The Comedy Is In The Struggle, Not The News

Last week I used the phrase “The comedy is in the struggle, not the news” when referring to an exercise to help inject a little pathos into scenes. I want to dig into that a bit more today. Moments of struggle on stage are compelling. And yet there’s a real tendency among improvisers to steer away from them, to solve the problem, defuse the tension, or move the scene along the moment things get hard. If you’ll indulge me, I want to make the case for the opposite instinct: struggle is something you say yes to, not despite the discomfort it creates, but because of it.

The character’s struggle

Moments of struggle on stage are really compelling to me. There’s a tendency for improvisers to steer away from these moments rather than latch onto them, and I think that’s backwards. The struggle is something you want to say yes to, not least because it gives characters so much more depth.

Any inner conflict a character has, as opposed to interpersonal conflict, is well worth exploiting. I think it’s possibly because we latch onto other humans who have similar struggles to us. Anything that is struggle or frustration is genuinely interesting to watch on stage, and you can return to it again and again in the same scene without wearing it out.

One great way of doing this is to find a simple, overcomeable (is that a word? Let’s say it is) obstacle that your character just can’t seem to get past. The key thing here is to be prepared to lose. There is no point having an obstacle in your way and then overcoming it immediately. I think that robs the moment of all the potential it could have had.

My friend Jorin Garguilo makes a related point about not over-engineering the obstacle in the first place: “build a door, walk through it, and play, don’t spend ages figuring out how to make the door.” That’s the discipline here. Find the obstacle, don’t architect it, and don’t rush past it once it’s in front of you.

The improviser’s struggle

There’s another struggle worth noting on stage, and that’s the struggle of the improviser. We see this a lot in short form. In short form improv, you’re often given obstacles you have to overcome, like starting the next sentence with the next letter of the alphabet, or a game like Party Quirks, where a guesser is robbed of so much of the information they’d normally rely on. Those struggles are built into the format on purpose.

In long form, we have the option of discovering these weird improviser struggles in the moment instead. And this is where the unique joy of improv really shows itself, because we’re watching both the process and the product at once. A weird improviser struggle might be someone just trying not to laugh. It might be a performer given a word that they don’t know the meaning of (either in context or at all) and the audience can jusy tell they’re struggling with it. I could watch that struggle for hours.

You’ve got to be prepared to lose in those situations too. Maybe your character just doesn’t know what the word means. Maybe they use it out of context. Maybe you, as an improviser, are struggling so hard not to laugh that you’ve got tears in your eyes and you just keep struggling. The audience will really enjoy that too. It’s a genuinely human moment.

I wrote a while back about this exact thing happening through corpsing / breaking. Because an audience is watching process and product at the same time, an actor’s real, unstifled laughter tends to read as infectious and human rather than as a mistake breaking the illusion.

I’m not saying we should go engineering these struggles for ourselves in long form. In short form we do that to a degree on purpose, with something like the alphabet game or Party Quirks. But that same kind of moment turns up on its own in long form scenes too, so we shouldn’t be afraid of it when it does happen. It’s not a problem to solve. It’s a wonderfully human part of the show.

The Robin Hood International Improv Festival is just four weeks away - not that I’m panicking that I have a lot of things to still do or anything. Noooo. Festival passes are selling faster this year than ever before (only a handful “all shows” passes are left). All the details are here. I’ll be performing with Katy Schutte and Sam Marshall during the festival in Brand New Musical - a Sondheim-inspired improvised musical. It’s on the Friday of the festival at 6pm.

I mentioned a while back that I’m not going to be traveling as much come January as I’m going to be an election candidate. I’m running to be a councillor for my area on the new Greater Nottingham Council in May. From January a large chunk of my time will be tied up with that. As ever, I’ve filled my diary well for the next few months, but I have a slice of time in mid-November that I’ve love to give over to some teaching (especially outside of Nottingham). If that happens to line up with a time you might be interested in a workshop, do get in contact!

Have a great week!

Lloydie