Fun Night improv

I mentioned to a few of my friends back home recently that I missed doing improv. Sam in San Francisco suggested I find a way to do some improv here. A few days later, our friend Christy here in Yaounde suggested to Ann and me that we get together with a few other people and put an improv set together for an upcoming SIL event. Christy has never done improv before, and neither had any of the people she had in mind other than us, but she thought it might be fun. And once we decided to do that, I discovered that there was another alum of River City Improv, an improv group from my hometown that I performed with for years, here in Yaounde for a few weeks volunteering with SIL. There are maybe a dozen of us in the entire world, and another one was right here, right now. It didn't work out for her to join us onstage, since she was flying out that night, and not sure if she would make the show, but it was great to see her, and since it turned out that she was there, she threw us some good audience suggestions.

The event was SIL Cameroon's annual Fun Night, which took place last Friday. This is a traditional part of the branch conference, when SIL people from all over Cameroon come meet in Yaounde for a few weeks. Ann and I don't actually work for SIL, but we've met and made friends with several people who do, including our friend Christy, who travels around the region teaching homeschooled SIL kids for several weeks at a time. One of the slides they showed at Fun Night was a great picture of her and two of her students up north dressed up as pigs for a play they wrote and performed for an audience of two, their parents. The pig play probably would have been a fine contribution to Fun Night, but Christy proposed to Ann and me that we put together an improv set.

So we did. With a grand total of one hour of rehearsal, seven people who had never done improv before in their lives, plus Ann, got up and performed it in front of a couple of hundred of their friends colleagues and family members. And they were great! We got to do two sets, since the other acts ran a bit short on time. We did 20 or 30 minutes of improv, all told. I was the MC for the improv sets, so I introduced the games, got suggestions, and edited the scenes when they finished, in order to keep things moving.

Our preparation and rehearsal was a one-hour meeting at Christy's apartment. I spent some time combing through the Improv Encylopedia online to jog my memory, took some notes, and then came to the meeting with improv games that seemed good for new improvisors, games with clear rules and a structure for who talks when. As we talked about each one at Christy's, people volunteered to try them and then perform them on Friday night. Some people were nervous, but everyone was willing to give it a try, and seemed to like the idea.

These performers weren't actors, but linguists and teachers who work for SIL and for Rainforest School, where lots of SIL kids attend. The format was improv games, which are funny and quick and depend on language and cleverness and a willingness to be silly, rather than acting experience. When our turn came to perform, I asked all the performers to get onstage, asked the audience who had seen improv before (most had not), and then explained that since we depended on them for suggestions for our success, we had to warm them up. We invited them to sing My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean with us, and every time a word was sung beginning with the letter B, they had to stand if they were sitting, or sit if they were standing. Meanwhile the performers and me sang lustily from the stage and bobbed up and down ourselves. Then to business.

The first game was Actor's Nightmare. One actor reads consecutive lines from a play script, the other has no script and has to improvise lines to somehow make the scene make sense. Dan improvised and Christine read from the script. I asked the audience for a random page number, and a location in Cameroon for the scene to take place. The location was Lolodorf (not sure on the spelling), which is the village where Dan actually works. The only script I had for this game was one I had borrowed. It was the script for the recent Rain Forest high school play, written by an SIL member here, so I introduced the skit as "deleted scenes from an early draft of the recent high-school play." Dan and Christine did a great job, and the audience was warm and appreciative, and stayed that way the whole show. Then we played the same game again, another scene, with Karen improvising and Margaret reading from the script.

The next game was the only one with all the actors, so we did it second to make sure we got it in, in case we got cut for time; we didn't realize we'd get a chance to do everything we had prepared. This was an advice game, where the audience asks questions. I asked the actors to come onstage in a line. I explained to the audience that I had found a strange snake out on a logging road in the wilds of eastern Cameroon that could answer questions. The snake had many heads, and each head could say only one word. I then fielded questions for the snake to answer, and the actors passed the mic from one to the next, each actor contributing one word to the snake's answer. As usual, this game resulted in a lot of hilarious semi-coherent nonsense that more or less answered the question; the audience loves the consternation of the players themselves as they try to come up with something reasonable.

