Under The Influence

One night, a few years ago, my wife asked me a question as I was talking about my improv group. I’d mentioned my frustration at lulls in our show – moments where scenes seemed to drag, go nowhere, or be unfunny, and specifically when it seemed to me like my fellow performers somewhat dropped the ball. To me a clear comedy opening was there, but they hadn’t seen it. Or I had offered something which had been poorly built on. Not because they are bad improvisers, but because they didn’t see that particular possibility of funny. She asked me what our common comedy influences were.

I realised I didn’t know.

The next week, at rehearsal, I asked the group: what are our shared comedy influences? I offered a few of my own. The League of Gentlemen, Kids in the Hall, Stewart Lee, Saturday Night Live, Chris Morris, Reeves and Mortimer, Upright Citizens Brigade, etc. Those present shrugged. There was little joy of recognition or bond of shared respect. Others then followed me with their own comedy influences. My shrugs matched their earlier ones.

At the time I thought maybe it didn’t matter. Perhaps it was the secret to our chemistry: all of us bringing different and disparate influences into the mix and combining the mess to make a sum that was greater than its parts?

Theoretically the same had been true of my band, Academy Morticians. I brought the punk rock, Si brought the Queen, our drummer, Steve, the death metal and our guitarist, Tom, a Manic Street Preachers obsession. The clash of influences led to a beautiful tonal carnival of melodic and harmony laced punk rock with some kick-ass satanic blast beats.

Except we all loved Queen. And the Manics. And when it came to punk rock there wouldn’t have been a band if Si and I hadn’t first listened to Green Day, Dead Kennedys and Bad Religion together in my back garden on a cheap cassette player. Even the death metal, though not a favourite genre, had its occasional moments on all of our stereos. Although we maybe put the emphasis on different words, we were all essentially singing from the same hymn sheet about what “good” music was. And when the band broke up for a time, the “creative differences” which led to the formation of solo and side projects could be easily redescribed as no longer agreeing on what good music sounded like. I wanted to pursue more punky punk combined with experimental influences (No Means No and Mike Patton), and just a soupçon of Nick Cave, and Si did not. The difference is evident in the respective musical paths we took afterwards. And when Bullet of Diplomacy, my band which followed, broke up it was largely because the guitarist and I had different views about what I saw as guitar “wanking” and he did not. At that point we were already on our second drummer because the first over-complicated things with unnecessary fills and nonsense. His idea of “good” drumming clashed with our own.

These disputes are important to document because that drummer, and that guitarist are the Academy Morticians guitarist and drummer! We were no longer active as a band because we no longer agreed on what music we were trying to make. Crucially, when we did all agree again, a few years ago, we got together and made a new EP. And there were no arguments and no disputes. Steve’s drumming was as complex as it needed to be without crossing the line into metal, Tom’s guitar soloed with a technical excellence that was exactly right alongside Si’s other guitar, which was now finally bashing out punky chords again after all those years of non-aggressive electro-pop and acoustic singer-songwriting. And my bass guitar slotted right in there too. Punky, but not too punky. Raw, but not ragged.

The reason we were able to do that was because, despite all the other musical stuff we had done in the intervening years, we knew when we came together again exactly what makes something a Morticians song and not a Bullet of Diplomacy, Woe Betides, Pixieland or an Isenscur song. We had a shared vision of what this band should be. If anything, we only broke it up because the songs we wanted to write, we knew, were not right for the group.

Just like years before, when I had recorded the Whining Maggots album with Paul Raggity and Sebby Zatopek. We all knew what we were looking for – something Ramonesy. Something Screeching Weasel. Something pop punk. And importantly for me and the songs I wrote for the project – that was not the sort of music we were making in Bullet of Diplomacy. Those songs didn’t fit there.

I wonder with my improv group – how can we work collectively to do something funny if we don’t all agree about what funny is?

One answer could be something I heard Penn Jillette talk about on his Sunday School podcast – that when you create something it is better to focus on what you don’t like than what you do like.

