When I was living in Toronto, I used to fool around doing improv comedy. Here are some improv games that I developed with friends at Northern Secondary School, and at Theatre 5 in Kingston, Ontario. Feel free to try these out with your own group!
Improv performances occasionally call for extreme leaps of illogic; creating situations where the laws of physics, causation, and reality fly right out the window. This is a beginners' exercise designed to practice this kind of absurdism, as well as to develop spontaneity and justification skills.
This exercise is best done with a large group. Divide the group into two lines. The people at the front of each line must think up two things in their head: a crisis, and an unrelated object. The crisis can be as small as having an untied shoelace, to as big as a meteor about to crash into the Earth. Then the two people at the front of the lines approach one another, and quickly divulge their dilemmas:
P1: "I've broken my leg, and all I've got is a goldfish bowl."
P2: "Oh yeah? Well, my house is on fire and all I've got is this
lawnmower."
The goal: solve the other person's crisis using your object as quickly as possible. Because it can be hard to keep track of two objects and two crises in one's memory, it's not unusual to forget what the other person said. Tell the group at the beginning of the exercise that if they forget, it's o.k. to ask. ("What was your crisis, again?")
P1: "Uh... here, use the water in my goldfish bowl to put out the fire."
P2: "Thanks! You can use my lawnmower to ride around on, until your
leg gets better."
(The two players leave the stage, and the next two people step up.)
This game has a tendency to descend into "gagging" if done for too long. Crises should be kept within the realm of fixability - situations like "I don't exist" are simply impratical. Always give your fellow players something they can work with; don't try to stump them.
A difficult exercise; recommended for intermediate and advanced players only. It has a tendency to either work out really well or fail miserably, so don't perform it on stage unless you're quite confident. Have a stopwatch handy.
Send two people out of earshot. Gather five different words from the audience, then call the two people back to the stage. Tell them the first word. They start a scene, but can only speak that one word. After a short pause, give them the second word. Their scene continues, uninterrupted, but now they have a two-word vocabulary. And so on, until they're using all five words. Very tricky.
Choice of words: Generally, it's good to get at least two nouns, a verb, and an adjective. The nice thing about nouns, is that some of them can be used as verbs (like "fly"). We've found the scene works best if you make the first word a noun, and the second word a verb, but there is a lot of room for experimentation.
Timing: Twenty seconds between each new word is a good average. Cut it down to fifteen if the people on stage are really struggling; push it to thirty if they're doing really well.
This game only works if you mime and put a lot of emotion into your speech. It's also important to remember that you don't have to speak. You can have long silences, and set up the scene at the beginning without saying a word. A conflict of some sort will almost always arise between the two players. To prevent blocking, try to pretend that you're having a friendly (but firm) argument, and aren't complete enemies. Sometimes people make small grunts or other non-verbal noises. These are o.k., if kept to a minimum.
Here's how one of our more successful scenes went:
[1st word: credenza]
P1: (knocking on door, making a delivery) Credenza!
P2: (opening door) Credenza?
P1: (pushing it inside) Credenza.
(P2 frowns, inspects it and is obviously not satisfied, shaking his head.
P1 indicates for him to wait a moment. P1 pushes the credenza aside,
goes through the door, and pushes in a second, much taller one.)
P1: Credenza!
P2: (very satisfied) Ahhh, credenza!
[2nd word: washing]
(P1 and P2 examine the new credenza. P2 steps close to it, and suddenly
P1 jumps back, sprayed by water.)
P1: Washing?!
P2: (coming around to P1's side to investigate) Washing? (He gets sprayed.)
P1 & P2: Washing credenza!
(P2 enters the credenza and starts to take a shower.)
[3rd word: attractive]
(P2 steps out of the credenza, and P1 starts to admire him.)
P1: Attractive...
P2: (opens the credenza door for P1) Washing credenza?
(P1 enters, spins around a few times as if in a rinse cycle, then
hops out)
P1: (declaring dramatically about himself) Attractive!!
[4th word: aardvark]
P2: (points at the floor in panic) Aardvark!!
P1: (looks around scared) Aardvark? Aardvark!
