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SLIDE PRESENTATION: Improvisational Comedy and the Internet
Professor Susan Jacobson
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Professor Susan Jacobson talks about what she sees as the connection between long-form improvisational comedy and the Internet. Powerpoint slides and the text of her speech are below. You can also listen to her speech.

SLIDE 1

Good evening, and thank you for coming. My name is Susan Jacobson, and I am aprofessor in the College of Media and Communications ehre at the  Unviersty of the Arts. I am really pleased to share with you some ideas I have been working on recently about long-form improvisational comedy and the Internet, and to be able to present these ideas in conjunction with Bobbi Block, Philadelphia's queen of imrpovisational comedy, and LunchLady Doris, her long-form improvisational comedy ensemble. I am going o speak very briefly about how I think long-form improvisational comedy could be a useful tool for developing content on the Internet, and then Bobbi is going to educate us as to what long-form improvisational comedy actually is, and then the Lunch Ladies are going to actually peform a Harold for us. Harold, that's what they call long-form improvisational comedy. That's h-a-r-o-l-d, like Harold and Maude, not herald like a heraldic trumpet. This is comedy, after all. My work as a professor focuses on developing multi-linear, open-ended, dynamic, participatory, mutl-modal, multi-perspectival stories in audio and video. Here I ususally say something about "hypertextualizing the time-based media of audio and video," but today that may be overkill. Because I am interested in creating dynamic stories in audio and video that the audience may "interact" or "participate" with, most of my workis on the Web. So a practical area of my investigation is in streaming media. I am really pleased to be part of a streaming media initiative here at UArts called WebRadio.

SLIDE 2

The WebRadio program has a few goals: To provide a platform for students to publish audio-visual work online, as part of their portfoilo. As an arts institution, the University of the Arts views portfoilo development as a critical pat of the students' education and eventual emergence into professional life. To develop Internet-based radio and TV facilities for students. In my opinion, it is faster, chepaer and better for colleges and universities to build Internet-based studios for their students rather than to infvest time and money in building traditional broadcasting facilities. There are several reasons for this. First, streaming technology is getting better and more reliable and more compatible every year. Second, the tools of digital audio and video production have significantly come down in price so that it is possible for smaller, non-commercial institutions to produce professional-level audio and video programming for a lot less money than in the past. Third, smaller digital faicitlies are more nimble and more able to adapt to changing technologies than huge broadcast operations. And finally, the Recording Industry Association of America recently approved a measure that will make it very affordable for universities and other small Webcasters to play commercial music online. In conjunction with this idea that we may provide students with the facilities to produce TV-like and radio-like programming for the Internet is the idea that students may go beyond traditional TV and radio formats because their programming is delivered on the Internet. They can invenvt new forms of storytelling that incorporate these ideas of participation and interactivity. Finally, we see the WebRadio program as a way to foster community-based partnerships and interdisciplinary collaborations.

SLIDE 3

Some of our partnerships and interdisciplinary collaborations include: A partnership with the Barnes and Noble Read and Ride Program, where UArts students record local authors reading from their books, and stream the presentation online afterwards. A connection wtih some of my students at Marymount Manhattan college in New York City, where students share work that they are doing with UArts students over the Internet. A collaboration with local artists like Bobbi Block and LunchLady Doris, where the students may appply the skillls that they are learning and developing while working  with professional artists. The development of new student groups that may take advantage of the WebRadio platform. Melody Johnson, a student here at UArts, is forming a student improvisational comedy group. We welcome inquiries from other local groups and organizations that might be interested in collaboration or partnerships.

SLIDE 4

So back to improvisational comedy, The form of improvisational comedy that we are primarily interested in this evening is the Harold. It was developed by Del Close and Charna Halpern mostly in Chicago comedy venues such as Second City and Improv Olympic. The most famous text on long-form improv is called "Truth in Comedy, " and was written by Close and Halpern. The Harold, or long-form improvisational comedy, is much different from forms like "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" or short-form improvisational comedy, in that it is longer  and strives to create a true narrative arc. Short-form is often about playing a game or creating a very short scene. The Harold starts off with a suggestion from teh audienc eof a theme, a character, an idea. The improvisers then take the idea and create an opening game - where they free-associate with the theme on the stage. Then, over  a period of half an hour or so, they perform several short scenes with different characters . The first three scenes, in particular, are often very dissimilar to one another. For exaple, in a Harold I saw recently by the group Respecto Montalban in New York, the first scene was about a dog getting hit by a car, the second scene was about a pair of bank robbers, and the third scene was about a man who owed money to someone named "Tony the Hat." The goal of the Harold is to eventually weave these very disparate scenes and characters together into a narrative whole. So, for example, the dog in the first scene turned out to be Tony the Hat in a dog suit, who was trying to get his money back from the bank robbers. The magic of the Harold is that it is completely improvised. The audience will sometimes think that the actors must be conspiring with each other on stage as to what they are going to do next, or that they have made some kind of arrangments ahead of time, but they have not.

