Austin Improv

kaci_beeler wrote:

York99 wrote:

kaci_beeler wrote:I keep thinking about Matt Besser almost purposely refusing to talk about improv when he came to town to do his "one-man show", which was kind of like an extended stand-up routine.

In the question and answer period Dave Buckman asked, "When is there going to be a UCB Austin?"
and Matt answers, "uh....This place right here is pretty cool that you guys have got!"
We were at the Alamo Drafthouse by Lakeline Mall.
I wanted to say, "This place is a fucking movie theater, jackass!"

And since then I harbor a sort of resentment for the guy.

I don't get it. You're mad because he didn't know what kind of venue he was playing? Or because he was dismissive with Dave?

Yeah right he didn't know where he was playing. There's a sign out front with movie titles, movie posters along the walls, there's no way when he was booking the gig that he didn't know that.
He was being dismissive of Dave with a silly little compliment which to me was an insult. If you're going to perform in a city, why don't you learn a little something about it? Plus, he sent messages to improv and sketch troupes' myspaces asking them to come to the show. He knew. He just didn't want to talk about it.

I wasn't challenging you. I was trying to clarify.

I wasn't there so I don't know, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he thought it was a friendly way to say that there was no plan for a UCB in Austin. Maybe he's just not good at Q&A. Maybe he's a bit awkward (an improviser? awkward?). Maybe he'd been touring endlessly and was beaten down by the rigors of the road and having to answer the same or similar questions in city after city after city. Maybe he's just a dick.

York99 wrote:Maybe he's just a dick.

From what I've heard from people I know who knew him before UCB was famous, I'd say this statement is highly in play.

Edited to also add that I liked the UCB show on TV but have never seen them play live. I did however hear an interview with Besser on The Sound of Young America where he was pretty dismissive of Chicago other than as a place where you get some training before you go do your real work of becoming an instrument in the entertainment industry in LA or NY. Which is fine, but it was expressed in such a snide, superior, icky way that I'm feeling Kaci on this one.

He seems to be in it more for fame and money than love of craft or encouraging new talent. I don't know if that makes him a dick, but it is a departure from what the Austin improvisers are about. His namby-pamby answer about a prospective UCB Austin was probably coming from the fact that we're not turning out pilots and viral videos like mad and getting the attention of industry types--which is probably why he claims to deify sketch. Why invest in us? Also, sketch is the easier entry into the fame and the $.

That said, most UCB-ers I know call him a dick, or worse. So yeah. Definitely in play.

Hopefully he won't be googling himself any time soon.

Only dicks google themselves, so if he does, we're right and all is well.

Now, to play devil's advocate here, who cares if Austin has a UCB? We've got a ColdTowne, a Hideout, an Alamo Drafthouse, blah blah blah. So could be what Besser was saying, "What do you need me for?" And it just read awkwardly. Or he didn't want to say, this market is to small for us and came up with a sly way to avoid saying that

I just want to add, you really really really should go read all those interviews over on that site Roy posted. Some amazing stuff, and some nice history as well. And chances are, you're going to read something over there from somebody way better than you that directly challenges your attitudes about improv. Also lots of stuff to back up what you think. It's awesome. I've read the Ian Roberts, David Razowsky, and Gary Austin interviews so far. Can't wait to work through the rest of them.

Roy Janik wrote:

York99 wrote:That link is weird. It goes to part 3 of an interview, has no home page and only links to a couple of the intervies (not even the Besser one). Am I doing something wrong here or what?

No, the website is terribly laid out and way hard to navigate. He's working on it, supposedly.

It's a blog, not a website. The column on the right lists only the most recent posts, i.e., interviews, so that if you click on the last one you'll get an older list in the righthand side.

He could VERY EASILY insert an Archive link, though.

Also, blogger now lets you tag entries, so he could stick the interviewees name on as a tag, and if you wanted to look for Craig Cackowski you could get all three parts of the interview as links. I know he's using blogger since he has the exact same template as my blog.

