Who are we?

A friend of mine told me about a time when they complimented another improvisor on how they have such fun characters, and that improvisor did not take it as a compliment! I don’t think I would either, but I can’t totally say why, so this post will be: at worst, me sharing my confusion and at best, uh… coherent?

One thing that seems to be the case is that some people say, “I don’t like game, I like more character-based improv”. (Sometimes they say “…I like more relationship-based improv” - these people are for sure astray; good games need relationships.) I guess maybe it’d be good to say what a character might mean in this context. I think, no matter how close-to-self we’re playing, we’re always playing a character when we’re in a scene - I don’t think this is what people mean by “character-based” improv. So, a Character™ must be something else.

A few things that might make up a character are:

Physicality
Backstory
Justification (or philosophy)
Accent/vocal affect
Emotion

These things definitely inform one another and aren’t totally independent! Maybe there other things too! If you think of any, I’d love to know what they are (leave a comment)! But, if these are the things, then maybe a normal, non-trademark-character that we all play in scenes has a moderate level of each of these things. And maybe what makes a Character™ is that one (or more?) of these facets is exaggerated. See a visualization of this difference below, where the radial axis is something like magnitude of absurdity (0 being not absurd and 100 being very absurd)!

A character skill chart! (These types of graphs are called “radar” or “spider” charts — took me some Googling to figure that out! And I made this using this website: https://www.chartjs.org/docs/latest/charts/radar.html)

Here are a couple Kristen Wiig SNL sketches to quickly test this framework. First up is Sue, who gets very excited about surprise parties.

And here’s how I might break it down using that same visualization.

And next is Kristen Wiig’s Target Lady, with bonus JT character, Peg.

And here’s my attempt at a visualization for Target Lady and Peg!

I think that was a big (fun! for me!) distraction! I wonder if people who like Character™-based improv are just less interested in justifications. I think that also might tend to lead to more narrative improv. Accents, backstories, and physicalities imply things about a character’s personal journey in a way that justifications probably do not. Often, (in my experience) bad (in my opinion) game-based Harolds have second beats that are just narrative continuations of the characters in the first beats. But maybe those characters just aren’t interesting/clear/big enough to warrant seeing them again, and that’s what I’m imagining when I’m thinking of bad Harolds.

Maybe this is a false dichotomy. Maybe I just wanted to figure out how to make (and what to call) spider charts! Let me know what you think!

Is this game?