Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
The Radical Agreement Project (RA) has been committed to improv education since its inception during the Covid Pandemic lockdown. This commitment has primarily taken the form of online classes and workshops, offered daily over Zoom. Recently, The Radical Agreement Project has begun more in-person events in multiple cities across the United States, including Richmond, VA and Philadelphia.
RA is hardly alone among improv institutions in making the transition out of the pandemic from online improv events to in person ones. However, while in person events are going well, the organization seems to have unlocked the trick to creating great comedy scenes online through Improv. Recently the organization began working on a new short form exercise called The Slip.
The Slip is entirely different from most improv comedy scenes in that the scenes are competitive instead of what you would expect in your standard improv comedy scene, which is a lot of teamwork and support.
Here’s how it works.
Two players begin a scene off of a suggestion. The first order of business, of course, is establishing the base reality. Once that is done the players begin looking for an opportunity to make a comedic offer. If a comedic offer is made and not reacted to by the other player, then it is understood that the player who made the offer has scored one point.
This simple exercise seems to unlock the secret to great scene work, which is to pay attention to your scene partner and react to the things that they say to you. Bad improv comedy scenes often feature multiple comedic offers that go unresponded to or uninvestigated. When this happens scenes tend to descend into a type of comedy mush where jokes are told nonstop in no particular order, for no particular reason, in no particular fashion or pattern.
Although scenes like this are so common that no improviser can claim to not have been in some, they tend to leave audiences cold and uninvested in the ongoing performance. In The Slip actors are incentivized to listen sharply for comedic offers and to be sure to react to them.
It is as if the part of their brain that’s competitive stops being focused on putting the funniest ideas in the scene (which is a terrible and destructive focus when improvising) and starts being focused on making sure the other player doesn’t score on them
