Comedy Mistakes and Opportunities

Pan Theater Awkward Show - 2009

Repetition Repetition

There’s a cliché passed around Jazz teachers that if you make a mistake in a solo, do it again.

What could have been a plain old-fashioned gaffe becomes a repeated theme which is then picked up by the rest of the band and echoed.

By the end of the song, the mistake has become an integral catalyst to the entire piece.

I used to be petrified of committing mistakes in shows. I would berate myself viciously for forgetting names of characters or for stuttering or (in what I thought was humiliation beyond anything) falling down really spectacularly and so not on purpose on stage.

While beating myself up internally, I’d hope that the audience or the other players didn’t notice. I’d pretend nothing happened.

The audience, though, always notices when an actor slips up. The beauty of improv is that because we lack a script and blocking, there can’t ever be a true misstep. Instead, it is only a blunder when the improvisers fail to utilize it.

There was a wonderful show I saw where a janitor’s name was forgotten by one of the characters (a high-profile business type).

In the course of the Harold, every character the janitor came in contact with forgot his name and the deep pathos and bitterness of the janitor unfolded with a comical explosion at the end. Imagine if the improv team had been so mortified by the name change that they ignored it and hurried along to something else. It wouldn’t have been as organic or funny and the audience and players would’ve felt cheated.

It turns out that these so-called mistakes are fabulous shiny diamonds. Keep digging and there’s a whole diamond mine. Rather than uselessly worrying over a mistake, I excitedly anticipate the first blooper and repeat the hell out of it until the scene unfurls around it.

If you repeat the mistake with enough verve and bravery, your fellow improvisers will come along for the ride and the scenes practically play themselves.

Mistake? What mistake…