“Wanna
hear you say yeah yeah yeah” ~Maroon 5
After years of watching Whose Line Is It, Anyway?, marveling at the talents of comedic
giants like Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles, I stumbled across an improv club in
high school freshman year. Since then, I have been practicing improv comedy for
roughly fifteen years under a variety of local troupes.
When I entered seminary to study for the Roman Catholic
priesthood, I feared my improv days had come to an end. On the contrary, I am constantly
amazed at how the seminary has embraced the whole man that I am—including my
theater gifts—and even deepened my appreciation for improv.
YES,
AND:
One of the foundational
rules of improv is commonly known as “Yes, And”. It refers to receiving the
idea another gives you and then adding to it.
Say I’m in a scene with Carla. She begins the scene by
shouting at me, “Joey, your pants are on fire!” If I respond, “No, they’re not,”
I have effectively killed the scene (and committed improv heresy). If, however,
I say something like “That’s right. I lit my own pants on fire to prove my love
for you,” now the scene is going somewhere. In the latter example, not only
have I received Carla’s idea (YES), I also added to her idea (AND). If Carla then
runs with what I introduced into the scene and adds more to it, the results
could be pretty funny.
You want to know what the mortal sin of improv is? It’s
denying your teammate’s idea because you think your own idea is cooler. Failure
to accept your teammate’s idea will lead to a disjointed, lame scene with two
of Bryan Regan’s “Me Monsters” on stage. Good improv involves a harmonious
interchange between the players of continuous giving and receiving.
Interestingly enough, the former pope, St. John Paul II
(who himself had a great love for theater) writes something strikingly similar
to this improv rule in regards to God, sex, and the meaning of life. For JPII,
God is One and Triune, an eternal exchange of love (of giving and receiving)
between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He speaks of this mystery through the
analogy of sexual intercourse, not as an isolated act, but as the sum of the whole
married life of a couple. In and through their bodies, the man and the woman
both make a gift of self where “giving and accepting the gift interpenetrate in
such a way that the very act of giving becomes acceptance, and acceptance
transforms itself into giving” (TOB 17:4).
Sit back and wonder with me for a moment. What if the
beautiful things in this world point to the deepest mysteries of our humanity
and of God? What if there are patterns interwoven into the good things we
enjoy—like art and improv—that ultimately point us to a God who is a communion
of love?
Focus
on the Relationship:
Which is a more interesting scene? A zombie apocalypse,
or a zombie apocalypse where one of the zombies is a vegan and struggles to
find acceptance among his other zombie friends? Zombie apocalypse happens in
both scenes, but the latter example is more interesting because it involves
relationship. Good improv focuses on the relationships of the characters to
drive the scene, not just witty banter or the external events being portrayed. I
like to establish a relationship early in the scene. One way to do this is by
giving the other player a name: i.e. “Steve,
you’re embarrassingly late to this meeting.”
Relationship matters. I’ve made some pretty big mistakes
in life by putting more value in my company sales scorecard and in my
accomplishments than in the people that love me freely. If I forget the
relationship that matters most—the Father who loves me as his son—then I risk
forgetting who I am. My work can turn into frenetic activism, or be motivated
by pride instead of authentic love. Choosing to live in and out of relationship
is a decision I must make every morning.
It Takes
Practice:
Whenever I tell people I
have improv practice or show rehearsal, the usual response is: “Improv
practice? I thought you like…make that stuff up on the spot?” It’s true that
improv comedy relies on audience suggestions to form unscripted, unrehearsed
scenes. Even so, improv itself is a skill that needs to be worked at. Getting
comfortable with receiving and giving, remembering to focus on the relationship
in a scene, these things do not come easy at first! With committed effort,
however, and after a lot of failure, the improv skills start to become second
nature.
Just like how one needs
to practice scenework in order to be a great improver, we too need practice in
loving God and loving others. These can be fostered in concrete ways. One of
the teens in my youth group decided he would stock his car with granola bars to
encourage himself to be more generous to the homeless people at stoplights.
Another teen has chosen to let God love her every week for one hour of prayer
in front of the Blessed Sacrament.
Receive
It Well:
Improv is not about being funny on command. Improv
relies on receiving the gift well. Christopher West likes to say that holiness
is not so much doing something, but “letting it be done unto me” (Luke 1:38). The
Church honors Mary as the model and archetype of the human race because she had the courage to say
YES to God’s idea AND give her whole life to him.
Jesus has given us the gift of his whole self out of
love for us. Will we receive his gift? That could make for quite an exciting
scene…
#
Written by Joey Martineck
Director of Creative Arts, Notre Dame Seminary
Seminarian for Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta, GA
Graphic borrowed from: http://ew.com/article/2015/08/11/penn-teller-whose-line-anyway-cw-renews/
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