Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [44]
But the truth is that improv isn’t random and chaotic at all. If you were to sit down with the cast of Mother, for instance, and talk to them at length, you’d quickly find out that they aren’t all the sort of zany, impulsive, free-spirited comedians that you might imagine them to be. Some are quite serious, even nerdy. Every week they get together for a lengthy rehearsal. After each show they gather backstage and critique each other’s performance soberly. Why do they practice so much? Because improv is an art form governed by a series of rules, and they want to make sure that when they’re up onstage, everyone abides by those rules. “We think of what we’re doing as a lot like basketball,” one of the Mother players said, and that’s an apt analogy. Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice — perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again — and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. This is the critical lesson of improv, too, and it is also a key to understanding the puzzle of Millennium Challenge: spontaneity isn’t random. Paul Van Riper’s Red Team did not come out on top in that moment in the Gulf because they were smarter or luckier at that moment than their counterparts over at Blue Team. How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.
One of the most important of the rules that make improv possible, for example, is the idea of agreement, the notion that a very simple way to create a story — or humor — is to have characters accept everything that happens to them. As Keith Johnstone, one of the founders of improv theater, writes: “If you’ll stop reading for a moment and think of something you wouldn’t want to happen to you, or to someone you love, then you’ll have thought of something worth staging or filming. We don’t want to walk into a restaurant and be hit in the face by a custard pie, and we don’t want to suddenly glimpse Granny’s wheelchair racing towards the edge of a cliff, but we’ll pay money to attend enactments of such events. In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.”
Here, for instance, is an improvised exchange between two actors in a class that Johnstone was teaching:
A: I’m having trouble with my leg.
B: I’m afraid I’ll have to amputate.
A: You can’t do that, Doctor.
B: Why not?
A: Because I’m rather attached to it.
B: (Losing heart) Come on, man.
A: I’ve got this growth on my arm too, Doctor.
The two actors involved in this scene quickly became very frustrated. They couldn’t keep the scene going. Actor A had made a joke — and a rather clever one (“I’m rather attached to it”) — but the scene itself wasn’t funny. So John-stone stopped them and pointed out the problem. Actor A had violated the rule of agreement. His partner had made a suggestion, and he had turned it down. He had said, “You can’t do that, Doctor.”
So the two started again, only this time with a renewed commitment to agreeing:
A: Augh!
B: Whatever is it, man?
A: It’s my leg, Doctor.
B: This looks nasty. I shall have to amputate.
A: It’s the one you amputated last time, Doctor.
B: You mean you’ve got a pain in your wooden leg?
A: Yes, Doctor.
B: You know what this means?
A: Not woodworm, Doctor!
B: Yes. We’ll have to remove it before