This is a really weird movie
Supporting a bad scene, keeping your teammates' and the audience's trust
Picture the scene: a bad scene. A really bad one. Totally insane, with a thousand moving pieces, a crazy-capers plot that’s going nowhere, where nothing is moored to the ground.
Everyone knows something isn’t right. The improvisers, the audience, probably the people in the pub downstairs. And you, stood on the backline watching. You feel it more than anyone because an improv show is ultimately about you and your feelings*.
But no worries. You are a mercurial improv talent, at one with the current pop-culture discourse of crapping on things from a healthy distance. You’ve got the perfect move to save the situation. Simply tag out the idiots doing the scene and set your next one in a cinema. A cinema showing a really bad movie. Turn to your scene partner and state: ‘This is a really weird movie!’.
Fantastic - Improv saved!
I promise this move will always get a big laugh. You’ll feel good….for about 2.7 seconds. Because it’s a hollow, dirty and high-cost laugh. It’s a relief laugh as the audience releases energy. They knew the scene was bad too and now they get to bask in it. A WEIRD MOVIE! That scene was insane because we were actually watching a weird movie! It wasn’t bad because the improv was bad...hang on...was it?
With ‘This is a weird movie’, what you’re actually, and very literally, saying is ‘what my teammates are doing is terrible. I’m going to point out it’s terrible and also get a laugh for myself in the process’.
Enjoy that hollow dirty laugh, because you’re about to pay for it. Now, in an artform where you have no props, set or costumes to establish a believable reality, you’ve established that what the audience has just watched isn’t even real in the canon of the show. It’s fiction even for the characters on stage.
It’s very hard to convincingly pull off ‘This is a weird movie’ for two reasons, both of which leave us in the same position before we made the move - needing the scene to end.
Firstly, once you’ve made the move, you have nowhere else to go. Like any improv scene, we’re asking the audience to suspend their disbelief. Except they don’t trust you now. Last time they trusted you to create something out of thin air, they had the wool pulled over their eyes - IT WAS A MOVIE ALL ALONG! Safer for them to wait and see what happens, sitting there cross-armed and furrow-browed until they’re comfortable again.
Secondly, you just tagged out two or more teammates in such a way that their ‘movie’ must still be happening in the background, since your new characters are reacting to it. So do they still have to carry on from the backline? Or have you paused the movie (you can’t do that in a cinema)? Or is it some mix of the two. Either way, it’s a lot of work to re-establish the reality of the scene for an audience.
Ultimately ‘This is really weird movie’ is a move out of fear and ego, two very unhelpful places to improvise from. Fear that the only way to end a scene is with a big laugh; ego that unless you personally acknowledge that the scene is bad and get your laugh, everyone will assume you think it’s good and therefore you aren’t funny.
‘But this scene is horrible? I love these people and I want to help!’.
Of course you do, here’s some ways you can:
1. Mercy edit - support your teammates by sweeping their scene and starting something new. This is fully pulling the ripcord, the sharpest knife in the block. It draws a line fully under the scene. You might get no laughs (horror), or no applause (terror!). But it’s for the greater good. Frankly your teammates in the scene will probably thank you for ending their pain. Ideally you will then get in the trenches and initiate the next scene, as a courtesy more than anything.
2. Enter the scene in a constructive way, by supporting what’s actually happening. Enter to help clarify something, frame the game, ground the chaos, establish a relationship that matters - anything really that actually engages with the content, rather than commenting on it from outside.
In both cases, your next scene, even your whole show, might still be bad. That’s okay. You gave your team a fighting chance. You kept the suspension of disbelief alive enough that you could build something good again. Most of all, you didn’t throw your pals under a bus.
A good team doesn’t need to be best mates, but they do need to trust each other. To trust that their choices will be supported, not undermined. Actually have each other’s backs. Jump in to support, and you might make a good movie instead.
*It isn’t