i'm doing an improv show in 8 weeks

[Bob]

i've been taking improv classes, and the current level of classes that i'm taking ends with a proper show on a stage in front of probably/hopefully mostly strangers that are paying american dollars to watch me and the other people be funny

i can't wait to find out for really reals whether or not strangers find me funny. at the moment i'm super excited about this but i bet that as the weeks crawl forward my enthusiasm will gradually morph into terror

and i'll probably post about it

i hope this turns into something, good improv scenes are really fun

[like2_drink]

That's sick Bob, good for you! I love comedy, and even tho every comedian has to bomb on stage at one point or another, I hope u have alot of fun! Def. post how it goes (y)

[Guy Incognito]

its about fucking time you had a go at it, i have seen afew threads on here where you have talked about wanting to do it and this sounds like its right up your street.

good luck bob

[Adam]

Go bob!

If I win the lottery I'm gonna commission a plane and pick up every BBMB member to come watch you.

[Tone Capone]

Throw it on youtube for us! (y)

[jabumbo]

well you can't be any worse than leno, so you have that going for you

[hardnox71]

You'll do fine, Bob. (y)

[NicRN77]

when is it, Bob? I would get a kick out of seeing you do improv!

[abbott]

wish i could make it ... i need a laugh

[Guy Incognito]

Bob,
some questions:
will this be you on yer own on stage or with a group?

What exactly is involved in an improv class?

Do you just sit there and tell people your jokes and work on them? I'd be horrified it was just people evaluating if i was funny or not (mainly because i am not)

Do you improvise with others or on own?

It sounds interesting can you let me know some stuff about it please?

sorry that was a lot of questions

[cosmo105]

Awesome! Best of luck, Bob, you'll be great. Good improv can be really fun. It's a great first step. Now come out here and do classes at UCB and do jokes and let me book you on my show

[DandyFop]

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!

(and)

[Bob]

when is it, Bob? I would get a kick out of seeing you do improv!

it's october 10 at improv boston

it'll be like a normal show, on a stage, with an audience, and lots of structure and practice because we're only a level 2 class and aren't very good yet

although this is actually my 3rd level of class, they pulled a fast one on me and changed the curriculum so i graduated into another level 2 class and half the students are just coming from level 1 (which means they're as bad as we were when i started level 2 which is a little frustrating at times)

i started taking the classes with 2 other friends, and in my last class we became friends with a bunch of other people and they came with us as well. maybe we'll form a group. or maybe we won't. iunno

[NicRN77]

it's october 10 at improv boston



if I have the night off from work I will be there for sure!! (y)

[Documad]

Awww, this is great news!

[adam_f]

Bob, I hope you do well, but failing will make for a better story.

[Dorothy Wood]

make sure you don't get too drunk! seriously...I was all cocky about my stand up routine because people responded really well when I did an improvised set to fill in for someone at a variety show I produce...so I was like oh yeah, I'm amazing! let's take this show on the road! so I decided to do a fairly popular and critically acclaimed open mic, and I sat and got drunk for 3 hours waiting for my time slot...and totally bombed. forgot everything, froze on stage, etc. etc.

anyway, that traumatized me, haven't tried since...now I just make props and assist with the game show segment or shout things from the sound booth.

I also used to know this kid who did improv and he accidentally got too drunk and ended up drifting into the same grandpa character for every scene, then called someone a "faggot" which made everyone gasp so angrily that he had to break character to apologize.

eesh, it was painful to watch.

anyway, do you have any go-to characters yet?

[Bob]

i dunno if i have go to characters exactly, but my favorite scenes are the ones where i do a silly voice of some sort and base a big character off of it. good improv scenes require, among other things: 1) strong relationships between the two characters and 2) big strong emotions and behaviors and my normal self doesn't really do either of them very well, so the more of a caricature of a person i become, the funnier my scenes tend to be.

silly voices like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l99Ek4YtTuw)

[DandyFop]

I also used to know this kid who did improv and he accidentally got too drunk and ended up drifting into the same grandpa character for every scene, then called someone a "faggot" which made everyone gasp so angrily that he had to break character to apologize.



