Relationship scenes are not about clever premises; they’re about the friction between people behaving honestly. They de-emphasize the what. They are born not from words or clever initiations but from simple emotional reactions.

the audience quits believing in the reality of your scene, they’ll stop caring.

Chicago also has more improv than any city in the world.

If I had to throw a net over all of the reasons why we don’t like certain movies or books, it would be this: we quit believing what we’re seeing is real.

that expression. If they’re eventually going to be useless, you’ve probably picked the wrong rules in the first place.

clever premises can be a bit of a trap, because they can make us feel that once we reveal the clever premise we’ve done all the work we need to do for a successful scene. In fact, our scene, and our workload, have only just begun at that point. Strong players don’t need funny ideas; they make simple ideas funny by playing them well.

changes weren’t forced, because the trail of inspiration

The trick with general agreement scenes is that both players share the same point of view and keep pushing and adding information. There won’t be a frustrated straight man to question their behavior, pull information from them, or provide them with the contrast to enable absurd behavior.

“You gotta know the rules before you can break them.” I’ve never liked