How to Explain an Improv Comedy Game

Video Transcript

"Hi there, it’s Les McGehee again, author of Plays Well With Others, director and founder of National Comedy Theater and a bunch of other improv stuff. I have so many miles it would make your head spin, but I’m here on ExpertVillage.com to teach you a little bit more about running your improv show. We’ve been talking about hosting a show. What we’re going to do in this clip, is we’re going to go on to actually hosting the games that are in the show or whatever improv structure your group likes to do in the show. In my background I tend to call them all games. You can call them whatever you like to call them; stories, sequences, heralds, whatever the case may be, or monologues, that’s all up to you. Now hopefully you’ve already seen our pre-show clips and our introduction clips and now we’re actually into the body of the show. We’ve warmed up the audience, we have introduced the players and brought them onto the stage with us and now it’s time to get some improvisation going for those players. Well, when you’re introducing games, there’s a few things to look out for. One of those is, is that you want to explain enough of the game to the audience that the audience kind of has enough information to get into it and get going, but you want to be very careful not to over explain it. Sometimes, as a rule of thumb I think in terms of thirty seconds or so and if a game can’t be explained well enough in thirty seconds you might want to consider the fact that maybe you’re going to go without an explanation. There’s a lot of games that explain themselves, even though the audience may start a little bit confused, the game will explain itself as they go and that might be a better choice for you sometimes than talking and talking to your audience and keeping them away from the improvising. So you’re going to do again, an explanation of some sort, that’s one of the things that you can rehearse, even though it’s an improv show that doesn’t mean you need to improvise the explanations of the games. You might want to kind of try that a couple of times, and make sure you have a good succinct explanation that works for you. "