Teatro Triste del Clown

Originally published at Improvland

I recently received the following e-mail from Dan Kois, of Loose Screws in Honolulu:

OK, this one time, I was in a scene with someone, and they were trying to get me to guess “Nancy Kerrigan.” Well, they did a bunch of things like pretend to ice skate, and then did some double axes, and then pretended (”mimed”) whacking me on the knee with a pipe. But I still couldn’t figure it out. I guessed “Michael Weiss,” a famous figure skater from Fairfax, VA, where I went to grad school. Anyways, after the show, they told me it was Nancy Kerrigan, and I said, “Oh, you should have said, ‘Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!’” Because remember that she hosted Saturday Night Live once like maybe four years ago or maybe a little more, maybe 6 years ago. Whenever the last Winter Olympics was. Anyways, my question is, Weren’t those guys dicks for not thinking of that?

I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked this exact same question.

The Nancy Kerrigan scenario is one of the major reasons that I advocate scripting out your scenes before hand.

First of all, let me say that it is ludicrous for any of you in Hawaii to do a scene about Nancy Kerrigan at all. You have no frozen lakes, thus no ice skating. If you don’t have ice skating on your island, nobody in your audience is going to have the slightest idea who Nancy Kerrigan is, except for some wise-guy tourist on vacation.

No wonder you needed the SNL clue to guess who she was. So, yeah, they were pretty much dicks to keep the one piece of information that might make a Hawaiian recognize the name Nancy Kerrigan from you. On the other hand, maybe they thought that clue was too easy, sort of like yelling “Look! It’s a blonde woman wearing a cone bra and she’s like a virgin,” as a clue for Madonna.

Many improvisors have an open hostility to SNL because they do comedy so much better than we do. Remember Doug and Wendy Whiner? Wow, they were a hoot. They have been able to simulate improv at SNL by refusing to write decent endings to their scenes. Since the scenes end clumsily, the audience thinks “nobody good could have written this stuff,” and assume it is improvised.

In the scripted improv style, your Nancy Kerrigan scenario would not have arisen (arose? eros?) because that is not the suggestion in the script. The suggestion in the script is “Desmond Tutu,” which is funny because he is a Catholic religious figure with the name of a ballet skirt for a last name. This gives one male member of the group a chance to play a ballerina, which is really, really funny.

Occasionally, we have opted to actually improvise a guessing game. To this end, we have installed a intercom system in the deli we are currently performing in so that the person we wend out of the room can hear the suggestion. The crowd is always so stunned when the person guesses the answer correctly after one single, very obscure clue.

Good luck with your future improv endeavors in Hawaii, Dan, and watch out for lava!

If you have a question about improv, please send it to Joey Michaels and he will answer it correctly.