Pitch perfect Prince Charles impression

Bill Maher on why Mitt Romney’s “charitable” donations to his Mormon cult are bullshit.

Preach. It. Bill. Maher.

Letterman works the drive through window at a Taco Bell.

11/10

A lot of people have been posting Conan’s “Don’t be cynical” advice lately.

I prefer Letterman’s perspective. Lots of wisdom in this one.

Please come to this show and “like” this video via the Facebook link! I’m a whore!

heyjb:

Weekend of Regret is competing in Indie Cage Match this Sunday at 7:30pm at UCB East. Sure would be awfully swell to see you there!  

Also, my parents will be seeing my improvise for the first time ever.  

Jay Sherman and his Stomach

But it sure is noxious, you gotta give me that!”

“Say we were all trapped in this classroom, and I had to prepare dinner and all I had was the stuff in that vending machine. And then say somehow I managed to put together something resembling a meal beyond what you normally eat out of a machine. You’d be tremendously impressed. Then say I invite you over to my home for dinner. You’d probably expect a nice home-cooked meal. If I served you an arrangement of vending machine food it wouldn’t fly.”

Okay Let’s Do an Improv Post - ZZ Top’s choreography and making physical choices

When improvisers make and commit to physical choices on stage, the audience payoff is always disproportionately large. Just think about the last time anyone on your ensemble got picked up and carried around during a scene. The audience probably went nuts, even if the improv was shit. If the improv was good too, you were probably blowing the roof off the place.

You don’t need to be a brilliant mime or a natural mover on stage to add this layer to your work. It’s entirely a matter of intention. You choose to do it, and to demonstrate my point I can think of no better example than ZZ Top.

Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill have some extremely basic choreography they incorporate into their songs. It’s so simple, just a few cross-steps, pushing their guitars forward at the same time, c’mon they’re old guys at this point. Literally anyone could do it, and there’s honestly nothing that impressive about the moves in and of itself, but anyone will tell you watching Billy and Dusty click into those moves together is what makes a ZZ Top show.

Could they just stand there and play their instruments and have it be great? Sure. Can you just stand there and talk and maybe (maybe!) hold a glass in your scenes and have it still be fun? Sure, I’ve done probably 98% of my scenes like that. But the fact remains the effort/payoff ratio in those 2% of scenes where physical choices played a big role was much easier than any laugh found by being verbal and clever.

So does this mean if you’re a talky player to abandon your style and start flailing your body around in every scene? Of course not. It just means over a 25-minute set, agree with your ensemble that at least one scene will have a physical focus. Put nothing on it beyond that. On the individual level, commit to taking yourself out of your physical comfort zone at least once.

That’s all ZZ Top is doing. They’re making the choice to add this element to their show. Why an audience goes batshit for improvisers being picked up, or improvisers touching in general, is for another post, but the fact is they do.

So just do it. Have that show where you all collectively form an 8-person dragon and fly around on the stage. The edge-of’-your-seat “holy shit they’re really making this up” audience excitement physical work generates is not only available to the Fred Astaire improvisers out there. I wish I did it more, and there’s no real excuse not to.

If ZZ Top can do it, so can you.

TJ and Dave mentioned in their talk today they still rehearse. They’ve been doing their show for 10 years, sometimes 4 times each week. Remind yourself of that the next time you say your group’s “chemistry” is so good you don’t need to do the work. No improvisers have more chemistry than those two. They did the work to create it.