Random Pips

So your day was that bad, eh? Well, I can top that.

You may find that scenario quite familiar. That’d be because you’ve probably done it yourself thousands of times. We all have – and secretly, we love it. We seem to have this strange fixation on always trying to outdo each other on who has it worse. And not surprisingly, that’s the basis for a lot of comedy scenes.

It was improv night yesterday and the premise of one of the exercises is to escalate an initially benign conversation to a point of ridiculousness that causes one of the parties to back down. This was the scene my partner and I came up with:

“Aw man…what a crappy day,” I said dejectedly.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” my partner replied with a sigh. “But it can’t be worse than mine though.”
“Well, I had a customer today who called me an idiot.”
“That’s not as bad as what my boss said to me today. He told me I was retarded.”
“Oh, I forgot to mention…that customer who called me an idiot? He spat in my face – while calling me an idiot.”
“That’s nothing. My boss’ dog ended up biting my leg and I had to go to the hospital to get stitches.”
“You think that’s bad? That customer also happened to have brought along his pet gorilla to the office. And it was a female gorilla…that really seemed to like me.”
“Psh, what about what happened to me next? There was a bunch of old geezers wearing hospital gowns that left their backsides exposed who suddenly surrounded me and took me down. And the orderlies all just stood there and watched.”
“Yeah? Well…I banged a gorilla.”
“Oh.”

And that was as far as the scene went. It’s kinda hard to go on when we’ve both fallen over clutching our sides and snorting.

I love improv and all its randomnesses. I think I still have side cramps today.

~ by Winluck on May 15, 2009.

Posted in Acting, Humour, People