One piece of advice I’ve heard multiple times is that a strong Harold is about the scene work, and players don’t have to worry as much about tying ideas back to the opening. Bill broke down the Harold in such a way that added some more clarity. Namely, the first beat scenes do not need to find or tie back to a larger theme, but the players can declare a theme later in the show by looking back at everything that has already happened. I’d like to call this a free range Harold.
YUMMY YUMMY YES
As usual, Bill Arnett is the smartest man in the room.
You wouldn’t expect a class to just “get” a short form game without explaining the rules, just as you wouldn’t expect someone starting UCB to “get” game without having it broken down. That doesn’t mean some people won’t get it right from the start—whoop dee doo, they’re your Level 1 class star. Big deal. But there’s plenty of people who just need the steps explained and suddenly they’re killing it. On the flip side, they might never get those steps explained and, despite what you can see is a sincere engagement with the process, they can’t seem to do a good scene at a basic level. In my experience in the English and improv classroom, this is almost always due to the teacher not breaking down the process into manageable steps, or, if the process was adequately broken down, the student is trying to “skip steps” and get to the result faster because he thinks that having to work through the steps makes him “dumber” or “less funny,” respectively.
Hoo boy. A big fat yes to this post.
Technical skill isn’t your problem. The fact that you could be better at finding game or connecting 1A to 2A in your Harold isn’t why you feel like you bombed. The reason that you feel like you bombed is you. It’s you and your desire to lose. It’s you setting yourself up for failure. It’s your desire to prove the world right – that you suck and should probably just quit improv anyway and go back to sitting at home watching Bob’s Burgers reruns.
With every practice and every show, you’re working on your technical skill. You are constantly improving. You can’t avoid getting better.
Being good at improv means knowing how to manage doubt and anxiety. They never totally go away but they can be handled.
Will Hines answers some reader mail on how to feel “right” before performing.
An effective warmup ultimately comes down to whether people engage those warmups with commitment. Often the reason players aren’t ready to go after a warmup isn’t necessarily because the warmup sucked, but people’s commitment to the warmup sucked, or their commitment in general sucks. That’s not necessarily going to change if you do a better warmup. Often, the warmup doesn’t need to get better. The attitude and approach needs to get better.
For me, it’s playing a crazy warmup that gets me warm for a show – something fun, something fast, something that’s easy to generate energy. I’m Coming Over For Pancakes, Vroom/Click/Clap, Rotating Pattern Game with four or more patterns are all great. Running half-assed intentionally bad scenes makes me to do bad scenes in shows.
