Your reaction is all you get. No one is more than they are right now. In trying to be so is where we fuck up. We hear a line of dialogue, we have a reaction, we ignore or try to be better than our reaction, we think, we come up with a second or third option, but now we are no longer in the moment, we aren’t focused on listening or playing our character, we are in our head. We think we can’t come up with anything when actually we have come up with too much. What we should have done was the first thing that occurred to us.
Tag: reactions
To Think or Not To Think→
Nathan [Fielder] had made a lot of pieces at This Hour Has 22 Minutes in Canada, and I think one of the things he found out, and it made such a big difference in Nathan for You, is just to really not ever force anything and not try to create a reaction. Like if a person is in a real situation, their reactions might be very small, but that’s still the real reaction of that person in that situation. As much as I like, you know,The Three Stooges or Bugs Bunny or something, it’s really funny just to see how a person actually behaves in a really awkward situation, and sometimes people being small and polite is just as funny. If it was written, a lot of times there’d be a really big reaction because you want the audience to feel something, so it’s really cool when people — especially when it’s actors and you’re banking on your actors being funny — that you just let them be natural and accept that people watching this will get that it’s a truthful reaction.
Michael Koman on letting audiences find the funny from truthful reactions – something that applies to improv as much as the written material he’s talking about. More comedy theory in a really great interview with Splitsider here.