A Method to the Madness: Laughter Research, Comedy Training, and Improv

A Method to the Madness Laughter Research, Comedy Training, and Improv Patrick Bynane If the surest way to kill a joke is to analyze it, then surely the quickest way to a deadly comic performance is to teach the actor to be “funny.” Not only is such a strategy questionable, but it is most likely impossible. Simply stated, any actor training that focuses on how to be funny or deliver jokes is ultimately bound to fail. Yet anyone who has ever worked on a comedy would certainly admit that a certain, special touch is required of the actors. Painfully, many actors lack that touch and are often directed in such a way as to make achieving the required skills difficult. These skills are different from those needed by the stand-up comic or the “serious” actor, although they are not mutually exclusive. These skills should be applicable to classical or contemporary texts, and these skills must be teachable. Traditionally, most training methods seem to be a nonsystem of either trial and error or dubious advice. How-to-befunny books (à la the Toastmasters), vaudeville guides, imitation of favorite comic actors, and “you’re-just-born-with-it” fatalism are all variations on the nonsystem theme. The more fully realized attempts at creating a training system have historically allowed themselves to be guided by the text rather than performance . As a result many of these more developed methods end up sounding more than a bit dry and often rather absurd. Charming in its absolute certainty (and brevity) The Craft of Comedy by Athene Seyler and Stephen Haggard falls into this category. Writing during 1939 and 1940, Haggard and Seyler engage in an ongoing epistolary debate about the true nature of comedy and comic acting. The overall tone of the wisdom discovered by the conversation is decidedly New Critical. The text 32 P A T R I C K B Y N A N E governs all; actors must discover “inner tempos,” “comic rhythms,” and proper syllabic emphases as though these concepts existed in some Platonic realm of comic ideals. At one point Haggard declares that “there are no two ways of saying a good line effectively—there is only the right way or the wrong way.”1 Seyler gently corrects Haggard by pointing out that with some especially well-written lines either of two ways may be equally right. After that gentle reprimand she concurs with Haggard that the “rhythm of the line” (57) should guide all comic acting choices. “The proper balancing of a comedic sentence” and the discovery of a perfectible “comedic rhythm” certainly sound impressive and comforting to anyone who has ever flopped in a comedy. These appeals, however , to some external and absolute comic “reality” seem to deny the truly ambivalent and slippery work that is comic acting. In this essay I would like to propose not rules but suggestions or guidelines that an actor needs in order to generate a successful comic performance. These guidelines are principally derived from the work of Viola Spolin, Keith Johnstone, Paul Sills, Sanford Meisner, and Declan Donnellan, as well as from my own experiences on the stage. In no particular order of import they are (1) the ability to tell a joke without “telling a joke,” (2) the ability to find fresh readings of the performance text that allow for unexpected yet effective responses and readings, (3) generosity, (4) clarity, (5) the ability to “bomb,” and (6) the ability to react honestly to imaginary circumstances. If this sounds like the basis for good acting in general, and not just in the realm of comedy, it is, more or less. I would draw your attention to the complete absence of laughter from this list. Good comic acting cannot merely be defined by laughter, causing laughter or even holding for laughter. Holding for a laugh, rather, is a technique that comes to most of us naturally as the result of what behavioral neuroscientist Robert Provine describes as “the punctuation effect.”2 This effect, in which laughter almost always occurs at the end of a phrase and almost never during a spoken phrase, “indicates that a lawful and probably neurologically based process governs the...