Every Sunday night for six years, Louis Kornfeld and Rick Andrews have walked onstage at the Magnet Theater in Manhattan and created a refined hourlong play from scratch. These impromptu comedies stand out in a New York improv scene filled with quick-hit jokes and formulaic patterns, appearing more like scripted theater than almost any other improv show in the city.
In an attempt to figure out how elite improvisers think so quickly, and on the same page, I debriefed with shorter, bearded Kornfeld, 38, and the taller, clean-shaven Andrews, 33, right after they left the stage, then again two days after their performance, with the assistance of video to try to break down the unspoken process they use to build a show together. (Though the theater has suspended operations because of the coronavirus, Kornfeld & Andrews and other shows normally staged there are being livestreamed on Twitch TV.)
When Kornfeld and Andrews discuss their work, they can sound almost mystical, rarely talking about creating a show so much as discovering something that was already there. But what also becomes clear was that despite how effortless their shows seemingly come together, an extraordinary amount of action goes on inside their heads in every moment.
The opening
Kornfeld: All we need to begin our show is the suggestion of a non-geographic location.”
Audience member: “Bowling alley.”
At the start of any improv scene, every move has a huge impact, providing a foundation that both constrains and inspires what comes next. With that audience suggestion, Andrews told me, he immediately imagined a rowdy St. Louis alley he used to visit, Tropicana Lanes, a bustling place with a lot of noise.
They each grab a pair of chairs.
Andrews sits down and strikes a pose of jaunty confidence, head swiveling to observe the chaos around him.
As soon as Andrews took this posture, he started thinking about it and drawing conclusions: “It showed I was feeling good, but also trying to show that I’m feeling good, which is not the same thing,” he said.
The chairs were critical. By having two extras, they decided they were at the lane, not at the bar or walking to get popcorn. That opened up the possibility that someone new might be coming. Andrews suspected someone was. Kornfeld had no idea. In his peripheral vision, Kornfeld saw the bouncy, assured energy of his partner, and he moved in the opposite direction.
Kornfeld (trying to enter his name on a pretend computerized scoreboard): What do I shorten my name to?
Andrews: Pete?
Kornfeld: Nah. I want it to be —
Andrews: And they only give you three letters? …
Kornfeld: It feels weird for it to be Pet.
And with that, an entire psychology and back story was born.
“Once he named me Pete and then Pet would be my name, it instantly made me think it was insulting to think of someone as being like a pet,” Kornfeld recalled. “I knew immediately I felt small and insecure and reassured around this guy. I knew I would be slowly revealing my insecurities so you can beef me up and make me feel better about myself.”
That sparked the question that would dominate the subtext of the first half of the show: What was making him so nervous? Andrews’s calm response to his friend’s insecurity clarified his character and the central relationship of the show. He didn’t tease or offer a big reaction. Part of this, Andrews said, is a strategy for opening scenes. “If you keep the energy steady,” he said, “you hear the notes of the characters over and over again and then it just helps slowly coming to an agreement about what’s happening.”
But it was also a choice indicating this was a real friendship, and that he was playing someone trying to help. “If I bristled, that would suggest a dynamic where I’m poking you and making you feel hurt,” Andrews said, adding that he believed that for characters to remain interesting for an hour, you have to empathize with them.
Kornfeld (deciding to input his friend’s name, Dou, short for Doug, first): You happy with that?
Andrews: Yeah. I feel fine about it.
Kornfeld: Back to Position 2. That didn’t buy me nearly enough time. I just feel like when the girls come here, I just don’t want to be Pet.
Andrews had begun to think this might be romantic anxiety. But he wasn’t sure until he turned his head to look around, and Kornfeld fretted about being called Pet. Now both performers were on the same page: It’s a show about a double date.
Andrews (after some disagreement over whether “adorable” is the right adjective for Pete): What’s your male machismo, what’s your attractiveness, what’s your main No. 1 selling point?
Kornfeld: Oh, confidentiality.
Andrews cited a theory by Keegan-Michael Key comparing improv comedy to a camera starting in a close-up and then slowly zooming out. But there comes a point where the picture frame gets set and that’s when Pete said his main selling point was “confidentiality.”
