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Are you cast in an American comedy? Are you auditioning for drama school? Or ever wondered why they say, “Dying is easy, but Comedy is hard?” Then let me share my experience as an American actor whose been acting in comedy since 1979, plus coaching actors on how to give winning auditions to get into drama schools, as well as picking up a few awards for my screenwriting.
American Comedy is different than British comedy and it requires a different approach. It’s not enough to try to find a way to “say the lines funny”. As a matter of fact, that’s the worst way to approach American comedy; it’s the fastest way to turn off your audience and bore yourself to tears before the end of the run.
To generalize, British comedy tends to favor clever wordplay and irony. American comedy is based on two things:
These people are not normal, otherwise the writer wouldn’t have created them. Normal, well-balanced people are not funny. Your character, finding themselves in a challenging situation, is driven by a character weakness, and it’s your job to search for it. This weakness is very deep within them and it colors their personality, and they don’t even know it. Their rational mind has no control over it. Where did it come from? They have latched onto it in order to protect themselves and to survive in a universe that is frightening, frustrating or just disorderly — just like you and me, and crucially, your audience. And that’s where the comedy is going to come in. Once you set these flawed people in a dramatic situation, their character flaw drives them to neurotic levels, and it expresses itself in a heightened way. The audience watches your character as the struggle through the developing story – and then they laugh, for two reasons:
SO QUESTION: How much energy does it take for Comedy?
ANSWER: a lot more than you’re used to. If you don’t raise your energy level to the same magnitude of your character’s neuroses, you are, in essence, lying to the audience. And you won’t be acting in a comedy.
So your job is to study the script thoroughly and brainstorm: What is my character’s weakness? Clues will come to you when you think about how they react in challenging situations, what sets them off, what drives them bonkers, how they relate to other characters, and how they may change for the better through the story.
Your character must never, for one single moment, think that they’re in a comedy. And they must never think that what they’ve just said is funny. You the actor knows it’s a laugh line, but the character must be innocent of this. Any actor or character who thinks that they’re funny, or tries to be funny, will betray that suspension of disbelief with the audience, and the audience will be robbed of the objectivity and joy of laughing with/at your character. Oh they’ll laugh for a while, but only because you’re forcing them to give you a “mercy hump”. By willing them to laugh, you are forcing them into being your scene partner, and they will tire quickly. So you must abandon the need to be funny and get a reaction from the audience in order to suit your demands.
“I just don’t get comedy these days,” says John Ashton, veteran American comic actor. “Actors should play a scene seriously, but let the situation be funny. If you play it funny, it’s unfunny.”
Want proof? Imagine that you’re enduing the latest Dad joke and the person telling it begins to giggle, as they try to get out the punch line. It lands. And you groan. Why? The teller thinks it’s going to be funny before they even get to it. Which leads to:
Much of American comedy comes from surprise. There is an agreement between the actor and audience that they are both experiencing the play for the first time. The character is always experiencing the events in a scene from a state of innocence; they have no idea what’s coming next, so the actor must never anticipate anything, especially a laugh line that is coming up. If they anticipate it, the audience will also anticipate it, and then the audience won’t be surprised by the event, thus killing the laugh. This is what makes Comedy so hard: this demand for the actor to have a deliberate blank, Zen state of mind, where the actor silently says: “I’ve never been in this situation before, I’ve never thought these thoughts before, and I have no idea what I’m going to say next.” Good acting skills for any occasion.
Go back to your Meisner philosophy: the seed of the craft of acting is the reality of doing. The actor must think the character’s thoughts at the same speed that the character is thinking them (again from a state of innocence, deliberately forgetting that there’s a laugh line coming up). The actor must never think faster than the character thinks. This is very hard, because the actor often falls into the trap of thinking at the faster speed that has resulted from the many rehearsals of the scene. The actor must allow a stimulus to land in the mind before they can react to it.
For example: a gag from the play ‘Picasso at the Lapin Agile’. A beautiful young woman comes into a French bar, spots the great Pablo Picasso, and immediately begins gushing all over him. All of this is overheard by the other people in the bar who are sick of hearing about the genius Picasso. The admirer then freezes and says: “You’re not Schmendiman!” She turns on her heels and walks out, leaving Picasso wounded. Up to this point, the characters Freddy and Germaine have anticipated that during the Admirer’s speech, she thinks he’s Picasso, and the shock lands in their minds when they learn that she was actually wanting to meet a character called Schmendiman. If the actors allow themselves to process this surprise at the exact speed that the audience is processing those thoughts, this will create a reaction in the audience. Anticipate the moment, and you kill it.
Playing American Comedy then follows the paradigm of good acting. It’s like riding the crest of a wave. If the crest of the wave has just passed (i.e. you’re hanging onto past performances and how they laughed at you more last night) – then you’re clinging onto that past wave as if in a state of grief – you’re bobbing along behind the wave with dead energy. The other problem is: if you anticipate the crest of the wave (if you project into the future of your upcoming gag, and get nervous and dependent on the audience to laugh at you) the anticipation and control freakery will begin to make you rush with anticipation. Stay in the moment, on the crest: watch, listen, absorb, think and respond. And give up the need to be funny.
So, as you can see, there’s a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to doing justice to comedy. The payoff though is incredible: your work will be fresh, I promise you you’ll be funnier, and you’ll get to experience the same joy every night that your audience is having, because you’ll all experiencing this wonderful event for the first time.
If you’d like to buy Scott Sedita’s wonderful book called The Eight Characters of Comedy, you can do so from my Must Reads page on the Neuro Acting website. And there’s no commission for me, I’m just trying to help you. Break a leg!
Get in touch HERE if you need help with an upcoming audition, American accent training or questions about a NEURO ACTING course.