You stand with 7 strangers on the backline. Either someone who runs the jam you’re at, or a peer with ambition, steps out and gets your one-word suggestion. They step back in line with you, and the eight (ten, including the representatives of the host team) of you stand there, digesting the suggestion. For an interminable moment, you are all frozen in silent contemplation of the different ways to interpret and interpolate the word “pudding.”
Seven to ten minutes later, a buzzer sounds, a red light goes on, and the others go out. Before you could come up with your brilliant take on “pudding,” you are being ushered by the small of your back towards the audience, a reunion with obscurity that you signed up for when you submitted your name in the first place. Your trek back to your chair is maybe 20 feet, but during that time, you come up with a dozen slayer openings and easily as many minutes’ worth of brilliant standup monologue on the subject of pudding, until it all clears away and you’re left stewing in your seat with one word projected onto the screen in the theater of your brain:
FUCK.
Backline inertia is nothing to laugh about. I’ve seen brilliant people get up at a jam and never get a word out. They were looking for a way to show support, but the opportunity never came, or they thought they had a decent idea, but weren’t sure that it was smart enough to share. These are the people who think I’m “brave,” because not one set that I’m in hasn’t had me in a few scenes. I deflect that praise, though, because courage doesn’t enter into it — it’s all about being a good student.
You’re going to fail. You’re going to fail big, and often, all the time. Your first hundred initiations will haunt you for the rest of your life if you let them, because they will all suck. Guess what? So will everybody else’s. Growth is the only constant in improv, and the reason improv karasses work so well in fostering new talent is that the people in charge of them are aware, from the moment you walk in the door, how very much you are going to fail, and that it’s about getting up and examining the wreckage, not avoiding the crash.
So how?
It’s probably different for everyone. Every time I’m on the backline, I lean back on one foot. That’s the foot I use to kick myself into the field of play if a few seconds go by with no one on stage. Once that initial push is out of the way, and you’re out there, you have no choice — you’ve got to come up with something, or your partner does and you have to go along with it. If there’s nothing, you’ll find something in the honesty of your awkward silence, or a third person will initiate, and you just have to trust that.
My friend Ben, host of Pittsburgh’s Friday Nite Improvs, once said that his secret was that he never went to the men’s room before he started a show, so that he pretty much spent every show with nervous energy filling his bones. That’s a solution, too?
If you find yourself onstage with a partner, silent and awkward, just start making up an environment. Make breakfast. Do dishes. Mow the lawn. Sit at a desk and start typing on your computer. You’ll be surprised how fast a scene unfolds. Ryan Karels once confirmed this idea for me: “95% of the scenes that start with an environment succeed.” Next time you’re watching your favorite troupe, take note of how often the scenes begin non-verbally. You’ll be surprised at how often professional-level improvisers have nothing to say.
The point is, you’re probably going to fail — and when you do, you will learn, and you will get better. A cumulative lifetime of experience is almost always on stage with you to help you learn how to be a better improviser — don’t fuck it up by not failing.