Watching the Improv Jam two weeks ago, sitting with Neil Casey while a scene started where someone did a tag out that transported characters from a fast food restaurant to a police interrogation room. Neil leaned over and said this to me:
“I’ve noticed that for students under 25 a lot of them walk on or tag out as the police coming to shut things down for being out of line. These kids either live in a world or they think they live in a world where if you step out of line the system comes crashing down on you like a ton of fucking bricks.”
After he said that, it started to stand out. Someone in an improv scene starts cheating on their company, security comes crashing in to ask them questions. Some tag-outs were just people being police. Other were smarmy investigators who came in with a sort of “good cop” attitude: “Hey, we’re just here to ask a few questions.”
Once you start thinking about this, a lot of improv gets really creepy.
…
Am I just more sensitive to such things now that Neil has made his observation?
OR IS THE WORLD TURNING INTO A TERRIBLE PLACE?
I would say that it has a lot to do with the type of TV we’ve grown up with (I’m 28, but I definitely relate to this phenomena).
Cops has been on for nearly as long as I’ve been alive. As Bill Hicks pointed out, the theme of Cops has always been that if you dare to step out of line, the Force will crack down on you so fast, you’ll be in a holding cell wondering why your eyes have been set on fire before commercial break. 9/11 has only made this worse, especially in New York where I assume these improvisors all live.
I would also blame it on unfamiliarity. The kind of people who do improv are cooperative by nature, or at least social on some level. People with more anti-social tendencies tend to go into the solitude of the stand-up world. This is a big generalization, but I am not saying any of this is fact. My own interactions with real police have been sparse (2 speeding tickets, an accident report, and nearly being busted for fireworks). Lacking any real familiarity with law enforcement, the point of reference moves to TV and movies where the police are allowed to do whatever they want for dramatic effect. It then comes across on stage as broad and vague since the player has no real point of reference for how cops usually behave.
Lastly, I think it also has to do with the improv tenant of status. High status people are usually the most fun to play, and who is more high status and as prevalent as the police? It’s why a car scene can’t go for longer than 4 minutes before someone comes in as a cop pulling over the driver, even if the driver wasn’t behaving recklessly.
It’s fun to play policemen because it’s fun to play authority figures, and they do seem to be everywhere. Speaking from my own experiences in improv, there is a tendency to want to try to make sense of the scene, and quell weird behavior. A lot of our first 1000 scenes have problems at their root, and the urge is to solve these problems. Slowly, over time, we are working to not have a problem in a scene, but an idea at it’s heart, so we won’t need the police to help solve anything.
Reblogged from Improv Nonsense.
January 13, 2012, 1:36pm Permalink