For the last game of the first set, Chris J. and Christy came onstage and improvised a song based on the audience suggestion of "travel." So these two people, who have never improvised before but are a couple of hilarious over-the-top characters who clearly love performing in front of an audience, got onstage and made up a song about travel in Cameroon, on the spot. They really sold it too, and as the scene went on they got more and more over the top, crooning into their mics and dancing around onstage as people cheered them on.

That was it for the first set, but the MC for the whole evening told me they wanted us to perform again, and we had prepared a couple of extra games just in case this happened, so we were ready to go. The second set started with the mighty Ann playing the alphabet game with Michael. I asked the audience for something you might do in Yaounde while you were in from the village, for the scene to be about, and the suggestion was "buying cheese." So Ann and Michael did a scene about buying cheese in Yaounde; the game was that one actor (Ann) said a line starting with the letter A, then the other (Michael) said a line beginning with B. Then Ann with C, Michael with D, and on through the alphabet up to Z, trading lines. They were hilarious; I've seen Ann play this game before, and she's great at it, quick and very funny, and she and Michael got a huge reaction when Ann switched the scene from English to French on the letter O, with a line starting with "oui", and she and Michael carried on in French for six or seven more lines, without missing a beat. Since SIL is a linguistics organization in a French-speaking country, people just loved this. I've done improv for awhile now, but this was the only bilingual improv game I've ever seen.

The last game was another advice game; one good thing about advice games is you can really tailor them to your audience, so I explained that when I was in eastern Cameroon and found the snake, I had also run across three linguists who had been out there a long time, and had agreed to answer some questions for us here in Yaounde about linguistics. Karen (who really is a linguist), Beth and Christy came onstage and lined up to be the linguists. The game was that Karen always gave a correct, or at least reasonable answer, Beth always gave a completely wrong answer, and Christy gave as crazy an answer as possible. Once again, with no improv experience whatsoever and on one hour's rehearsal, these folks did a fantastic job in front of a crowd that loved them. Beth actually balked when it came time to get up onstage, which is a completely reasonable reaction if you've never done this before; we're friends with Beth, and I was convinced she'd enjoy it if she did get onstage, so I told her to she wasn't getting away that easy, and asked the audience if they wanted Beth to come onstage to play. They cheered her, and she got up onstage and did a great job.

And that was it. I got all the performers up onstage together and had them take a bow in front of the happy audience. Over the next few days, several people told me how funny they had found the show. People really liked it, and most people in the audience had never seen improv before. I wish I remembered more of what was said in the scenes so I could share it here, but that's not how it works. Since I was responsible for introducing things and tying it all together, my brain was taken up with that during most of the show, and although I had a great time listening and watching everyone improvise, it was more with an eye towards when to edit the scene and move onto the next one, and paying attention to the audience reaction as much as what was said.

Ann and I didn't take any pictures that night, but I'm going to try to track some down. Christy says she has a video of the entire evening, and promised me a copy once she transfers it to her Mac, so I may get video and audio. It would be great to have a record of the evening. I've never done or even seen a show quite like it. Some people who performed said they want to continue to improvise, so we might set up a regular meeting to get together and play games.

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Technical note: for my improvisor friends (hi, Sam!) who may be curious, here's the set list from that night:

• My Bonnie (audience warmup)
  
• Actor's Nightmare 1 (Dan and Christine)
  
• Actor's Nightmare 2 (Karen and Margaret)
  
• Mr. Know It All (all)
  
• Lounge Singer (Christy and Chris J.)
  
• (break)
  
• Alphabet (Ann and Michael)
  
• Good, Bad and Ugly Advice (Karen, Beth and Christy)