Chapter 9 — Forms

Short form

Games with rules, played fast, for an audience that is participating. It is the improv most people have seen, the improv most improvisers are sniffy about, and considerably harder than either group thinks.

A short-form show is a sequence of discrete games. Somebody explains a rule, somebody takes a suggestion, two to five minutes happen, everyone bows, and the next game begins. Nothing carries over. Each game is a complete unit.

This is the format that made it onto television, which has shaped its reputation in both directions — it is the reason most of your audience knows what improv is at all, and the reason a certain kind of improviser will tell you it is not real improv.

The families of games

There are hundreds of named games and roughly four things they are actually doing.

Constraint games impose a rule on how you may speak or move. Questions Only, where every line must be a question. Alphabet, where successive lines begin with successive letters. Backwards, where the scene is played from its ending. The comedy comes from watching competent people fight a stupid restriction and mostly win.

Guessing games hide information from one player. Party Quirks, where a host must work out what is wrong with each guest. World's Worst, where performers offer terrible examples of a category. The audience's pleasure is dramatic irony — they know, and the person on stage does not.

Narrative games hand a story between players under pressure. Story Story Die, where a conductor points at storytellers who must continue mid-sentence and are eliminated for stumbling. These teach continuity and listening more brutally than any exercise.

Musical and rhyming games demand form under time pressure. Freestyle rap, sung scenes, rhyming couplets. Enormously impressive to audiences and largely a matter of being willing to be bad at it in rehearsal for a long time.

Theatresports and the competitive frame

The most influential structure in short form is Theatresports, devised by Keith Johnstone. Teams compete, judges score, and the audience is invited to react to the judging as much as to the improv.

Johnstone's insight was partly about audiences and partly about performers. Competition gives a crowd permission to be loud, and it gives improvisers stakes — the pretence of winning something makes people commit in a way that "have fun out there" never does. The scoring is largely theatre in itself, but the effect on the room is real.

ComedySportz applies a similar competitive framing in a family-friendly package, and between the two of them they account for a great deal of the improv performed in the world on any given weekend, particularly outside the major training-theatre cities.

Why it is harder than it looks

Here is the trap. The rule of a game is structure, not content. It tells you the shape of what you are about to do. It does not tell you who these people are, what they want, or why anyone should care — and a game played without those things is a mechanical exercise that the audience claps politely at.

Watch a weak Questions Only. Two performers volley grammatically correct questions at each other, satisfying the rule perfectly, and nothing is happening. Now watch a strong one: two people who want opposite things, in a real place, with a relationship, who happen to be constrained to questions. The rule stops being the point and becomes an obstacle that reveals character.

Short form also demands two skills long form quietly avoids. Economy: you have three minutes, so a scene must establish and pay off almost immediately, with none of the luxurious exploring of chapter six. And direct audience handling: someone must take suggestions, manage a crowd, absorb a heckle, and keep the evening moving. That person is doing a job closer to hosting than acting, and doing it badly sinks a show that was otherwise fine.

On the snobbery

Long-form improvisers have a habit of treating short form as the children's table, and it is worth being clear that this is largely a status behaviour rather than an aesthetic judgement.

The honest version of the criticism is narrower: a game's rule can substitute for the work, and because it produces reliable laughs, it lets performers avoid ever learning to build a scene. That is a real risk and it does produce a lot of mediocre short form.

But the same is true in reverse — long form lets performers avoid ever learning to be economical, or to hold a room, or to fail in front of people and recover in eight seconds. Most improvisers who are good at both will tell you short form made them faster and braver, and that the discipline of having to land something now is not a lesser skill.

If you are starting here

Most improvisers do, because most community theatres, schools and pub nights run short form. It is a completely legitimate way in, and everything in chapters one through eight applies to it without modification.

Three things will make you immediately better than the room. Do not explain the rule mid-scene. Commit to the first choice rather than hunting for a better one — the game is short and hesitation costs more than a mediocre idea. And establish a relationship in your first line, because the game will not do it for you and without it you have four minutes of mechanism.

The rule is the frame. You still have to put a picture in it.