We sometimes get bored with the same questions, and try asking for left-field ideas. It’s a question that draws out situations with potential emotional depth.Īsk-fors don’t have to be “out there”. They ask for something that someone is looking forward to, or dreading. When introducing their set, Middleditch & Schwartz use a very simple prompt to get a starting suggestion. (For a review, along with a great history of improv and its place in the arts world, check out this article on Vulture.) Interviewing the Audience I’ll assume you’ve watched them and will refer only to specific beats and examples. What I’d like to do here is point out what we can learn from these shows. I haven’t seen Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz in person and have no idea how these sets stack up to their usual act. Whether you find the improv funny (or even good) is subjective. ( Whose Line Is It Anyway? still comes up, but it’s been off the air for a long time and becoming harder to find every year.) Long-form improv is almost non-existent on film or TV, so the release of the Middleditch & Schwartz comedy specials on Netflix gives us an exciting opportunity. It’s much harder to write for a larger audience because there aren’t many common sources to refer to. When practicing improv skills, we usually have only our own scenes to talk about. For best results, you should watch the Middleditch & Schwartz comedy specials on Netflix before reading this article. It’s 2020, and we’re currently quarantined due to the Corona virus, so I suppose nights at laughing at the banter you’d have with buddies can be replaced by a few streaming episodes of Middleditch and Schwartz.As we all know, describing improv out of context is hard to understand. And again, I admittedly laugh on occasion. I was curious to see what merited an improv tour, and I do respect the confidence of the two performers in getting up and doing it. I suppose that sounds prudish of me, but swearing can be hilarious for punctuation, or perhaps when purposefully overused, but when it’s part of someone’s usual speaking patterns, and occurs every few words, it seems as unintelligent as any such repeated phrase – such as umms, or ‘you knows,’ – but with an added taint of laziness. I was entertained, but – and this is awful to say, because I wouldn’t want to go up in front of a crowd night after night and try to make stuff up on the fly – but I’m not sure the performances amounted to something better than might be conjured amongst a group of 30somethings during a night of drinking and chatting, especially given that swear-laden banter. Schwartz does his quirky snark bit, and Middleditch is uncomfortable, and they riff off of a scenario procured from the audience at the start of each episode – tell us about something upcoming that you’re excited for or nervous about – always latching on to the most obvious aspect of it, and then peppering in an exhaustive amount of ‘fucks’ that really undermined much of the humor. I did laugh out loud on a few occasions, but the bang-for-buck of waiting for the duo to find their way to those moments may not have been worth it, overall. Thomas Middleditch’s and Ben Schwartz’s improv tour, three episodes of which were given hour-ish long episodes as a Netflix series, is pretty much a straight line through my above opinions on the comedians and genre. They find a couple of good beats and groove, then someone goes off on a tangent, and eventually, it ends. I don’t think I have an outward bias towards improv humor, but I suppose I would lump it into the same pot as improv music: some acts thrive on the energy of the format to push compositions to surprising and satisfying levels many acts just sound like they’re doing what they’re doing – making things up. If I can again bring surface judgements into it as well, his somewhat stooped posture and clothing that accents his skinniness adds to that. Yes, my awareness of him comes from Silicon Valley, and whether or not that role typecast him, it was hard to not see him as the cringe humor-type that he portrays on that show. I wouldn’t have thought of Thomas Middleditch as a comedian outside of the context of TV. That he has glued up hair and cool sneakers makes him into a type that you probably work with, or is probably in your circle of friends. While I’ll allow that a huge part of comedy is simply presentation, Schwartz’s bits and contributions have often struck me as solely that: he’s the guy that says pretty standard stuff but with a quirky snark, and so the quirky snark encourages chuckles, while whatever was said maybe wasn’t all that funny in itself. I’ve laughed at Ben Schwartz’s work a couple of times. Created by: Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz
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