The two times I've said faggot during an improv scene are maybe the biggest laughs I've gotten doing improv. Not that I was setting out to offend, it just worked.

[Myu-to]

I'm impressed.

You'll be awesome.

Try not to shit your pants.(y)

[Guy Incognito]

so is this a show where people shout suggestions out at you to be funny?

Or is it just stand-up?

[cosmo105]

improv is usually a scene based on a particular suggestion that is thrown out from the audience. the group will ask for it at the beginning. it's not just jokes or stories or something, you have to create something more or less from scratch - improvised.

[Bob]

that's the core of it, yeah. sometimes it involves games, too. whose line is it in anyway was basically a show about improv games, like party quirks (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJB6BIJoTwI). i'm told our show will be fairly game-oriented because we're new and likely kinda sucky and games keep things structured and can be funny even when they go wrong, unlike a scene, which can just be boring or horrifying when it goes wrong

but mostly improv is about creating scenes on the fly. this is improv (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS76ejN1gAo) (the monologue thing is kind of unique to that format, most improv doesn't involve that)

so is this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hEV389DVjA)

[Bob]

so this is coming up, 10/10 (that's a week from monday) at 7pm. if anyone in the area is actually interested in coming, PM me and i'll send you the link to buy tickets. $5 each. afterwards you'll get to hang out awkwardly in the audience as i try to balance talking to you and my real friends, who are you to say no?

[Bob]

this happened tonight and it went well, so much better than i'd hoped. i got lucky and landed in a super funny and compatible and supportive class, we worked so well together

i got one of the first big laughs of the night, and it involved the suggestion of lactose intolerance and my use of the phrase "goat chi", and i also got to close the show, literally the last words that were said before the lights turned off came out of my mouth, and those words were a lady gaga dick joke

i love comedy, i wanna do this forever. i'm so on top of the world right now, i literally cannot believe it's monday

also i'm pretty drunk

can't believe it's monday

[NicRN77]

this happened tonight and it went well, so much better than i'd hoped. i got lucky and landed in a super funny and compatible and supportive class, we worked so well together

i got the first big laugh of the night, and it involved the suggestion of lactose intolerance and my use of the phrase "goat chi", and i also got to close the show, literally the last words that were said before the lights turned off came out of my mouth, and those words were a lady gaga dick joke

i love comedy, i wanna do this forever. i'm so on top of the world right now, i literally cannot believe it's monday

also i'm pretty drunk

can't believe it's monday


awesome, Bob!! wish I could have gone. it is one slooooow night here at the hospital. please let me know when your next performance is!! (y)

[Bob]

awesome, Bob!! wish I could have gone. it is one slooooow night here at the hospital. please let me know when your next performance is!! (y)

another 8 weeks, tops, although it is the most inconveniently timed show in the universe. i think it's something like december 20, everybody's gone for one holiday or the other. hell, as far as i know i might be gone too

i'm hoping that my group decides to just start doing shit together otherwise though, however that works—we are so super funny and compatible, i feel so lucky to have landed with them, it'd be a sin to waste this

i will obviously keep the bbmb in the loop because between this and girl problems it's the only thing i've got to talk about anymore, but if any of you do come to the shows, i'm telling you right now, i've never heard of the beastie boys or the internet in general

[KingPsyz]

another 8 weeks, tops, although it is the most inconveniently timed show in the universe. i think it's something like december 20, everybody's gone for one holiday or the other. hell, as far as i know i might be gone too

i'm hoping that my group decides to just start doing shit together otherwise though, however that works—we are so super funny and compatible, i feel so lucky to have landed with them, it'd be a sin to waste this

i will obviously keep the bbmb in the loop because between this and girl problems it's the only thing i've got to talk about anymore, but if any of you do come to the shows, i'm telling you right now, i've never heard of the beastie boys or the internet in general

The in ter net? What poppycock do you speak of good sir!? Have you caught the vapors? Why a man of my standing only frequents the libraries of the arts where the discussion is of the matters of the day and museums of great knowledge where felines are displayed as if they posses the grammar and intellect of a small child.

