Okay! I present here for improv nerdy delight and judgment a series of exercises on handling accusations in a scene. Each one evolved out of the previous one, and I think they’re each useful for different levels.

When I say “handling accusations” I mean treating accusations like gifts rather than an excuse to fight or to prove your character “right."

And when I say "accusations” I mean both:

Actual accusations, like: “Hey, Jeremy, YOU were supposed to invite people to this party!”

And the related ’explain this’ statement which is less angry but still makes the other person ‘weird’: “Jeremy, I hired you to be the clown for my son’s birthday party, why are you discussing philosophy with them?”

Both of these things can bait people into either being defensive or deflecting or fighting, so it’s good to practice responding to them.

(Also: great scene ideas in my examples, as always)

EXERCISE ONE: SUPER VILLAIN / MASTERMIND

Two people up. Person A makes an accusation. Person B deliberately acts like a super villain or mastermind in response. Person A must then sympathetically disagree (otherwise Person A will often get too angry).

Person A: Jeremy, did you use all the conditioner?

Person B: Bwa ha ha, yes I did! Now your hair will look stringy and flawed! AND I SHALL LOOK MORE BEAUTIFUL BY COMPARISON!

Person A: (sympathetically disagreeing) Look, I know that I can be arrogant about my hair but this is really going too far.

PROS: Person B practices being the “bad” character while still taking full ownership of the accusation. The sympathetic disagreement lets Person A practice giving his/her scene partner room to digest, since they are defending something they didn’t think of. Exercise is silly and entertaining. As an exercise, it’s clear and easy to measure if you’ve done it right.

CONS: Resulting scenes are kinda dumb.

EXERCISE TWO: OWN IT

Same thing, but now Person B must admit to the accusation and explain why as a “normal” person, not a super villain. Person A still sympathetically disagrees.

Person A: Jeremy, did you forget to invite anyone to this party?

Person B: I did it on purpose. I wanted the party to fail because I’m jealous of you having friends besides me.

Person A: Yes, I know I’ve been ignoring you but you’re acting like a child!

PROS: As an exercise, it’s still easy to follow. It makes Person B use the accusation as a way of learning more about his or her character. In an improv scene, this strategy will actually work very often.

CONS: Although more natural then the super villain one, this one can still feel forced and contrived and the scenes all take on a similar feel.

EXERCISE THREE: THE REAL REASON

Same set up (two people up, Person A accuses) but this time Person B tries to feel why he/she would have done such a thing FOR REAL. Like, in real life. The only condition here is that you have to accept without argument that you REALLY have done the thing, you can’t change it so you didn’t do it, or even that you didn’t do it on purpose.

For example, if Person A says “Sir, we found these knives and excessive liquids in your luggage. Why were you sneaking these onto the plane?”

If you were doing super villain approach you might say “So that I can take over the skies!”

If you were doing the “own it” approach, you might say “Because I plan on using them to bully other passengers up there.”

I actually think both of those responses could work.

But if you take a moment and try to feel why you might really have done it, I bet you’d take a moment to consider, then say something like this:

“You know, I just was hoping you wouldn’t check. I thought I could get away with it. I think the TSA policies are kinda dumb, and I’m not planning anything bad and I just didn’t care to follow your rules.”

PROS: The answers are rich, specific and have the ring of truth that makes improv compelling. This is what the best improvisers often do when endowed with a strange situation. It is the best approach in actual scenes.

CONS: It’s hard to measure, from the student’s perspective, if you’ve done this right. They don’t necessarily know what truth feels like on stage. And since there’s so few restrictions on how you respond, many students will inadvertently deflect: (“I don’t know! Someone else must have put them there!” or “Ach, I took the wrong bag by mistake!” )

The exercise is basically just telling the students “be good actors and be interesting people” which is not the most helpful teaching exercise.

IMPROV IS LIKE MEMENTO AND/OR SPLIT-BRAIN EXPERIMENTS

Here’s two stories I will tell to explain what it should feel like when you’re accused of something in an improv scene:

a) In the movie Memento, the main character can not form new memories and thus is constantly in situations which are a surprise to him (and since the scenes are show in reverse chronological order - the audience also does not know what came before). At one point, he’s being chased through a parking lot by someone shooting at him and you hear him thinking “Okay, so what’s going on here?” And he has to guess what’s going on with context clues. He generally assumes that whatever is going on is because of something he’s done and that he meant for it to happen.

That’s how the improviser should approach scenes where they’ve been accused. They must assume it’s true and they did something to create this situation kinda just sense why they would have done such a thing.

b) Split-Brain experiments. For a few decades, if someone suffered from epileptic seizures that were so intense the person could not function, doctors might perform surgery to separate the hemispheres of their brains! It would stop the seizures, but leave the patients with a “split brain,” meaning the two halves of their brains could not communicate directly.

This relates, just give me a moment.

Doctors could then perform cool experiments like this: they’d cover the patient’s eye and ear on one side of his head, tell him something which then only one side of his brain would perceive.

In one experiment, they made the patient cover his right eye and ear. Then they said “Okay, get up, switch to cover your other eye and ear and go to the next room.” The man got up, switched to cover his other eye and ear and started to walk to the next room.

The doctors stopped him and said “Where are you going?” And he said “To go to the bathroom.”

Because: he didn’t really know why he was going. It was the other side of his brain that had made that decision. But in the heat of the moment he made his best guess as to why he was doing such a thing and convinced himself that was the reason.

That’s what it’s like to do improv. You’re doing something, or you’re being told that you’re doing something and you don’t really know, at first, why. But you have to explain it. If you’re a good actor, and you’re in the moment you will come up with a specific, true and interesting reason. It will be related on some level to why YOU would have done such a thing.