(P2 and P1 scurry backwards in fright)
P2: (getting an idea) Credenza! (pushes it over, onto the aardvark)
(A long, guilty pause ensues.)
P1: (mourning the loss of the furniture) Credenza...
P2: (trying to cheer him up, as if it's repairable) Credenza...?
P1: (indicating how good a credenza it was that P2 ruined)
Attractive WASHING credenza!
[5th word: sleeping]
P2: Aardvark... sleeping?
(P1 sighs. He walks to one side, and pulls back the original, much
shorter and less desirable credenza.)
P1: (sadly) Credenza.
P2: (also sad) Credenza.
(P2 notices it has a pillow, which he picks up and fluffs.)
P2: Sleeping?
(P1 suddenly has a realization.)
P1: (points at the short one) Sleeping credenza, (points at the tall one)
washing credenza!
(P1 & P2 pull out a fold-up bed from the reclaimed credenza.)
P2: Sleeping credenza... (indicating it) Attractive.
[end of scene]
Again, not for beginners. Send two players out of earshot, and get two unrelated locations from the audience. Assign one location to each player privately, so that they don't know what the other player's location is.
In this game, the two players must do a scene. Each one thinks that they are in the same location together - but each have different locations. How does this work? The players are not allowed to refer directly to where they are; they can only do so indirectly ("Wow, look at those waves," instead of "Well, here we are on a beach"). The challenge: whatever the other player says or does, you must try to make sense of it - justify it into your own reality. You cannot claim that the other player is insane or hallucinating.
This game is tricky, but it's important to remember that the scene is cooperative, not a "reality fight". Don't try to endow things on the other player too harshly, nor should you insist that they conform to your reality. Try and merge the realities into some bizarre, dual-universe hybrid. It's not unusual for one reality to dominate slightly over the other. By all means, try and figure out where the other person is - double entendres and other forms of creative wordplay can happen this way! Half the fun comes from the audience, watching you as you figure things out.
As far as choosing locations goes, there are some combination patterns you can keep in mind. For instance, you can take locations that have certain similarities, like on top of a ferris wheel, and on the side of a mountain (high, dangerous). In one scene, we chose two locations that were very tense and involved a lot of people running around: a burning building, and the stock market...
P1: (waving his arms) Sell! Sell!
P2: (in an adjoining room) Hey, look out!
P1: What's in there?
P2: Hot oil!
P1: (waving his arms wildly) Buy! Buy!!
P2: It's on FIRE!
P1: ...Sell! Sell!!
You can also choose locations that are opposites, like an ice cream store (cold) and the centre of the Earth (hot). Quite often, audiences will suggest locations that are socially awkward when put together, like in a church and in a brothel; or in a butcher shop and in a funeral home. But, most of the time, the locations will be completely different with no linking themes at all. On the rare occasion, the locations may smoothly merge. In one instance, the locations we got were on a space station and in an East Indian video store. The scene turned into astronauts going into a video store, which happened to be on the Mir space station. ("Do you like elephant films? The Russians - very much like the elephant films.")
I would not recommend doing this game with any more than two people. I watched it attempted with three, and it failed miserably each time, except for the one snippet of dialogue below, which I must explain first. The three people were in a tanning salon, a dungeon, and a disco. The person in the salon was reclining in a chair admiring her arms. The person in the dungeon was in the middle, arms shackled to the wall. The person in the disco was on her other side, dancing a bit. The dungeon person looked really miserable, and was staring at the other two with some confusion.
Dungeon: (to the salon person) So, how long have you been here?
Salon: Oooh, not long enough!
Disco: I got in with a ticket!
Salon: (as the dungeon person is looking increasinly worried) I
think they're offering memberships.
In closing, if you play this game, whatever locations you get, you can
end up with wonderfully silly dialogue.
[Locations: in a sugar shack (where maple syrup is boiled), and in a bank.]
P1: (carrying in two heavy, liquid-filled buckets) Well, here you go!
P2: ...Are you making a deposit?
P1: I guess you could call it that, yes...
P2: Is this a negotiable currency?
P1: (after a thoughtful pause) Only in northern Quebec.
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