[Dorothy Wood]

Way to go bob!

[cosmo105]

i love comedy, i wanna do this forever.


yes! do it bob, you're hilarious!

[checkyourprez]

bob, if you become big in the comedy world, like say john leguizamo, will you be happy that you went to law school in the end or pissed that you didnt just go right into jokes?


im sure theres some jokes to be had there. paying all that money to tell jokes. or like some how relating talking in front of your audience to talking in front of a jury/judge and shit. i think theres some comedy gold in there. but i dont want to give you all my good jokes and then you become famous off them so i will leave the finagling to you.

[Bob]

well, i certainly have no use for the law degree. and law school definitely resulted in a pretty dark period for me (i'm still too embarrassed to put out all the whiskey bottles at once for the recycling) and was in many ways the worst decision i've ever made in my life

but

the only reason i moved to boston was to go to law school, and if i hadn't done that, i wouldn't have any of what i have now, however i happened to manage to get into it and whatever it is. i dunno where i'd be if i hadn't gone. probably in connecticut still or something boring

i mean law school itself was definitely a massive waste of time and money, don't get me wrong there, but i can't deny that i got something good out of the secondary effects


(i've been thinking about that a lot lately. usually right around the time i drop my student loan payment check in the mail)

[mikizee]

People still use checks?

What is this, the 1980s??

[Bob]

i was being metaphorical, i do it online :(

[checkyourprez]

well, i certainly have no use for the law degree. and law school definitely resulted in a pretty dark period for me (i'm still too embarrassed to put out all the whiskey bottles at once for the recycling) and was in many ways the worst decision i've ever made in my life

but

the only reason i moved to boston was to go to law school, and if i hadn't done that, i wouldn't have any of what i have now, however i happened to manage to get into it and whatever it is. i dunno where i'd be if i hadn't gone. probably in connecticut still or something boring

i mean law school itself was definitely a massive waste of time and money, don't get me wrong there, but i can't deny that i got something good out of the secondary effects


(i've been thinking about that a lot lately. usually right around the time i drop my student loan payment check in the mail)


true. i would think some of it would come in handy. just in the way law school improves quick thinking and reasoning. i feel that could defiantly be of use in comedy, especially improv.


and hey greg giraldo was a lawyer, and a pretty good comedian. so you got that going for you!

[mikizee]

Australia's greatest comedian genius Shaun Micallef was a lawyer before as well, so you're in good stead.

What the hell is a stead?

[Bob]

rich fulcher (bob fossil in mighty boosh, rich fulcher in snuff box) is apparently a lawyer too. he says that it took him years to tell his parents, and that he went so far as to hire a woman to answer his phone for him and pretend to be his secretary to hide the truth

so he says. it seems far fetched

then again, doug benson's parents apparently don't know he smokes pot, so i guess if parents really want to ignore something, they find a way

[Kid Presentable]

Australia's greatest comedian genius Shaun Micallef was a lawyer before as well, so you're in good stead.

What the hell is a stead?

Micallef was a funny cunt. I'm watching his stuff at the moment, a guy I work with wants to write something for ABC so we're seeing where Aus comedy has worked before. Thankfully it doesn't take a lot of researching.

[Guy Incognito]

Bob Mortimer was some sort of lawyer before him and vic reeves started being funny on telly. He even helped represent JArvis Cocker after the michael jackson incident at the brit awards in the 90's.

anyway, how can you rehearse or prepare for improv, isnt spontanaeity supposed to be the whole point?