SLIDE 5

So what does this all have to do with the Internet anyway? Well, my hunch is that the Harold is one of - possibly many - good content models for developing content for the Internet. Enhancements in technology and ever-increasing production values are simply not enough to develop compelling content for a new medium. While video games and online role-playing games provide us with some models for nonlinear storytelling, they are notoriosly short on narrative - sort of like the difference between Whose Line Is It Anyway and the Harold. Like the Internet, The Harold is, by nature  participatory - the audience participates at least by providing the opening suggestion;  interactive - the improvisors read cues from each other on stage to further the storyline; and dynamic - the story is continuously changing as the improvisors heighten and complicate the action through techniques like YES-AND. Stories are created by association. The improvisors develop connections to the audience suggestion and seek connections between different scenes and characters. To accomplish this, Improvisational comedy has a vocabulary and a set of conventions that move the action forward, like YES-AND, Tag outs, shifting focus, cut to and group mind, that could be adapted to the Internet. Bobbi may speak to some of these conventions a little later. Long-form improvisational comedy is both a performing art form in and of itself, and a tool for comedy script writing that is used in sketch comedy shows like Saturday Night Live, David Letterman and Conan O'Brien. As streaming live events becomes more common over the Internet, we may capitalize on the non-linear aspect of live performance. Finally, long-form improvisational comedy is a narrative form, not a game. The actors create multiple scenes and characters to explore the audience theme. The goal is to bring these disparate scenes and characters together to create a narrative arc. At the same time, because the arc was created by exploiting details within the scenes, the possibility for furthering the story always exists, just like in hypertext.

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So where can we see examples of the Internet as lf improvisational comedy, or Harold as hypertext that already exist on the Web? In the early days of the internet - way back in 1994 or so - there was something called the Hamnet Players (http://www.hambule.co.uk/hamnet/). They did silly versions of Hamlet, A Streetcar Named Desire, and MacBeth. Just to give you an idea of how they did it, MacBeth was renamed PCBeth, An IRC Channel Named #Desire, very silly. The performance was totally text - they used the IRC, the Internet Relay Chat, so they were just typing at each other. People from all over the world would play different parts, and adlib just a bit on the script. Certainly we see imporv in online role playing games. Elendor (http://www.elendor.net/), which is based on the J.R.R. Tolkien story The Lord of the Rings, is a text-only environment where people assume characters as elves or hobbits or dwarves, and live-out text-based lives online, developing new stories that fit into the Tolkien world. Projects like Star Wars Galaxies (http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/), a new massively multiplayer online role-playing game, certainly borrow from improvisation. Based on the universe of Star Wars, Star Wars Galaxies is going to be interesting to watch because Lucas Films is producing it, and has put a lot of money into it. It can support thousands of players simultaneously. Players can do everything from build player economies, fashion their own homes and businesses - it's a graphical, 3D world. So these are some of the things that are already borrowing from improv. There is a great community site online called the Improv Resource Center (http://improvresourcecenter.com) - it's mostly a resource for improvisors online, and it's also a kind of improv in and of itself. The world-famous True Porn Clerk Stories started on the IRC. You will often see improvisors doing "bits" on the IRC. Most recently, the administrators of the IRC's bulletin boards changed its name to the "Fair and Balanced" Message Boards. There is a project that I have been working on called Countless Stories (http://countlessstories.com). Which takes video clips on a theme, cuts them down to short, one-minute segments, encodes them in a database, and allows users to create associations between them. The video comes up and plays on the fly.

SLIDE 7

Anytime you have something like improv informing the Internet, you always have the reverse, being a good media ecologist. So you have the Internet also informing long-form improvisational comedy. The example that I am most inspired about is the Neutrino Video Projects (http://neutrinonation.com). The very interesting thing about Neutrino is that they take long-form improvisational comedy and use technology to achieve it. So instead of doing a live performance like Lunch Lady Doris is going to do for us this evening, they go away from the audience and they videotape a live performance, and they play the tape. While the audience is watching the first tape, they are off shooting the next scene. The interseting thing that happens here is that you suddently get the combination of improv with the language of film - both the visual language and the audio language. So you start to see some of the possibilities of how improv intersects with technology, and how the Internet might further this. It is my sincerest hope that some of our students will get involved with this because I think it's a very exciting area for them to investigate. There are many dance companies and other performance companies experimenting with technology in peorformance. One example is The Troika Ranch Dance Company (http://www.troikaranch.org/), which has been using video and dancers' movements to create responses in music for a very long time. So there are projects like that out there.

SLIDE 8

For more information about the WebRadio Program at the University of the Arts, please contact: Dr. Barry Dornfeld, Director, Communications Program bdornfeld@uarts.edu Professor Susan Jacobson sjacobson@mmm.edu For more information about LunchLady Doris and long-form improvisational comedy in Philadelphia, contact Bobbi Block, co-Director, Comedy Sportz Philadelphia (http://www.comedysportzphilly.com/) bobbiblock@aol.com

Audio and video recordings by Zong Shi Wang, Cameron Zonfrilli and John Welsh III.

Return to Countless Stories * Return to Whose Web Is It Anyway? * Send an E-mail to Susan Jacobson