You’re Lying To Me!

thoughts on the art of being stupid

Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash

A common improv scene is one person telling the other “Hey! You’ve been lying to me!” Something like “Wait a minute, I just talked to the landlord, have you not been paying your proper share of the rent?”

This is a little bit not great as an improv move. You’re basically saying “Hey, you’re a liar — and a boring one at that. Can you come up with a funny or interesting reason why? Good luck.” But it’s truly SO COMMON that I think there’s no point in telling people to stop doing it. We have to just get good at being liars.

So maybe the other person — the person who has been told they are a liar — says yes to the offer. They admit they have not been paying rent, and they apologize. “I have been doing that, sorry, I won’t anymore.” Sounds good, right? They said yes and accepted the offer, and they’re acting rational.

But it’s not great. They are SO rational that there is no absurdity.

Three Ingredients

Remember there are three ingredients in a successful improv scene:

• agreement - you are adapting to each other’s choices

• reality - we are acting like emotionally real human beings

• absurdity - there is something absurd (or whimsical or silly)

Answer: You’re Stupid

Okay, so maybe the first person piles on some craziness. They’re gonna make sure this first person is a dumb liar, one way or the other.

“Well, why did you do it? I see you’ve avoided paying (overdoes it, trying to get some kind of weirdness going) a million dollars! We’re in debt a million dollars thanks to you!”

Now it’s even HARDER for the first person to explain. How in the world did they avoid paying a million dollars worth of rent? Why would they do it?

One way is to make up a really complicated plot. Something like “I’m actually a millionaire and I’ve been scamming you.” But this is just kicking the can down the road. The scene still feels too complex and unreal. There’s more questions to answer and they all feel emotionally fake.

The best answer seems so simple you might not even think of it:

It’s that you’re an idiot.

You look back at the first person and say “You know, I have no idea. I really thought I could get away with this. Sorry, dude. I think I might be an idiot.”

Or maybe just “Sorry, dude. I blew it. Let’s hug it out.”

It’s relatable. It’s real. It’s simple. And it’s really really fun.

Speed Eating

One of the best comedy bits I have ever seen was my friend Rob’s “speed eating” bit. Rob and I took classes together at UCB NY in the early 2000s. We were on a house team together for… 5 years? Sheesh. Time!

Anyway, the speed eating bit.

Rob would set up a table full of food on the stage. Sandwiches, boxes of cereal, a gallon of milk, a plate of cheese and crackers, a loaf of bread, a big head of lettuce, etc. Then he would tell the audience he was going to eat it all in 60 seconds. The time would start, he would frantically start to eat. But he would make no progress. He’d get maybe two bites into a celery stalk and then start to spread cheese on a cracker and take one bite, and then time would be up. He would have barely eaten any of it. And then he would just say “There was just too much food. I didn’t have enough time.”

That’s the best move sometimes. Just to go “I don’t know what I was thinking. This was a stupid idea.” It really works.

What Were You Thinking?

I saw this exact situation once, long ago. Two folks were starting a scene. One guy gave this huge initiation “Well, you really did it. You brought us up here to Alaska and tried to sell refrigerators. No one up here NEEDS those! You told me — you PROMISED me we were gonna be able to sell a ton and we didn’t. What do you have to say for yourself?”

I mean, it was a forced, convoluted, kinda dumb start. But there it was. And the other guy exhaled and said “I think I must be an idiot.” Like he just kind of agreed with the first guy that he himself was dumb. “What was I thinking?” he said in frustration at himself. He just kept restating the situation. “We’re in Alaska! Refrigerators? It’s a stupid idea!”

Prison Scene

I just thought of another Rob scene. It’s another big long initiation scene too. This was in our level 2 improv class, by the way. That doesn’t matter, but that’s how long this scene has stayed with me.

Someone initiated to Rob “Hey, Rob, what are you doing here? This is prison! You escaped! You were out, and now you’ve come back!”

Rob went “I did?”

The guy goes “Yeah! Look at you! You crawled through the sewer, and then walked through the desert! You’re all scratched up and bloody but you were out! And now you’ve come back! Why? You snuck right by the guards and got away! Everybody has been talking about how you escaped?”

And in my memory there was a pause as Rob considered this, and then he said:

“Were they mad?”

And somehow that was just the funniest answer. I remember people falling out of their chairs laughing.

Maybe my memory is exaggerating. And some of this is just that Rob has a naturally kinda “dim” persona when he wants. He has a podcast called “That’s History!” which I highly recommend.

But the point of this story is right: the answer to the situation is not logic. It’s that you’re kinda dumb.

Be Ready To Be Stupid

When a scene starts, you should be thinking that whatever happens, you are very possibly going to be just a little stupid. Not emotionally fake. Just foolish. A small liar who thought they could get away with it. An insecure dummy who tried to do something dumb.

2 Eyes Wide, 1 Crinkled Forehead

Sometimes it helps to practice feeling what a foolish energy is like.

An exercise I have put on this site before is to get 3 people up.

• Two of them must keep their eyes just a little bit too wide. (alt: mouth open the whole time)

• The other must keep their forehead scrunched up the whole time, as if they are confused. (alt: eyebrows raised the whole time, as if shocked)

Then let them do a scene.

They can all say or do whatever they want, as long as two keep their eyes open and the other keeps their forehead scrunched.

What usually happens is the two people with their eyes wide are kinda stupid, and the forehead-scrunched person is kinda skeptical. Honestly, even if that doesn’t happen the scene is fun. Like if the eyes-wide-open people are calling out the forehead person, that’s funny too.

The point of the exercise is to feel different energies. The eyes make you feel kinda silly, kinda stupid, kinda foolish. The forehead makes you skeptical, questioning, concerned.

You need to be ready at any point to realize you are an idiot!

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