The Seventy
A exerpt from my forthcoming manuel on character creation for improvisers.
For the last seven or so years, I’ve been working on a manual that takes a method my good friend and mentor, Seth K. Thomas, and I developed while we were at Second City together to help improvisers create better characters.
It’s finally done, and I’d like to share the introduction with you as my first post on Substack.
This is the introduction to THE SEVENTY: Character Creation in Improvisation.
Most improv programs will teach you how to agree, how to heighten — they may even have you walk in a circle, leading with your elbow, then your waist, then your head, trying to find a character that way. And yet somehow you still get notes about your characters. You still feel like you’re playing yourself. The circle didn’t fix it.
Del Close — the coach, director, and improv theorist whose fingerprints are on essentially everything you’ve ever done on stage — used to tell his students to “wear your character like a thin veil.” Not a mask. Not a costume. A thin veil. A great character shouldn’t be something you put on. It should sit so lightly over who you are that the audience can feel the real human being underneath it — giving the character weight, specificity, truth. Characters that work are not performances; they’re people.
He also believed (and this is less flattering) that when improvisers hit the stage, they actually get dumber. Fear does that. When you’re scared, you reach for the broad choice, the obvious joke, the loud voice, because broad and obvious feel safer than specific and true. Close’s remedy was the principle he drilled into everyone who worked with him: play to the top of your intelligence. Don’t make your character stupider than you are. Don’t perform comedy. Be someone, and trust that the comedy lives in the truth of who that person is and what they’re doing.
Seth and I have no argument with any of that. It’s right. The problem is it’s incomplete.
Playing to the top of your intelligence tells you something about how to show up on stage. It doesn’t tell you how to build the vessel you’re showing up as. It doesn’t tell you why your father character and your teacher character look identical from the back. It doesn’t explain the thigh slap. And it doesn’t give you anything to do in your kitchen on a Tuesday night when there’s no show for two weeks.
That’s what this book is for.
Most people drawn to improv are intrinsically funny, but they’re not actors. Acting is hard. It requires practice, discipline, and time — things most improvisers are short on, for reasons that range from legitimate life constraints to a culture that sometimes mistakes casualness for authenticity. So Seth and I are not here to teach you how to be funnier, or to find “truth in comedy” — that’s a whole other book, and Close and Charna Halpern already wrote it (Truth in Comedy, Meriwether Publishing, 1994; read it). We want to give you a repeatable method for building realistic, specific characters you can carry into any scene. To stop playing yourself. To stop the thigh slap before it starts.
We call this method The Seventy. And we think it’s going to make you a better improviser, comedian, and artist.
I plan to post more excerpts from THE SEVENTY: Character Creation in Improvisation as well as my creative writing and musings, so feel free to hit that big ol’ subscribe button.