The Impressionist

Warning: this is about improv.

I had an improv show on Monday with one of the teams I regularly perform with. Three people in total, and we had about ten minutes, which generally is not a lot of time (in addition, it was a competition, which meant that we had to move quickly and try to generate laughs). So we started in a pretty standard way (with a two-person scene), and I was on the side, looking for an opening to get in on the fun.

Then one of my scene partners decided to make me an “old Japanese man”, forcing me to come in and play, well, an old Japanese man. It wasn’t a surprise, really (it’s one of the things we do on this particular team a lot), but it’s one of the few accents/voices I know I can do, so it was fun to play around with.

A few scenes later, that same scene partner decided to make me President Obama. Again, I’m not particularly good at impressions, and I’ve never done an impression of the President in a show before, but I was able to glide into a passable version of his speech pattern (truthfully, I have no idea how good it was, but people were laughing at least at the level of recognition of what I was attempting, so I guess it was okay). It helped that I had just watched the debate before heading to the show, so I had just heard the President’s voice earlier that evening.

All of this is just to point out that there are some performers who are great at impressions – people who can really disappear into the voice and mannerisms of the person they’re trying to mimic. People who have worked incredibly hard at what they’re doing.

I am not one of those people.

But! It was yet another reminder of the simplicity of improv. Despite all the rules, all the technique, all the things that we learn. Committing to a fun idea will always lead to laughs.

October 26, 2012 Dan 0

The Best Medicine

I spent a few days out of town, and now have spent the last two fighting a cold, so this post will be extremely brief.

But while attempting to fend off this cold (we’re at a bit of a stalemate at the moment), I will point out that when you’re feeling ill, comedies are MUCH better to occupy yourself than dramas.

Which may be why last night’s presidential debate was a godsend.

TONIGHT: Finally, the triumphant return of Happy Endings (and another show that has managed to grow on me a bit, Don’t Trust The B—- in Apartment 23), which I wholly expect will cure my cold completely.

October 23, 2012 Dan 0

That Moment When You’re In

When you fall in love with a television show, it’s almost never an all at once, love-at-first-sight type deal; it builds up, over time, a collection of little moments and jokes (or dramatic scenes, or explosions, or whatever it is that you like) over the course of a number of episodes.

That being said, you can probably find (and point to) a moment, a joke that turned you, when you realized that you were in it for the long haul. On 30 Rock, it took the “Captain Needa” joke to really hook me in:

On Community, although I enjoyed the pilot much more than most people I know, it was really the moment between Abed and his father in “Introduction to Film” where the show really first showed its heart (I can’t find the moment but here’s the short film Abed makes that affects his father):

And last night’s Ben & Kate was what really did it for me; it was the episode that really showed the heart underneath it all – a heart that we knew was there, but for the first time, the show really let us see.

It tied together three successful stories (Ben and his sadness over losing out on the future he thought he had, Kate and her old friend coming to an understanding that although they’re in different places in their lives, they’ll still be friends, and Tommy’s runner that reveals his own regret and why he’s so mad about once loaning out fifteen dollars) that all fundamentally explored the notion of past vs. present and our expectations of how our lives will go vs. how they actually go.

To top it all off, they How I Met Your Mother-ed us (in a good way) by using a little bit of unreliable narrator technique to show us that the idea that Kate spent her birthdays alone wasn’t quite true – earning a nice, heartfelt moment without getting cheesy.

And for me, they provided something even more important: that moment that hooked me. That made me realize that I’m in it for the long haul.

Now here’s hoping Fox (and America) agrees.

October 17, 2012 Dan 0