I hear you on that one Spenc. The desire to be consistently funny, especially within improv, is incredibly strong, and when you aren't getting any laughs, the panic mode sets in. This is what I think my and James' problem is currently. We'll get goin in our scene and hit a mental block or a rather unamusing moment and we go into overdrive. We start spitting out as much as we can as fast as we can to produce humor. The problem with that is that it completely stifles anything that was actually funny within the torent of verbal one-uping and physical randomness. It leads to a lack of motivation for the characters which makes everything even less funny.
When Professor Phillips said to slow it up a bit, it made sense. If something isn't working then its ok. If you relax and calmly move to the next bit within the scene you can produce humor out of the character's motivated actions. One way Professor Phillips told me to fix the speed of a bit was to draw it out. Take more, longer steps to get to the punchline. A joke in physical comedy is like a volcano. Kinda. The more tension, difficulty, and steps that go into the eruption, the bigger it will be. So the more tension, difficulty, and steps that go into a punchline the funnier the actual moment the joke is delivered will be.
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The important part to remember outside of commedia is that the actor still has the same degree of control of physical behavior. Most of the work you do will have a locked in text, but much of the physicalization of the character is the exclusive property of the actor.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of this class the commedia work is less about continuing on with commedia and more about discovering how to use your body as an expressive instrument.
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ReplyDeleteImprov vomit is definitely an appropriate term for what I've been doing in my commedia attempts. I have long believed very firmly that what little ability I have as an actor is wholly dependent upon having a good text and a good director.
ReplyDeleteDiving into a scene without either has been a challenge that I so far have yet to rise up to.
A lesson I have taken from the work so far has been that tempo is something that needs to serve both the action of commedia and the ability and confidence of the actor.
It's a crazy thing, it is...
-James