What makes games funny?

[Milquetoast]

Today I'm thinking about games and heightening, and what makes them so funny. This won't be anything new to many of you, but here are the parts I've got:

1) Create an exaggeration of a human trait that we can all relate to. It may be that it's the trait itself, or the fact that the character just KEEPS DOING IT. After all, how we do one thing is how we do everything.

2) The audience plays along and gets to use their 'lizard brain' parts to recognize the pattern along with the performers.

I'm not especially concerned with figuring it all out, but I do want to hear what other improvisers think!

So what do you think?

[Wesley]

I think a lot of what makes games funny for me is figuring out what the game truly is and playing it--because it often isn't what it seems to be on the surface.

A lot of times people substitute shallow gags, over-exaggerated characters, unnecessarily heady plot, and other tricks and gimmicks for real, exciting game playing. It gets some laughs, and it works on the surface, but once you've seen it once, you've seen it 1000 times and there's no joy in it.

Personally, I think there are two ways to play games: gamey or transformative.

The first is easy. You go over-the-top wacky happy in Emotion Party; you drop a one-word curse in alphabet game; you play the emotionally crippled-war vet with crazy person tics or the overly-effeminent gay man who uses non-stop double entendres in Good, Bad, Worse advise, etc.

The second is different and much harder. You play games so well that people forget you are even playing a game and it is only after it is over and they remember that they fully appreciate it. Instead of just being wildly happy in general, you find a specific and different reason to be happy with each person and thing in Emotion Party; instead of using quick one-liners in the Alphabet Game, you set your partner up for success and do a scene so compelling people don't remember or care what letter comes next; you play a regular joe with subtle but scarily believable perversions of reality that people in the audience lean over to their partners and say "Damn, I know that guy! I work with that guy! I hate that guy!" in Good, Bad, Worse Advice.

That's the hardest part, really, make everything believable. Over the top and characture has a place, but it is the slightly odd, the crazy-but-believable, the "there but for the grace of God go I's" that I find people really relate to and remember. Anyone can do a silly walk and funny voice, but it is hard to recreate the twisted version of reality.

Oh, and whatever you do, commit to it wholly.

[kbadr]

I assume you're talking about "the game of the scene", rather than "shortform improv games."

Part of the joy, for me, in seeing a game happen in a scene is that it's an insanely playful, accepting thing for the players to do. One player does something weird or quirky (or something else to establish the game), and then the other player both accepts it, and does something to indicate that yes, they understand that this can be a game. The first player in turn sees the acceptance and heightens the game.

When done well, it's all very subtle and insanely satisfying to watch. You're seeing the players really paying attention to each other.

[Milquetoast]

oops! I should clarify, I was talking about games inside of scenes and long form, since that is where I am spending the most time practicing and watching. But, that said, this is really interesting, so anyone with thoughts about short form games, please continue to chime in!

[kbadr]

Shortform games can act as a set of restrictions to bring out good scenework, or they can be the focus of the scene. If the players are playing the game really hard, rather than making the scenework really compelling (which is always the goal in my mind), it's super important to have the use of the game get heightened, or everything sort of feels flat.

For example, if you are playing blind line, you use the lines more and more as the scene progresses.

I have more I can say about this, but I should actually get some work done.

Heighten, heighten, heighten!

[York99]

UCB has made the game the most important thing in their approach. When Chris and I were taking an intensive with them last year, we spent a lot of time on character work. I got annoyed because I wanted to work on game and not characters. It gradually dawned on me that the game derives primarily from your character work.

HOW you do what you do and say what you say is more important than WHAT you do or say (Annoyance Theatre also). A great tidbit I got was "find your character's adverb." If s/he does something aggressively, s/he does everything aggressively. A game will often come from the interaction of two or more characters with clearly defined adverbs.

This is just a jumping off point.

[Wesley]

I'm with Kareem.

My personal feelings are that I'm not one for "wack" in most cases. Generally speaking, the wackier the thing is, the more I tune out. I think a lot of improvisers use "big" and "over-the-top" heightening to cover fear and it makes things too wacky for my tastes. You get laughs when you hand the surgeon a dagger, then an axe, then a chainsaw, but I think there are more clever games of incompetence to be played.

For me, I think the best games are subtle and often go unnoticed. You know something added satisfaction to the scene, but you don't really catch what it was (especially if not trained in improv techniques).

I think a lot of the Frank Mills when I think about in-scene game playing. They can 'yes, and' the hell out of each other without breaking the reality of the world or making any of it unbelievable. I remember one time they were a group of high school aged travellers and a chaperone in Europe, I think, and somehow they got on the topic of making a snuff film. They ran with it, upping the stakes and agreeing to ever-growing insanity, while maintaining everything they'd developed about their characters. I couldn't stop laughing and the reason was that it was played so straight that I could actually see the conversation happening to someone.

I think what makes an in-scene game fascinating to me is that it heightens the reality without breaking it. That I see the game being played, but I also think "Yes! That is exactly how that character would have reacted to that statement!" Not "Well, I guess a bear could have jumped out of his pants and eaten the homophobic midget?"

[ChrisTrew.Com]

Also, I think one of the most important parts of game-play is knowing when to stop playing the game and start figuring out the next one.

[Lants]

Frimprov

[Spaztique]

To me, it's mainly going from subtle to blatant that makes a game funny. By blatant, I don't really mean over-the-top wacky, but far from the initially normal scene.

