"He taught people to commit. Like: “Don’t walk out there with one hand in your pocket unless there’s somethin’ in there you’re going to bring out.” You gotta commit. You’ve gotta go out there and improvise and you’ve gotta be completely unafraid to die. You’ve got to be able to take a chance to die. And you have to die lots. You have to die all the time. You’re goin’ out there with just a whisper of an idea. The fear will make you clench up. That’s the fear of dying. When you start and the first few lines don’t grab and people are going like, “What’s this? I’m not laughing and I’m not interested,” then you just put your arms out like this and open way up and that allows your stuff to go out. Otherwise it’s just stuck inside you."
—
Bill Murray, speaking on Del Close.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/man-at-his-best/q-and-a/bill-murray-interview-0612#ixzz1vu97244C
(via improvisorsimprovisor)
(via claireayoublaughingatthings)
Ben Schwartz Adam Scott Justin Long(?) and Zach Woods just performed with the godly Neil Casey at a fucking amazing UCB show and Retta Sirleaf was in the audience whatever, guys
"One of the concerns about doing a trivia show was that there’s a right answer and a wrong answer. There was a lot of celebration of being a kid at Nickelodeon, and they didn’t want to make kids feel bad about themselves. They realized that with this idea of a dare, there was no penalty for not knowing the answer; in fact, not knowing the answer made something even better happen."
—
Bob Mittenthal, on Double Dare
No harm, no foul, no boundaries.
britajames:
williebhines:
Reblog and describe the best improv scene you ever saw.
This is so difficult…but, i’m going to go with Ryan’s creepy dinner host scene from one of Grandma’s Ashes’ last harolds…it was a damn near perfectly executed group game. People weren’t talking over themselves, the thing just felt so right but it was so fucking hysterical because it was paced ever so properly, it built and built and built.
Rita actually mentioned the first one that came to my head. This is a pretty difficult question, so I’ll just write an awesome one instead of blowing off my whole work shift with the entirely-more-fun task of choosing a favorite:
I think it was at Improv Nerds, with one of the teams that performs before the Nerd-set. There were two people lying in a bed, each of them writing in his or her own diary with an “internal” monologue. The girl poetically wrote about social anxieties she was having (I think), and somewhat “typical” “girly” diary topics. When she finished her entry, the boy lying next to her (Marshall Stratton) wrote in his diary about farts and buttcracks. A fun juxtaposition, but it wasn’t immediately clear where it was going.
I believe it was Joey Price who made the next move — he came in from the back line, pulled someone aside and said: “Mrs. Frank, we love Anne’s diary, really, but we just don’t think Peter’s will sell.” And it was so fucking perfect — since it hadn’t been directly stated, you thought they were a couple until that very moment. But as soon as this support move came out, it was just like, “Yes! Of course that’s Anne Frank in an attic, and of course that’s her disgusting little brother.” And it started a really fun game of the lost history of Peter Frank, and a Peter Frank museum that, I believe, “smells like an asshole.”
Nailed it.
There’s nothing quite like meeting a new group of people and hearing someone say the words, “would anyone be up for a Taboo night?”
"I think somewhere around high school, your brain starts to gel, to harden. Before that, there’s this time where anything is possible and the more things that you artistically and educationally have in your repertoire, the more you become a child of larger possibilities."
—
Mark Mothersbaugh, On Rugrats
Reason #1 billion to love Nickelodeon (and do improv).
