I’ve been improvising for 15 years now. I love improv; the challenge of creating entertainment from nothing has always attracted me; I get a rush from working without a net like that. I’ve taken classes from a ton of different theaters: Groundlings, Second City, ImprovOlympic and more, but there are two big things I’ve learned from improvising a lot:
- Trying to save a scene by pulling off an imaginary mask and saying “I was Hitler all along” is never the laugh-getter you think it’s going to be; and
- The best way to make a scene work is to concentrate on the other person.
While both of these guidelines might apply to social media, for the sake of argument, let’s just look at #2. Social Media, like social interaction, works best when you take an active interest in the other people out there. That’s the best way to learn, grow, and as a company, find out how you can improve (a combination of learning and growing – from the department of redundancy department). Stop friggin’ shouting for two seconds and make it about the customer. Just for a little. Try it out. See how it fits. Give it a whirl. Some fifth analogy.
In improv, the person who goes for laugh and tries to steer the scene ends up looking like an ass and is more likely to bring a scene down than they are to lift it up, because they’re do busy trying to get their “bit” in and less concerned with concentrating on the things that make a successful (& funny) scene. It’s more important to listen than it is to speak, because if you spend more time listening to what the other person has to say when the time comes, you’re going to contribute something meaningful based on the information you’ve been gathering.
Sound familiar?
Tags: Comedy, Guidelines, Improvisation, Social Media