Now that nobody's reading this thread anymore, I will make some belated and ignorant points:

My goal is not for the scene to be as funny as possible. It's for the scene to be as good as possible. Two different things, unless you've decided that the only gauge of a good improv scene is how many laughs you get, which obviously is a completely legitimate approach.

I think there's a difference between a challenge and a mistake, but I'm limiting myself if I think I always know which is which. I don't.

It is one of the great ironies to me that this community of people, all of whom are clearly using their right brains like crazy onstage, retreat entirely into the left brain when talking about it. I think most of the points raised about improv vs. sketch and live vs. taped are accurate but incomplete.

For me, improv is an expression of what's going on right at that moment in that room, period. The more you restrict it by rules or preconceptions or rigorous format or assumptions, the less expressive it is of that moment. (Edit: What I mean to say is that it requires more skill to express that moment within those restrictions. Which is art, basically.) Rules and formats make for "better" -- that is, funnier, more entertaining, more professional -- shows, so they're a good thing. But if I just wanted to get laughs as efficiently as possible I'd write sketch, polish it like crazy, and not bother with improv.

Finally, I will cut anyone in a touring performance group endless amounts of slack for not knowing where they are, let alone knowing anything about it. Beeler, let's wait until you've come off a two-week tour with the Cupholders and see if you're still as irritated by Besser.

ratliff wrote:But if I just wanted to get laughs as efficiently as possible I'd write sketch, polish it like crazy, and not bother with improv.

I'm sure you know this, but polishing doesn't always equal laughs either. It is very possible to over-polish a sketch. It seems stilted and is usually not funny when that happens. I like it when it's rehearsed just enough to where you know your lines and blocking but it's still fresh enough to the performer to where the joy of performing it comes through on stage. Then again, I've only been in a handful of sketches. Maybe there are better ways of polishing a sketch and keeping it fresh enough so that it's not just a dude and a pinata reading lines.

</thread_jack>

For my last minute entry into this. My "favorite" memory of Besser is when he was shouting "Death to shortform, shortform is the devil." during a panel discussion that he was not on. This was during the first Del Close Marathon.

Allow that to confirm his dickness.

vine311 wrote:I'm sure you know this, but polishing doesn't always equal laughs either. It is very possible to over-polish a sketch. </thread_jack>

Of course. What I really meant but did not say is that if my sole goal was to make people laugh, I'd figure out a way to mount a continually running sketch show and write new stuff every week while tweaking the old stuff, based on audience reaction. So please substitute "tweak" for "polish."

Mo Daviau wrote:He seems to be in it more for fame and money than love of craft or encouraging new talent.

I used to do tech for one of his one man shows and would hang out with him briefly before shows. We weren't buddy buddy at all or anything, but still we talked. Sure, he's brash and direct and that can come off like being an asshole, but then again, I feel the same way about a lot of people like that.

I'm not saying he's not a dick. Maybe so. I used to live with a stand-up in Los Angeles. I would go to his shows and open mics and hang out with other stand ups. Their collective attitude was similar. They came off as tremendous dicks at first. But to get to know them, they were just direct. It often takes that kind of person to make comedy. Often, not always. They make a living on attacking the establishment, etc. It only stands to reason that this trait might carry over to their lives outside of the routine.

Plus, if you judge a performer by how s/he is offstage, then you will find that you won't be able to watch a whole lot of entertainment, or listen, or read, etc.

ratliff wrote: It is one of the great ironies to me that this community of people, all of whom are clearly using their right brains like crazy onstage, retreat entirely into the left brain when talking about it.

I'm not sure whence your feeling of irony. You're right that I think any improviser worth his or her salt is going to play from an open, spontaneous, "right-brained" place onstage. But I don't know what is served by talking about it in that way. It gets all wispy and platitudinous if you talk about art from that same place, IMO anyway. "You're in your head." "Group mind is important." Those kinds of statements don't mean squat to me as points of discussion because either you're feeling it or you're not. The analytical stuff I find more helpful--after enough time being right-brained onstage, you start to wonder why certain things worked great and others didn't. Yes part of why certain things work out is maybe you were more in touch with your spontaneous side, but I don't think that's always the case. I think there are times when you're working from someplace deep from the Jungian whatnot but your scene partner wrongfoots you or makes a lame gag and the scene goes down in flames anyhow. And besides, saying get more in touch with your Jungian whosits isn't very helpful--I don't know what it feels like to be in your skin. But I can talk about external, analyzable, discreet bits of technique that if you internalize hard enough, I suspect will make your right brained experience more predictable.