This rang true with Academy Morticians too. While Si and I, in it’s early days, agreed on certain musical influences, our band wasn’t ever trying to emulate Green Day, even if our origin lay in Green Day covers. At some point we wanted to write our own stuff. And that stuff was trying to do something that hadn’t been done: combining the pop punk of Green Day with the political lyrics of Dead Kennedys and the harmonies of Bad Religion and Queen.

I’d listen to Dead Kennedys and wish they were sometimes more tuneful; to Green Day and wish their songs weren’t all about drugs and girls; to Bad Religion and wish you didn’t need a dictionary to understand their lyrics; to Queen and wish their lyrics weren’t often so pointless. So we were not just trying to copy what we liked, we were trying to improve upon what we didn’t like.

So while my improv group perhaps have no clear shared comedy influences, perhaps we have a shared mutual disdain for certain things in improv which we don’t want to have in our shows? My own list of pet peeves would be:

• Themed shows (i.e. improvised Harry Potter, improvised Sherlock, improvised Agatha Christie, etc.) While enjoyable to watch if you’re a fan of the theme, they are boring and formulaic to perform and require a lot of prep and research, as well as a shared mutual passion for the thing you are improvising (which we, sharing no influences, clearly do not have!)
• Too much structure/ too many rules. Give me a blank slate and a word for inspiration and I’m off! Let’s discover the stories and the ideas together rather than hitting certain marks at certain times. Let’s be creative! Not slaves to arbitrary rules.
• Unfunny improv. Improvised drama just plain sucks. It will never be as good as something someone has thought about and scripted the careful emotional manipulation required for it to be successful. That’s not to say there can’t be serious moments or dark stuff in there, but an improvised “drama” is inherently disappointing, whereas improvised comedy is demonstrably pleasing because of the immediate feedback from the audience that tells us we have hit the mark: their laughter. Jokes can be spontaneous and just as good as those which are carefully crafted. Improvised drama will always be second rate.
• Lame endings. Your one job as an improv show is to find a satisfying ending out of all the random ideas generated in that show. And it’s fairly easy to do with just a little bit of thought. Shows that don’t, and try to get away with ooh, but look at all the thematic links as you sit clapping feeling underwhelmed can fuck right off.
• Giving audiences what they want. By this I mean taking an audience suggestion – say, “cheese” – and then doing a scene about cheese! Audience input should inspire not dictate. They will be just as pleased, if not more so, to hear the callback later to an idea generated organically in a cheese-inspired scene (say the cheesy pop song you sang returning later as someone’s ringtone) than to just hear the word “cheese” endlessly shoe-horned into uninspired scenes.

But whether my group agrees with this list of hate, or if it actually describes their own favourite forms of improv is hard to judge without first knowing what they are aiming for with their comedy. After all, even if all of us in Academy Morticians agreed that Green Day and Queen’s lyrics weren’t political enough, Bad Religion and Queen had lovely harmonies but equally dodgy lyrics, and Dead Kennedys needed more melody in their mayhem, the band would have sounded a lot different than it did if our shared influences meant we were aiming for Simon and Garfunkel instead of something punk rock!

I posed the question again two weeks ago to the three of us who could make that week’s rehearsal. We are in a time of transition. Working on a new show and taking time off from our previous monthly spot until April. A good time to reassess and get some specifics about what we are trying to achieve.

Although only three of the five of us were there, there remained no obvious common ground on influences, and we had very different individual pet peeves about improv. We had a good chat, but moved no further towards our new show. The following week I couldn’t make it and the other four worked on some new rules and structure for narrative improv. One of the very things my ideal improv show would do without.

In the last month I have read Paul Myers’ excellent Kids in the Hall biography: One Dumb Guy, as well as the Monty Python collective autobiography: The Pythons. Both books were excellent, but my main take away was that in each group five or six very disparate people with very different performance instincts came together to form two amazing comedy troupes because the Pythons all agreed that the Goon Show and Beyond the Fringe were hilarious, and the Kids in the Hall shared a love of Monty Python.

What is our Goon Show? What is our Monty Python?