[Bob]

i have another show next tuesday, another class graduation show

but i think this one's gonna be terrible. we're still funny people, but this show is going to be a particular long-form show, a format called the "harold"

and i fucking hate harold and we're all terrible at it, this is going to be such a bad show

anyone know anything about harold? i want to complain about it some more but there's no point if nobody knows what it is

the short explanation is "it's a complex set of ways for you to do scenes that fuck up your show, even if it's funny and the audience doesn't notice you're doing badly"

[Dorothy Wood]

I only know about it because my friend was the only girl to make the "harold" team when she finished her classes. I thought it was "herald" this whole time until now. oopsy.

anyway, it's good practice, that's all I know. and when people do it well, it's fucking awesome. It's been awhile though, the improv people I know these days are so far along, they mostly do sketch, one man shows, and comedic plays.


I am taking comedy writing classes in january, I guess I'll have to do some improv games too. I'm scared.

[Bob]

anyway, it's good practice, that's all I know.

well...

so basically my path through improv classes has been this:

level 1: we're going to teach you the basics of improv, and some of you are taking this class because you like comedy and want to do improv, and some of you aren't remotely funny or fit for this but are doing it because you want to challenge yourselves to try to do something different and you're going to quit but here you are anyway, let's go

level 2: ok, most of the people who suck at improv are gone, now we're going to really buckle down and spend 8 classes teaching you how to do good scene work and how to be funny

level 3: great, hopefully those 8 classes made you experts on how to do funny improv scenes. time to learn this:

http://i304.photobucket.com/albums/nn195/fuzzydunlop_bucket/theharold.jpg

it doesn't matter if your scenes are funny, if it doesn't fit this format, you've had a bad show. hopefully our 8 classes together will prepare you for an awesome show

(i'm not confident our show will be awesome)

[Bob]

if you look at the flowchart, it's a complex structure, and there's a lot of shit to keep track of. our instructor for this level of classes is the director of the harold program, and he was great and very open and tactful with feedback as we practiced and fucked up our harold scenes

but he waited until around the second half of the class to reveal to us that even if we didn't have scenes that fit into a good harold show's format, that we had to go out and do something, we can't just have moments of dead silence and empty stage on a real show, so even if it doesn't fit into the wacky harold flowchart, we have to do a scene, no matter how much it kills the harold

so in our last class, i straight up asked him, "say our harold gets immediately derailed, and we do 25 minutes of random scenes, but the audience doesn't notice and still laughs, did we have a good show, or a bad show?" and he kind of hesitates and says "in my view, it's a bad show"

way too soon for that flowchart imo

[Bob]

and it just kind of pisses me off, because at this point i know people who have been doing improv for years and years and years and years, and they're super talented, but they don't go anywhere near harold, because harold is a very specific beast and you can be great at improv without ever doing harold, unless you're taking classes at improv boston, then harold is mandatory and you have to do it immediately

not thrilled about this honestly. i've been taking classes with the same group of people for this level and the last, and we get along great and we're all super funny, but this harold shit has destroyed our collective confidence, it's really hard to watch and do

[Dorothy Wood]

It seems like the Harold was devised for experienced people who wanted a challenge and to create structure. So it's weird to me that they'd force it on newish people, as a part of instruction. But maybe they just want to ramp things up.

[checkyourprez]

quit complaining and kick this guy harold in the dick bob.

[Bob]

yeah...i fucking hate harold. i barely got on stage

[technical harold chat to follow, sorry if it doesn't make sense also i'm drunk]

i basically went on stage one and a half times. once was for one of the group games, and that didn't really count, because everyone has to get on stage for that particular group game. i barely even got a word in, so that sucked

the other time i got on i'm only counting as a half because a friend of mine basically circled around the back of the stage and whispered in my ear, "walk on the stage, i'm gonna stab you" (the scene was set in a prison) so it wasn't even my idea

the rest of the time i was just kind of holding back, thinking about the flow chart and what i could do that would fit in with the show, only i couldn't think of anything in time so i just ended up standing with my hands in my pockets the whole time...basically exactly the situation that i was afraid was going to happen

i fucking hate harold

at least i still have stand up

[Bob]

i also refuse to have my confidence undermined and feel totally vindicated in blaming the harold format (and how it's being forced upon us so soon) because we invited a bunch of friends who don't know what harold is and one of them basically said she thought the show was kind of awkward based on her conceptions of what "long form" improv was (which is totally fair, because who the fuck in an improv audience other than improv nerds knows what a harold is or would be impressed by the technical details?)

so basically, we had a good harold, but the audience didn't think the show was very funny

i fucking hate harold

[mikizee]

This Harold thing seems ridiculous to me. Structure, rules, hardcore at that, are totally contradictory in my mind to what improv is all about.

