Note: This is a post about improv. It also might spoil some plot points of last week’s episode of Community, if you haven’t seen it yet.
On last week’s Community, Troy and Abed lived out a body-switching movie (like Freaky Friday), except, of course, in this universe, things generally have an explanation that sort of makes sense – meaning it didn’t suddenly become a universe where body switching could actually happen, but rather was, essentially, a game being played by the two friends.
Thanks to the setup of the episode, what we end up with is a pretty good example of one person letting the other get his initiation out before adding on/jumping into the premise.
(The action starts at 0:36)
0:36-0:44: Troy initiates his premise to Abed – that their brains have switched bodies, meaning that Abed is Troy, and Troy is Abed.
0:44-0:47: Abed is clearly confused, but instead of railroading his own idea into the “scene”, his response, “…so right now…” suggests to Troy that he needs further clarification as to what the premise is.
0:47-0:50: Troy clarifies his initiation, stating once again that they’ve switched bodies.
0:50-0:53: Instead of rushing to respond, Abed takes a moment to fully process the initiation.
0:53-1:00: Abed buys into the premise and plays his part, his intonation, body language, and point of view representing what he thinks Troy sounds/thinks like.
1:00-1:10: Now that both scene partners have bought in, they can play their game for the rest of the episode.
Obviously, this is a scripted scene, so it’s not as though the two were improvising this (probably), but it still provides a couple of great reminders about dealing with these kinds of initiations in improv – initiations where the person initiating the scene clearly has a specific premise in mind.
In particular, if this were an improv scene, the real reason it works is because of Abed’s patience – he didn’t understand the premise at first, and instead of blowing past the initiation, he asked for a clarification. Then, when he got it, he took a moment to process/figure out what exactly that meant (and what Troy was asking from him), and then he launched into it full-bore.
As a random note, the episode was written by Jim Rash, who plays Dean Pelton on the show, won an oscar for co-writing The Descendants, and is an experienced improviser himself.
Incidentally, if you also to see pretty much a perfect example of a group game (as first pointed out to me by James Mastraieni), look no further than this (NSFW) clip from Django Unchained:
