Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation by Charna Halpern, Del Close, Kim Johnson Page A

the next idea.
    Suppose two actors are on stage, and one of them must choose whether to stay with his wife and children, or run off to a silver mine in South America. An inexperienced improviser might make the mistake of agonizing over the decision for several minutes, weighing the pros and cons. Boring! He might even choose to stay with his family. This is a more noble decision, but he's just chosen the routine, rather than the disruption, and we're left with no action. He's also wasted the audience's time wallowing in his angst. Chekov or Ibsen could probably script an interesting version of this scenario, but in improv, the active choice is the only one to take.
    Given the choice, any experienced improviser must immediately leave his wife and family, and run off to South America. If it's only a thirty-second scene, so be it — this allows us more time for their follow-up scene, which will obviously begin deep in the South American silver mine. See how much further the active choice leads?
    Scenes are much more interesting when the idea is seen, rather than talked about.
    Active choices forward the scene.
    Passive choices keep it stagnant.
    There's really no choice, is there?
    LISTENING FOR THE GAME
    Careful players will note that the structure of any good scene is usually a game, one that is discovered in the first three lines of dialog.
    A game doesn't have to be as specific and organized as some of the improv exercises explained throughout this book. Games are found within scenes. One example is one-upman- ship, where each player tries topping the other with every sentence (and of course, the opposite — continuing to lower one's own status — is equally valid). There are countless other games that develop within scenes that have nothing to do with status. Players may find themselves saying the exact opposite of what they are thinking during the course of a scene; in another
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scene, the actors find an excuse to touch each other every time they speak (this is also a good exercise to teach physicality).
    Howard recalls one ImprovOlympic performance attended by executives of Budweiser, who were there to decide whether they wanted to sponsor that year's playoffs. When the "Baron's Barracudas" team took the stage, sure enough, the suggestion for the improv was "beer." However, the players instantly discovered an outrageously successful game: they began mentioning different brand names of beer, all in a favorable context. At the conclusion of the scene, they burst into a room, saying it was filled with "the finest beers in the world." They rattled off the names of dozens of beers — none of them Budweiser — and the response grew with each successive beer. By the end of the scene, the executives were on the floor laughing, and the name "Budweiser" had never been spoken. Thus, the players discovered the "Ignore Budweiser" game, which proved to be the most successful possible choice.
    To discover the potential games in each scene, players must pay close attention from the start. They must be especially careful to notice their own lines, since players often aren't aware of the games they are setting up themselves. There is a part of the human brain that is very skilled at improvisation, and it is usually setting up a player's scenes for him (however subconsciously). So, he has to be careful not to get in the way of his own ideas!
    When an actor pays the same attention to his own lines as he pays to clues in a murder mystery, he sees his scenes instantly. Unfortunately, players often let their egos get in the way. They think they have a funny idea, and that is what the scene must be about. While they plan what they think should be happening, they are ignoring what actually is happening.
    Some improvisers are so busy searching for the scene, they don't notice it pass them by. However, if they force their egos out of the way and trust the choice made by the group, they'll all discover their scene together. They need to