My kids all got together one recent Saturday for a potluck. They had to invite me, of course -- because I’m the only one who knows how to make sticky rice (from my years in Thailand), and the grandkids all dote on my recipe. After the meal, while everyone was sprawled on a couch or laid out on the floor, a trip to ImprovBroadway was mooted about. It seemed like a splendid cap to the day, so babysitting was arranged and we all traipsed merrily out to the strip mall where they have their theater. To my critical eye the show was only so-so, even though my offspring guffawed so heartily they could barely keep down their Nicoise salad and grilled salmon.
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For you see, I had once studied improvisation under the great Dudley Riggs at his Brave New Workshop in Minneapolis. I figured it would strengthen my ability to rearrange some of the clown routines I was tired of doing -- things like Bigger and Bigger, and the Broom Jump. The old corny stuff that killed Vaudeville and would never be seen in a Buster Keaton movie (although it appeared with regularity in the Three Stooges canon.) So when it comes to improv, I know my beans.
Dudley was not teaching too many classes personally when I took the course some forty years ago -- but he often popped in to see how pupils were progressing. And to put the bite on any wayward students who were behind in their tuition. Dudley was an old circus hand -- he and his family having worked for Ringling Brothers back in the 1930’s -- and he knew and cherished the value of making his nut.
I regret to say I was not a particularly apt pupil when it came to ad-libbing. I had lately found myself becoming timid and cautious when it came to performing as a clown. I needed something to bolster my self confidence. My normal response to being thrown into new scenarios was to take a pratfall. Especially off of a folding chair. I had a patented fall I did from a folding chair that left me spreadeagled on the ground, and then when I attempted to become vertical I would entangle my leg in the chair like a bear trap -- it was a sure fire laugh getter. But I quickly found out that my physical comedy expertise was not welcomed in improv class. I particularly remember one young lady who was teaching us the “Yes, and . . . “ improv technique, who blew up at me when I fell off my folding chair once too often.
“Stop using the f*****g chair to disrupt everything!” she screamed in my face. “You’re here to learn how to affirm your f*****g partner!”
It may have been overly graphic, but her point was made -- I stopped relying on pratfalls during improv class.
Still, I was considered a very backward pupil. The other members of my class had acting backgrounds, or at least enough social skills to interact verbally with their partners when told to become an eskimo in a laundromat or Ricky Ricardo on Jeopardy. I stumbled and mumbled my way through one improv exercise after another, until the day came when I was summoned to the office of Dudley Riggs himself. His white hair and black horn rim glasses gave him an avuncular air as he kindly bade me be seated. He wasted no time in getting down to brass tacks.
“You’re terrible at improv, Mr. Torkildson” he began. “Why are you wasting your money on classes here?”
I sheepishly told him I thought it would help me improve my clowning. He hadn’t known I was an alumni of Big Bertha, as was he -- and immediately his demeanor towards me lit up with glowing geniality. What were his idiot teachers doing with me to discourage such obvious talent? He invited me to lunch then and there, to “cut up jackpots” he cheerfully said. I cringed inwardly -- I have never liked the term ‘cut up jackpots,’ mostly because I rarely ever know any of the people in the long and involved stories I’m being told by other old circus troopers. Frankly, I’d rather discuss a good recipe for goulash than who was the catcher on the Pollack Brothers show back in 1954. Still, a free lunch is a free lunch.
We went to the Red Mill across the street from the school. It catered to the college crowd, so the pizza was mediocre and the cheap beer was served in gallon schooners that would scupper the saltiest sea dog. I had a hotdog and a chaste lemonade. After his first flagon of beer, Dudley began to unbend towards me.
“You really don’t need these classes at all” he told me. “Any good clown naturally knows how to improvise already. You do it all the time when you’re told to make the gag run long or short, or when something goes wrong with the blow off -- right?”
I had to agree with him. It was dawning on me that maybe I was paying good coin to reinvent the wheel.
When he asked me what my class was currently working on I told him we were doing the Cookbook exercise -- this is where you make up your own recipes for a cookbook from suggestions from the audience.
“What was your improvisation on that?” he asked.
“Uh, I couldn’t come up with anything -- so I sat and watched everyone else.”
“Balderdash!” he said to me with a grin. “Let’s do it right here. Gimme a recipe for snow soup!”
“Uh, add a cup of snow to two quarts of snow, and uh, stir until it turns to slush -- then add salt and pepper to taste.”
“There. Now how hard was that?”
I had to admit it wasn’t hard at all -- but that was because I felt comfortable with Dudley Riggs, not because I was an improv maven. I suddenly had the urge to take a pratfall off of my chair to see how he would react to that -- but decided against it. And then a memory suddenly came back to me -- when I first started clowning old Swede Johnson had told me “Pinhead, you always go for the jugular, don’t you?”
Riggs kept on talking, but I wasn’t listening anymore.
Yeah, the jugular. I was a certified zany and did whatever I damn well pleased in the ring or on the track. That was me, that was my clown character. And that’s when I performed the best, when I didn’t have to listen to or obey any rules or regulations -- like the dozens of rules my improv teachers were trying to enslave me with.
I threw down my cloth napkin and jumped out of my chair.
“Thanks for lunch, Mr. Riggs” I said briskly. “But getting my mojo back means I don’t need those fossilized teachers of yours anymore -- in fact, I never did!” I waltzed out of the Red Mill and improvised myself a clown job with a ragtag circus out of Lakeland Florida by showing up on the lot and offering to clown for nothing so they could see how I did. That’s how high my self confidence had come back. Within a week they were paying me a comfortable salary and I was doing old clown gags with new twists and new clown gags with old twists -- just having a ball and reveling in Laughter Lane once again. Laughter is my only real refuge and home in this cold sterile Waiting Room of a world we’re all stuck in. Waiting for Godot? Not me -- I’m waiting for the next big belly laugh!
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I started to tell my kids all about my improv experience after the show was over, but they had to get back to put their kids to bed or walk the dog or wax the ceiling -- some piddling thing. So I’ve had to write it down here instead. If any of you know one of my kids you might tell ‘em to read this sometime -- if they ever want to know anything about me. Which maybe they don’t.
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