This odd response (“It sounds like confident so it’s almost like it’s as close as I can get,” Kornfeld said later) got the show’s first big laugh. Andrews made a mental note: This will be useful later.
The biggest fear
Kornfeld: I haven’t had sex in a, in a little bit.
Andrews: OK. No judgment here.
Once the opening situation and relationship has been established, the next step is to answer the central question of the show. “The audience needs one clear thing to explain why I feel so uncertain,” Kornfeld said, “this guy’s deepest fear.” He added that if you don’t push forward and “grab the trapeze,” the show risks losing momentum.
Andrews: Days, months, years?
Kornfeld: A couple years.
Andrews: OK. Cool.
Kornfeld: Four, five years.
Andrews: More than a couple.
Kornfeld: Maybe six.
Andrews knew this was a familiar comic trope plumbed in movies like “The 40-year-Old Virgin,” and that’s why he was skeptical of it. There are cheap laughs to be had with a big response. “I am aware that people think this funny, but I don’t,” he said. “I actually feel at the heart of it, it’s just a person feeling vulnerable.”
Noticing his partner’s posture and mood, he asked himself how a friend would respond and decided that the right move was to be generous and reassuring, to downplay the issue. So much anxiety is built around sex that the laughs will be there anywhere.
Kornfeld: A dry spell.
Andrews: A drought! Your libido is a desert now. It’s been deprived of water for quite a lot.
Kornfeld: Yeah, it’s a moistureless libido. The days are hot and the nights are very, very cold.
Andrews: Very cold. Few plants and animals can survive.
Kornfeld: And the ones that can, real serious.
Andrews: They’re special. A couple snakes. Some cacti.
Kornfeld knew that Andrews was a fan of nature documentaries, and saw possibilities in his eyes. “I could tell right there you were thinking about ‘Planet Earth,’ the documentary,” Kornfeld told him.
This back and forth is what these artists somewhat derisively call “a little bit of a move,” but it’s not only that. In real life, they said, friends joke with each other. And they do so with as much playfulness and specificity as possible. “I don’t subscribe to the Jerry Seinfeld school that some words are funny.” Andrews said, “It’s about how you say it and the context. Like when I say ‘cactuses’ and ‘snakes,’ they are picturing those actual things. But I could say that other things that were just as specific and probably would have gotten a similar kind of laugh.”
The endgame
Kornfeld (after telling his date that Pete and Doug know each other from college when a third roommate had a breakdown that terrified them): Fear creates a strong imprint, and you become very imprint-vulnerable with another person in a very terrifying experience. And so we imprinted on each other and have been best friends ever since.
Andrews (about to bowl but cringing as he hears the story): Pete’s really confidential.
For 40 minutes, Andrews had “confidentiality” on his mind. He’d been waiting for the right opportunity to reintroduce it and this callback was the start of the endgame of the show. “In the first 10 minutes, you’re trying to get a sense of the layout, but we now know who these characters are and where the hot spots are,” Andrews said, explaining that there was more room for playfulness.
Andrews (trying to play off a bowling misfire as if it was a strike): It bounced a little. Hey! There you go.
In analyzing the implications of this move, Andrews also made a deeper callback to his first move: the way his posture performed confidence and happiness, suggesting it was merely a cover. Maybe he and his friend are both nervous. In trying to help his friend, he reacted too fast, making the situation more awkward, and revealing his own anxiety.
Not all of this was operating on conscious level, Andrews said: “I wonder if that’s lingering in my brain, that I’m also nervous and futzing around before a date.”
As the show moved toward the ending, what began as a small realistic scene about the anxiety before a date escalates into something more heightened and overtly comic.
“We want to get to that exaggerated point so gradually that you don’t even realize that it’s been so exaggerated,” Kornfeld said. “By the end, this is no longer a real-life moment. It’s a ridiculous comedy moment. But we don’t want to start pounding that comedy moment so you expect more comedy moments. We want to get you there without seeing the work that got you there.”
Source: Television - nytimes.com
