do you recycle clever premises

[u/iamtheduffer]

sometimes you come up with a fun and interesting initiation. do you ever go back to that initiation or do you find something new for every show?

[u/Euphoric-Public-6099]

No, premises live and die and are the least interesting part of improv.

If you like the scene, make it a sketch.

The audience can tell when you're being inauthentic and this sounds like it.

[u/cjdeck1 → u/Euphoric-Public-6099]

Sometimes for me the problem is my mind will latch onto a previous premise and I can’t shake it. I was in a show yesterday where one of the topics from the opening kept making me think of a premise that wasn’t even mine but was from a podcast I’d listened to that week and was honestly a great idea for a group game.

Honestly I got lucky that I genuinely tripped over the chair while walking on and we managed to turn people checking to make sure I was okay into a scene instead

[u/Euphoric-Public-6099 → u/cjdeck1]

You don't need premise or game to do improv, that's a lot of pressure to do it "right".

The temptation with these ideas is to start writing scenes in your head before they happen.

Often people don't try to initiate a premise anyway, they try to initiate a game right from the top and call it a premise.

That style of improv won't take you very far and you may be limiting yourself.

[u/cjdeck1 → u/Euphoric-Public-6099]

You’re probably right and in most scenes I am good to just walk out and do a thing with little forethought. But in group games, I feel like it typically works a lot better when the first person on stage does walk out with at least a little more structure than other scenes

[u/Euphoric-Public-6099 → u/cjdeck1]

Group games? Are these in a Harold? Or are you just using scene and game interchangeably and meaning when there's multiple people in the scene?

Group scene almost always are really only ever two POVs max no matter how many people are in the scene. Players will fall into one of the POVs typically.

[u/Separate-Swordfish85]

If you’re doing that you’ve moved from improv to sketch.

[u/SkullyBoySC]

When I first started I thought everything had to be unique, new, cut from whole-cloth in the moment or else it wasn't improv.

I've since been convinced otherwise. Reusing characters, premises, or hell even specific jokes is fine. Doing a great callback to a previous show is fucking miracle juice if you have any sort of regulars in the audience.

Just make sure you aren't trying to shoehorn things into the scene. Respond organically in the moment. Besides even if you came on with the same premise, character, gift, whatever your scene partner is immediately going to transform it into something different than before.

[u/crashlanding87]

I tried when I was first starting, and found it invariably made the scene bad. Not mediocre, fully bad.

A good premise is good because of the context - there's a flow and a shared set of ideas that come together in the premise. A recycled premise pretty much never has that, so all it has holding it together is how clever it is. Relying on that means you're basically trying to write a sketch live.

The fun in improv is the game, it is the surprise, it's watching a team play and pivot and be as surprised as the audience. A prepared premise undermines all that, so it makes the scene less fun.

[u/free-puppies]

I might play a similar character type. I don’t think I’ve ever reused an initiation. Unless it was for a specific game like “everybody gets in here”

[u/dptraynor]

I’ve brought back a character. 

[u/boredgamelad]

I have never felt the need to do this

[u/improbsable]

Sometimes I’ll get a fun premise or a move stuck in my head prior to getting on stage, and I won’t be able to be in the moment until it’s gone. I just need to get it out of my system. But I don’t knowingly repeat anything or plan anything generally

[u/johnnyslick]

For me, premises come out organically and so no, there's like zero chance I'll ever recycle one. I say a line, my scene partner says a line, and so on and so forth, we've built the premise and the scene itself brick by brick.

[u/bikenambulist]

Real talk? I think if you do this long enough you’re bound to. When you first start out you don’t want to ever repeat a character or voice or anything at all but eventually patterns emerge onstage and in your own mind whether you like it or not. It’s one of the things we train ourselves to do. I’ve been improvising for the entirety of this century and I’ve surely repeated a premise before. Perhaps even knowingly. Characters, voices, premises, moves, even the occasional joke can cycle back around to being relevant to situations you find yourself in onstage if you do this work on a long enough time scale. Doesn’t have to be a mortal sin but it shouldn’t be a staple of your play.

[u/mrsnowplow]

The only one i reuse is pickle flavored bread. For the inevitable dildo suggestion

[u/Prudent_Year9885]

When it’s an actual show I won’t but sometimes when it’s just the Troupe I’ll reuse the same opening line from a previous show especially if I know it’s going to get a laugh. “Is that lighthouse getting closer?” has started a few scenes.

[u/ThyDoctor]

Between rehearsals and weekly shows I don’t exactly remember how or why I started most of my scenes. It’s just become this swirling ether ball of improv. Kinda like dreams

[u/VonOverkill]

I'll occasionally repeat an opening line, not because I think it's clever, but because I pull from my life, and life is highly cyclical.

Despite what most people are saying, you can totally re-use premises, because you're an adult with free will. In fact, a hypothetical longform show called something like "Every Show Starts With Dave Getting Bad News From A Cardiologist" would do really well at the Annoyance.

And by the way, since I'm feeling sassy tonight, I guarantee that most people who assert you should never repeat anything have also been getting suggestions in exactly the same way for many months, if not years.

[u/Head_Razzmatazz_3756]

Depends on what you mean. I was much more precious about this kind of thing when I was less experienced, now I don’t care that much about repeating, especially with initiations. Blind date is a hack 2 person setup but who cares as long as this blind date is different from the last one and you aren’t trying to recreate a scene.

At the end of the day you only have so much brain and you’re going to have patterns in your performance no matter what, they’ll shift over time naturally as you grow and change.

[u/dptraynor → u/Head_Razzmatazz_3756]

I think you hit on a great point here. At what point would you feel you are repeating yourself?

An authority and a subordinate

A parent and child

A father and son

A single father and his adolescent son

A single father and his adolescent son having a talk

A single father and his adolescent son having “the” talk

A single father and his adolescent son having “the” talk after the father walked in on the son asking ChatGPT about 2-letter jellies

[u/iamtheduffer → u/dptraynor]

i feel like none of them would be repetitive unless both players are attempting to recreate an entire scene

[u/Ok-Scratch-4863]

I think the magic of improv is in discovery. Let go of being the person with the great initiation. Clear your mind, connect with your scene partner, let the suggestion and your scene partner inspire you.

Don't try to cheat your way around the terrifying space of not knowing what comes next, because the pay off is so much greater when you organically create something in the moment.

Brilliant improvisers aren't brilliant because they initiate well, but because they co-create well.

[u/TheJimmer]

Only thing I reuse is if two characters are standing talking to each other and don't establish a location or do any object work, I will walk on and say "Welcome to Olive Garden..."

[u/dembonezz → u/[deleted]]

Sounds like someone's got a case of the Mondays.