Sure, there are things, guidelines which help improv be its best but this nazi shit? Fuck outta here.

[Kid Presentable]

To say you are really doing something, you're much better off getting a grasp of even the shittest and hardest parts of it. You'll only get better, I'm sure. (y)

[DandyFop]

yeah...i fucking hate harold. i barely got on stage

[technical harold chat to follow, sorry if it doesn't make sense also i'm drunk]

i basically went on stage one and a half times. once was for one of the group games, and that didn't really count, because everyone has to get on stage for that particular group game. i barely even got a word in, so that sucked

the other time i got on i'm only counting as a half because a friend of mine basically circled around the back of the stage and whispered in my ear, "walk on the stage, i'm gonna stab you" (the scene was set in a prison) so it wasn't even my idea

the rest of the time i was just kind of holding back, thinking about the flow chart and what i could do that would fit in with the show, only i couldn't think of anything in time so i just ended up standing with my hands in my pockets the whole time...basically exactly the situation that i was afraid was going to happen

i fucking hate harold

at least i still have stand up

This is why I do standup. Don't gotta worry about fighting for stage time, that's fer sure.

I like the Harold if it's done right. Obviously, yeah, it takes years and years to get good at it but I don't think it's that crazy that your teacher would have you try it. You have to try starting to connect those dots and do it, and it's gonna suck at first. That's just how this shit goes. It's gonna be rough at first.

I started enjoying improv once I got better at it but in the end it was too much money and too much of a pain in the ass to organize groups and shit. Standup is easier to get up on stage more often and cheaper.

[Bob]

This is why I do standup. Don't gotta worry about fighting for stage time, that's fer sure.

I like the Harold if it's done right. Obviously, yeah, it takes years and years to get good at it but I don't think it's that crazy that your teacher would have you try it. You have to try starting to connect those dots and do it, and it's gonna suck at first. That's just how this shit goes. It's gonna be rough at first.

I started enjoying improv once I got better at it but in the end it was too much money and too much of a pain in the ass to organize groups and shit. Standup is easier to get up on stage more often and cheaper.

i'm just irked that they're making us do it so soon. after the first two levels, you're just barely getting used to doing funny scenework, and then they're like "great, here's a bunch of other ways to fuck up even if your scenes are funny, by the way keep working on making your scenes funny" and you totally lose track of all the shit that makes for a good scene, like relationships and emotions and establishing a game and whatever because you're too busy thinking "ok, what was the game from 1A, what was the theme established in the opening" and so on. or at least that's the trap i fell into

it should come much later, i feel, after you've at least got the whole scenework thing down, and you struggle less with that, but instead you have to take two levels of it starting at level 3...not a fan. level 2 was so much fun, i wanted to do that some more

i also kind of feel (and i can't remember if i already said this, i made a lot of drunk posts in this thread in the past few days) like in terms of putting on a good show for an audience of people off the street, i don't totally understand the point of the harold. it seems like the only people who would appreciate a "good harold" are people who know what a harold is, and can follow the structure and notice all the nuances, and for that, you need to either study that shit on wikipedia or take a few harold classes yourself...i dunno who that audience is

[mikizee]

Its nobody Bob, its nobody

[Guy Incognito]

i can see how this harold would be annoying but it kind of remnds me of when having a really bad driving lesson and everything goes wrong and the instructor steps it up a gear , but as soon as you have that bad lesson it all kinda clicks into place.

there was a bbc doc on this week called "the art of stand up", it had a lot of comedians on and was pretty thorough , if a little british. But the common theme was to be yourself and be honest and that will shine through in your work. I have no idea if the US can get this but you should try and check it out