Yesterday's Conservatory class began with the usual warm ups. We were missing one of our classmates, but we had a guy from another Conservatory time slot, Trevor, in our class for the day. He was a very high energy guy.
We spent our early scene work in class trying to develop characters. I took a punt on a character that I've been working on that's actually based on a friend of mine. I always feel kind of wrong when I base a comic character on somebody who's a friend. (I feel even worse when it doesn't get any laughs. That proves that I'm a selfish bastard.)
The remainder of class was different from any improv class I've ever taken. We wrote. I understand that eventually in Conservatory, the goal is to develop a sketch show inspired by improv. As part of that education, we'll eventually learn to write sketches by being introduced to the common styles of sketches and reading archived material. Basically, the stuff they teach you over the course of a year and six courses in the writing program.
Interestingly, our introduction to writing was blackouts. We didn't do blackouts until writing three. We also attempted to write our black outs in groups of three. This inevitably leads to chaos. Ideas get spit out as fast as possible, and it's damn hard to keep up or even spend a decent amount of time distilling an idea. I was tempted to just steal some of the ones that I had already written. I was even more tempted to steal some of the blackouts that Mark has written. (Hey, that's a compliment to Mark.)
Ultimately, we had four groups of three people attempting to write six blackouts each. Three of these were meant to be topical/news related and three were meant to be almost anything. Tim actively encouraged us to be bawdy, raunchy, and borderline stereotypical in our content. He later explained that blackouts are an outlet for all of the bottom of one's intelligence, smutty, going-blue tendencies that funny people are often prone to indulging. And that perfectly explains why blackouts are so difficult and so hit or miss. When we had an entire class of sharing blackouts in writing three, Joe was satisfied in our output because "we had a couple good ones and even more that stunk up the joint."
I don't think we were told about the rule of ten yesterday: out of ten ideas that you have, you're doing well if one of them hits the mark. Yesterday was no different. Some were good, more were bombs, and others were just pedestrian. Still, when you're writing these amongst friends, the terrible ones are actually as much fun as the good ones. So, we got some good laughs out of this exercise.
The end of the class we tried to develop a sketch idea using a historical time period as our reference to make a comment about current events or something that is as true today as it was yesterday. It would've been cool if we had had time to review some archival material as examples, but we didn't have time. We were split into two groups of six each for this exercise and did not have a very long to try to come up with a sketch idea. I'm curious to see if we come back to this in future classes.
Some highlights from yesterday: Kristin had multiple improv orgasms in class. One resulting from Fifty Shades of Grey and the other resulting from apple strudel. One blackout involved people on a train getting jostled into each other that culminated in all of them groping each other. There was also a shoot-out at a cupcake store. Poor Scott was inadvertently cock-punched. (Occupational hazard.) Oh, and Tim declared that I am crazy. I'm taking that as a compliment.
No comments:
Post a Comment