Understanding the 'Mystery Problem' in Improv

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m back again, Les McGehee with Expert Village. We’re talking about prepping for your improv show, and there’s a lot of things you’ll be focusing on when you’re getting your improv show ready. Where is it going to happen? Is it happening in your theater where you know where everything is or is your show permanently on your stage where everything is all set up; there’s still a lot of a thing to prep. What we’re going to focus on, on this one is a thing called the “Mystery Problem”. I made this up in my book, Plays Well With Others, my book; you’ll find the “Mystery Problem” in there. Now the “Mystery Problem” is an interesting thing. At the National Comedy Theater in Austin and San Antonio, we’ve had over three hundred comedians come as a group with very little training and we’ve trained them up, created quite a few excellent improv comedians. But there always comes a point where they are going to a new place to do a show and I would have to ask them or their managers would ask them for me, would say; “What time are you leaving and what are you taking with you?” And we would double check and they would have a packet with a list, and a packing list and all those professional things but still things emerge and this is where the “Mystery Problem” lives. So in improvisation, when we say young and old we’re not talking about age, we’re talking about mileage so that when I call these guys young guys, we mean kind of green and low mileage; it has nothing to do with how old they are. But when the young guys are heading out on a job, let’s say they are driving to a neighboring city; in Austin they might be driving to Dallas. So you can ask them; “what time is the show call time?” and they’ll say “seven” and you say, “so what time are you leaving?” they’ll say, well it takes three and a half hours to get there and we’re going to have to stop for gas and everything so we’re going to give it four hours. So we’d leave at three o’clock, so then you can ask them; “well, how much time are you going to allow for the mystery problem?” and the young guys will always say the same thing when you ask them that. They’ll say, “Well what’s the mystery problem?” and then the high mileage guys like me can say; “well if we knew what the mystery problem was going to be we’d have a much better name for it.”"