A good example of what I mean by going from subtle to blatant comes from Parallelogramophonograph's amusement park show, where Kareem played a creepy dude and Val played "Busy Bear", and it starts out normal enough where Kareem's character tries befriending Busy Bear, and things get a little unreal around the point where Val takes her costume's head off and Kareem's character starts screaming at the top of his lungs in horror, and then things enter the world of surreal when Roy comes in on ukulele and starts singing to Kareem to get out of the carnival and that he's surrounded by snipers, just before he runs off into a minefield.

Another good example would also be Parallelogramophonograph's June 22 show. Every scene starts out extremely normal, and quickly devolves out of realism, and the plot as a whole did the same.

For further examples, there's a few ways I've seen this done...

1. Simply heightening from a straight, realistic scene into an absurd one.
2. Repeating the same line with bigger stakes.
3. Reverse heightening. Lowering the stakes until something big becomes trivial.

Option #1 example:
To cite the best examples, one of the best heightening scenes I've ever done involved two guys at a class reunion, and it starts out with just a former bully and a former geek meeting after the years, and at first, the bully is portrayed as simply incompetent (getting divorced, fired, etc), but near the end of the scene, he reveals he's dealt drugs to little kids and killed people (the button for the scene was "I have warrants!").

Another great example was during a game of Good, Bad, Worst Advice, when Zach played bad advice for gardening, and as the game progressed, it was slowly revealed he was a pot farmer (at first, he said he grew stuff in his apartment, which was only a little peculiar, but then as time went on, around the time somebody mentioned mentioned planting bluegrass, he was in full stoner mode).

Option #2 example:
Another example of another way of going from subtle to blatant was from my level 1 class, in which I played a suicide hotline operator, and a stoner was trying to exploit me since I did anything for depressed people ("Say, man, can you/do you ________" "Yeah, but only for depressed people. Are you depressed?" "Yeah." "Here you go."). It started off with me giving him money, but then it got to the point where I was going to give him my car, and then my job. The same went towards my responses to the suicidal callers, ("Thanks for calling the suicide hotline. What's your problem?", and then, "Welcome to the suicide hotline. May I take your order?", and then, "This is the suicide hotline. What are you wearing?", and finally, after giving the junky a wig and a dress after inviting a suicidal caller to a party, "This is the suicide hotline. I got a transvestite in here with me.")

Option #3 example:
Look Cookie did a show where a bunch of gangsters are standing around in a crackhouse, talking about how badass they are, but as time goes on, it's revealed they're very upper class, talking about driving yachts, wearing cardigans, living in penthouses, and one other gangster calls about attacking with grenades but needing to get back to his baccarat table.

Another example would be for a scene I think happened during the Tuesday night jam where I played in a civil war reenactment, filled with cannons and muskets and stuff, but as time went on, the quality of the reenactment got worse and worse, in which the cannons were made of cardboard, the muskets were really sticks, and the character's mom was watching them in their backyard.

But that's just me. I'm big into absurdity. Still, it's possible to work these techniques into realistic scenes.

[Jastroch]

It's important to note that a "game," a pattern that repeats through a scene, can exist on many levels. Yes, handing a surgeon a dagger, then a chainsaw, then an atom bomb is a game. But it's not a very interesting game.

The more interesting, dynamic and far more hilarious games we play are psychological in nature--the games that are played out through characters and relationships.

The book "Games People Play" was an extremely popular and ground breaking work of (pop?)psychology that came out in the mid 60s, right around the time that Del Close began working with the Committee. My time line may be off a bit, but it was defenetly an influence on his work, as referenced in Truth in Comedy. The study of transactional analysis is great supplemental improv reading and has, I think, punched up my understanding of character, relationship and games as they relate to comedy.

In a nutshell, you can boil down people's interactions with each other down to these games. The context of these psychological games and change, so as long as you're remaining true to the character and relationship.

Comedy, in my opinion, is all about patterns and connections--making them, breaking them, or carrying them out in some unexpected way. Every comedy scene has a game. It may be subtle. You may not be exploiting or playing it all the time, but every* time there's a laugh, it's because you've gone back to the game (as defined as a pattern) in some fashion.

* Yes, I know to avoid superlatives. But based on my limited understanding of the human brain, I believe this to be true.

[kbadr]

Reading and thinking about this thread while a Monty Python sketch played on my iPod made me realize how many classic Python sketches were all about bat-shit crazy games.

[York99]

Also, I think one of the most important parts of game-play is knowing when to stop playing the game and start figuring out the next one.

On this note: also just when to back off of the game temporarily and when to hit the same game again.

Coming back to a game that was started at the beginning often results in an edit line.

[beardedlamb]

in some modes completing the game could mean it's time to return to working on your story. if you're doing narratively focused stuff, you want to balance your gags, your game play, and your story progress to keep the audience engaged over long periods of time. none of these are the most important, but switching your focus as a group and pounding them home can be very effective.

[DollarBill]

Lately I'm just realizing that "playing the game" is just heightening within the scene (like when bugs bunny and elmer fudd pull bigger and bigger guns). So listening is key. But I would also warn that playing a game is not necessarily the first thing you should be trying to accomplish. It's also one of those things you get good at through experience. So I'd say work on your scene work, have fun, listen and heighten, and you'll find yourself playing great games.