Improv Comedy

Malcom Gladwell in his new bestseller, Blink briefly touches upon the basic concept behind Improvisational Comedy. I have watched a couple of Improv Comedy shows before, but never realized this before until I read this in Blink - the actors in a Improv Comedy typically "accept all offers made", saying yes to things which one would normally deny, thus opening up new scenarios and directions in the scene. A couple of nice examples illustrate this point very well in the Blink. If an actor says "your arm needs to be amputated", the second actor doesn't say "No, it cannot be". He accepts the offer and says something more interesting and positive like “It is the same one that you did last time". In other words, "They accept all offers made—which is something no ‘normal’ person would do.” - Keith Johnstone, improv pioneer. It would be interesting to analyze how adopting this kind of behavior in certain real-life situations could open up new directions.

This site has a bunch of cool exercises to get the mindset for Improv Comedy - need to try it out sometime...