immediate opportunity for comedy.
Don’t like that one? No big deal because it leads to Jennifer responding with her own slightly different opinion (thinking it can never be warm enough) which could be selected instead.
That’s the power of sharing honest opinions, you can end up in pretty funny places or with lots of funny options pretty fast.
Now there is a trap here. The trap is if Duane were to feel insulted if his scene partner suggested his character never wanted Summer to end and that such a perspective was sort of strange. Maybe Duane is like, “Hey, that’s how I really feel! How dare you make fun of me.”
Or what if Fran, from the first scene was like, “Hey, I really do try to only eat vegetables and I really do think popcorn might be healthy.”
Well, we aren’t trying to make fun of anyone of course, and if someone were to say something like this to you in real life, then you would be very rude to react to them as if they had said something funny. But in improv we are looking to create comedy scenes, we aren’t looking to teach other people about ourselves.
The goal when you get onstage is to find something funny collaboratively. If your scene partner thinks it is funny that your character (note, your character, not you) thinks popcorn is healthy, then go with it. Because you should always do what your partner wants to do if you can tell what that is, because it is always easier to do that then it is to get them to understand what you think is funny.
Now maybe your scene partner is wrong.
It doesn’t matter. We aren’t trying to educate our scene partners or the general public when we do improv. We are trying to collaboratively build comedy scenes.
I can hear someone saying, how can it be funny if it is actually true?
Well, comedy is in the eye of the beholder. Improv is more about collaboration than it is about being right about comedy. If a scene partner consistently doesn’t share your point of view and it bothers you, stop working with them. But don’t mess up the scene you are in over it.
I can hear someone else saying that it is offensive to make a scene where a comedic character shares the same point of view you do.
No it is not, because of course you have a reasonable point of view, you’re a three dimensional human being, the smartest animal ever to live. But this is about creating a comedy scene with no preparation, it means seizing on the first thing that occurs to either player.
Again, if someone’s humor consistently offends you, don’t work with them. But you’ve taken the stage with them in the pursuit of building a comedy scene. They wouldn’t react to the “It can never be warm enough” line like this in real life. They would understand you were just exaggerating to make a point.
Anyway, those are thoughts about why to be truthful in comedy and how to use truthful statements to create comedy. I hope you find them helpful!
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