A Central Tenet
One of the guiding rules I live by in improv is “Make Others Look Good.” By capitalizing each word, it should now be forever imprinted in your brain. That’s how these things work. Look, don’t get technical with me, just trust me, it will.
The basic human instinct is to make yourself look good. If you are up on a stage and there’s an audience staring at you, your shame-avoidance systems, among the most powerful in your arsenal, will kick in and do whatever it takes to make you feel comfortable up there with all those piercing eyes on you. There’s a pressure to be funny, to speak cleverly, to move fluidly. The trap is that the harder you try to force the issue the less funny/clever/graceful you appear. An audience can always tell if you are trying too hard. Making Others Look Good, however, puts your shame in a drawer that need never be opened again.
The keys to Making Others Look Good are to accept, to build and to be positive. If you’re accepting then the other players know that what they throw out there is being heard and being used. Accepting makes the scene flow. Everyone is on the same page and moving in the same direction. If you’re building, the other players know they can rely on you to advance the scene. If a player is stuck or the scene is stagnating, being able to push things ahead makes everyone look good. If I’m onstage with someone who I know can take an offer and move forward with it, then they will make my offer look good. I like that. True, making me look good is hard, but it’s do-able.
Being positive is a little more complicated. To start, being positive means ideas result in positive consequences. Player A hands Player B a sheet of paper. Negative: “Oh, you got an F on your paper!” Positive: “Wow! Is this a picture of the cottage you built?” Now, being negative isn’t automatically a bad thing but if you are positive then everyone onstage will subtly feel more comfortable and instead of having to address negative consequences, there is space to build character, environment, or, more generally, a scene in a more relaxed setting. If someone hands you an idea and it frequently turns into a disastrophe, this is not conducive to good scene-building. First of all, you’ll have a hard time setting up because being negative off the top results in Instant Trouble (which can be painful or at least less interesting). Secondly, you’ll have trouble resolving a scene if problem follows problem. You do need to be negative for things like conflict or friction, but you cannot be consistently negative and expect much to come from a scene.
Making Others Look Good helps keep your mind on the group activity that is improv. It’s not just you up there with a supporting cast. Always keep an eye out to help a fellow player. Making them look good makes the scene work well and then you look good by association. And if everyone onstage is Making Others Look Good, then everyone will end up doing some killer improv.
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The Big Picture — August 22, 2005 @ 2:24 pm
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By gilbonzo, November 22, 2005 @ 12:21 pm
Sweet! Spam comments!
By b.j.swank, November 22, 2005 @ 12:54 pm
Actually, trackback spam… I’m thinking of disabling the whole trackback thing. Anyhow, I deleted the spam.