On being wrong
Comedy improv is my life. At least lately: I'm taking East Bay Improv's Performance Improv class on Tuesday and Thursday nights (to culminate in a performance on Saturday, June 22 — mark your calendars) and the San Francisco Bay Area Theatresports (SFBATS) Beginning Class on Sundays.
Today at BATS, we did an exercise from Keith Johnstone's Impro: walk around the room, pointing at things, and calling them by anything other than their name.
That ought to be the easiest thing in the world: there are tens of thousands of things you can say, and only a few things you can't. But it's surprising how often I found my mind going blank other than for the 'right' name of something, which I owe to decades of socialization in wanting to be right all the time.
It's a wonderful exercise. Try at at home.
[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]
It seems to be easier for me to be systematically wrong than randomly wrong, to fall into patterns of listing things that fall into a different category (forest things rather than living room things) or just-off things (naming the thing next to the one you're pointing at). It also, oddly, seems to be easier for me to be wrong if I switch languages. "Post office" and "cat" and "pen" are evidently much more easily switched around in another language, and the ease of it was pretty nearly inversely proportional to my familiarity with the language (Japanese, Norwegian, French, and English, in order of ascending difficulty).
For what it's worth.
Posted by Mris on June 3 2002 22:07