Hustle→

I believe you need hard work to find success and talent just makes the work easier. Success eventually knocks at everyone’s door. But you need the talent to be let in when it comes knocking and you need the work to develop that talent. Additionally, you need the work to keep putting yourself out there and present yourself for when success comes sniffing around. Plus you need to work to maintain and build on that success.

Everything Matters→

All of this is great but especially…

  1. Notice something in the present.
  2. Ascribe meaning to it.
  3. Heighten it.

Don’t worry about finding something important. Don’t worry about finding a game. Just be present and notice.

He’s referring to the scene in series 4, episode 5 in which, on a stag weekend on a canal boat, Jez accidentally kills the dog of a woman, Aurora, he’s trying to seduce. After several misadventures, the two men burn the dead dog, but later with the cooked canine in a plastic bag, Jez finds himself on Aurora’s boat. She asks him what’s in the bag and he replies turkey. To prove it, he starts eating a scorched dog’s leg.

“Exactly,” says Webb. “Always entirely logical. If they started with ‘Let’s have an episode where Jeremy eats a dead dog’ that would be ridiculous. The Fonz has jumped the shark. But every little step is driven by their characters and is perfectly logical. And that’s how you get there.”
Robert Webb of Peep Show fame talking about finding the logic in crazytown.

Seems obvious but I know I’ve blown this before. Good reminder on when to edit.

Learning to Trust→

I know this is gonna sound crazy, but I’m asking you to like–no, love the people who you’re doing improv with. What happens to them, especially on stage, should be more important to you than what happens to you. You are a tough, smart, grown-up person who has seen a lot of tough situations. You can take care of yourself if it comes down to it. Your Improv Friends? Give them everything they need! Be their sugar daddies and tell them how they’re never gonna have to scratch and struggle for anything while you’re around. And you know what? They’re gonna love you back for that. They’re gonna trust you and try to give just as much back. If they don’t then you’ll survive, but if they do you both will thrive.

Players and coaches fixate on inspiration and idea generation. The openings job is not to generate ideas; that is the players job. But players feel that if the opening doesn’t silver platter them with an idea then it was broken. Sorry players, a “poor” opening means you’ll have to lift a finger. The openings job is to be the best monologue, scene paint, organic mirror dance or source scene it can be. Coach them and play them to be solid on their own merits. Don’t burden them with some external, heavy and intangible goal as inspiring people to create art. When you do, you will find that they do inspire.
Bill Arnett talking organic openings and being inspired over at Reddit.

T.J. Jagodowski on Realistic Improv

[..]The show itself, it’s an exercise in seeing what happens when you really only go from moment to moment to moment with no plans, no bits, and really just behave this way. [..] Like an actual human being, which is like the easiest way to get a show to a sustainable way, like put real people in it. Real people tend to live for a while, you know what I mean? They do things that they live by, and make choices that their accountable for, and that kind of stuff and so, if it was just going to be us and the show would be about an hour then, let’s make these people as actual as we can, and they’ll do things that people actually would do. Because no-one’s coming, we’re not getting edited, so we gotta live in these people for a while. It’s going to be easier if we make them real.
T.J. Jagodowski talking about realistic improv as the goal in a TJ & Dave show. Expect more quotes on here from a really interesting ep of Improv Nerd.