Improv Comedy Techniques: Improvising Scene Work

Video Transcript

"JOE PARSONS: And so, I was thinking about... LES MCGEHEE: Toner. Smell it. JOE PARSONS: Yeah, that smells like paper, toner. You smell like paper? LES MCGEHEE: I coded every page with Sharpie [PH] so I could [INDISCERNIBLE] while I held it up... JOE PARSONS: Really? LES MCGEHEE: Every three minutes. JOE PARSONS: Hey alright. LES MCGEHEE: It takes three minutes to get clear headed again. JOE PARSONS: It smells like you, that's why I didn't sleep with it... LES MCGEHEE: That's really hard technology to accomplish in a paperback. In hardback, it's easy. Hey it's Les McGeHee who plays well with others in the hit book from Les McGeHee called Plays Well With Others. I have here one of my favorite people to play with my friend, Joe Parsons. We've been doing shows forever. How long have we done shows together Joe? JOE PARSONS: Well, it's been almost 15 years now. LES MCGEHEE: Oh my gosh I'm so old and we have so much mileage on us. He tells the truth. He's not even having to fake that and we've been improvising since he was in high school, oh my gosh. Plays Well with Others is a story of an improvised career and it has great many games in it. What we're going to do in this segment is we want to tell you a little bit about improvising scene work. Eventually, you may learn a bunch of games so you get your improv skills together and that you'll learn how to play and enjoy playing, but eventually you're going to want to try some scenes and there's some simple things with scenes. One person can start or two people can start at the same time. All the same rules apply. You're going to listen carefully to what the other person does, you're going to agree where the scene is trying to go and help the scene go that direction by making active choices and staying focused on what's going on in the scene. Another trick I'll tell you is in my group, we like to practice believing what's going on because if you make the choice real quick to kinda believe where you are, then you see things and opportunities present themselves and that helps you and gives you more ideas as well. "