Or let's put it another way. I'm all for the mystical aspects of improv. Personally I think there's something spiritual, religious almost, about doing it well. But I think you can get your mystical group mind rocks off by taking mushrooms in a field with some friends. That's great, but I don't want to pay to watch it. So I find these discusssions constructive about what are the analyzable parts of improv that make us want to watch that but that doesn't make a group of 'shroom addled heads seem audience worthy. And then when I go back to the well and am not thinking about it, I've already extended my interior range. I don't know if other people feel that way, but that's how I work.

ratliff wrote:For me, improv is an expression of what's going on right at that moment in that room, period. The more you restrict it by rules or preconceptions or rigorous format or assumptions, the less expressive it is of that moment.

You should go read that Dave Pasquesi interview. I've looked at part of it, and I think you guys would see eye to eye on a lot of this stuff. For me, form is there both as a structure for the audeince to hold on to, and as liberating barrier. If it's all up to you, that can be daunting, but if you think of it as you playing the game, the rules of the game give you permission to go outside of yourself. I love playing non-linear, flowy shows, but for me at least it's always like catching lightening in a jar. Feels great when it comes off, but when it doesn't work, everybody gets burned, especially the audience. If I wanted to have a higher success rate with that kind of show, I'd want to work at it and find structural, formal ways to make those things get better. I know Erika has described doing Harolds as the equivalent of ab crunches for theme-driven shows. So I'd probably be all over that if I wanted to do more of those kinds of shows.

One of my favorite painters is Philip Guston and he had this quote that he either came up with or at least really loved from another source, which was "Form leads to doubt, doubt leads to form." I really love that quote and is how I feel a lot of the time. These analytical, "left-brained", observations, at least on my part, are in essence the visible rhetorical remnants of the kinds of oscillations between doubt and certainty that take place internally where the real work transpires.

Very well said. (I'm responding to but not quoting Shannon.) I fully understand that the technical aspects lend themselves more to analysis than the intuitive parts. But if you spend all your time working on the parts you can analyze, I think they eventually take on greater importance. If after every show, we discuss the analyzable elements and never spend any time on the intuitive elements, which aspect do you think is going to get nurtured and developed?

The fact is that there are plenty of practices and exercises that develop intuitive awareness, should anyone want to practice them. I understand and empathize with the rational arguments against New Age woo-woo, but in my case I have to admit that such resistance is also fear of anything I can't understand or control. (Also, and maybe even more crippling, fear of seeming foolish.) Much easier to debate acceptable violations of the Rule of Threes.

My point is that if you decide not to devote the same energy and attention to your unconscious and subconscious as you do your conscious mind, you are in effect deciding to ignore -- in fact, to block -- certain resources. Clearly, it's possible to create stellar, hilarious, emotionally rich improv using this approach. It's just a matter of personal priorities.

Carl Jung wrote:Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

My model of improv right now is this: I want to rigorously develop certain practices and skills, including the technical mastery we're discussing ... but they're not the point. The point is to express the moment as fully as possible, and without the technical skills I can't do that. The shroomers getting enlightened in the cow pasture are experiencing the moment as fully as possible but they're not expressing it as fully as possible. It's not that one is more valuable than the other, it's that making art is a commitment to expression as well as experience.

Put another way, I want to develop my awareness and skills to the point that I can respond appropriately to any situation without thinking about it. Of the disciplines I'm familiar with, this definition would also apply to yoga, Buddhist practice, music, and writing, and I strongly suspect it's true of the visual arts, athletics, and warfare.