Sunday Punch hosted by Joy Joy Tragedy

Every week a new spiked fruit punch to sample!

WHERE: Upstairs Gallery, 5219 North Clark Street, Chicago
WHEN: Sunday nights at 7:30pm, October 18th through December 18th
HOW: FREE and BYOB (suggested $5 donation)

The first week will feature Ever Mainard:

And then some music by Daniel Byshenk:

And sketch comedy by RAM Chicago: Matt Mages, Kate Cohen, Mike Girts and Robert Reid.

Mom and me

Still, she was engaged with us on other levels. We could understand how she was feeling. She seemed to recognize us and her mood often improved a little when she interacted with one of us kids or with one of the many wonderful aids who helped take care of her. If you had gotten a cut or a bruise since your last visit, she might touch that part of your body. She was a nurse after all, she needed to care for people.

So what does this have to do with comedy? Well there were very few things that kept her attention in these last stages. In the earlier stages we had done crafts and puzzles and encouraged her to draw things. She couldn’t do any of these things after a while and one of the few things that seemed to capture her attention was television. She had her soaps that she always wanted to see and when the soaps were done, we would switch the channel to Hallmark and watch Little House on the Prairie or Mash.

One afternoon, they were running episodes of I Love Lucy instead of Mash and mom did something that she hadn’t done in some weeks, she laughed. It was a distinct and clear giggle. And it wasn’t some random event. She was clearly responding and laughing at the right moments. She got it and thought it was funny. Perhaps she couldn’t understand the words really, but some part of her brain still did get comedy. She wouldn’t be able to explain what just happened on the TV screen, but she knew it was funny.

After that day, my sister started buying all the DVD sets of I Love Lucy and watching it with mom became a frequent activity. Mom never got tired of it. Over time even her laughter became a little muted, but it never failed to elicit some giggles from her. I’m sure it gave her pleasure when few other things could.

So if you ever find yourself taking care of someone with dementia, I’d rent a DVD of I Love Lucy and give it a try. You might be surprised how much your loved one enjoys it. Let me know if it works for you.

And if you do comedy, remember how important it is to laugh. When most pleasures in life fail you, laughter can still break through.

It’s an interesting idea. If you are like me and interested in evolution, but haven’t read much about Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, you should take a look. But I’ll leave it Miller to actually lay out the argument. He does a much better job than I could.

Near the end of the book came the following passage. As an artist, this passage jumped off the page.

Among competent professionals in any field, there appears to be a fairly constant probability of success in any given endeavor. (Psychologist Dean Keith) Simonton’s data show that excellent composers do not produce a higher proportion of excellent music than good composers—they simply produce a higher total number of works. People who achieve extreme success in any creative field are almost always extremely prolific. Hans Eysenck became a famous psychologist not because all of his papers were excellent, but because he wrote over a hundred books and a thousand papers, and some of them happened to be excellent. Those who write only ten papers are much less likely to strike gold with any of them. Likewise with Picasso: if you paint 14,000 paintings in your lifetime, some of them are likely to be pretty good, even if most are mediocre. Simonton’s results are surprising. The constant probability of success idea sounds counterintuitive and of course there are exceptions to this generalization. Yet Simonton’s data on creative achievement are the most comprehensive ever collected and in every domain that he studied, creative achievement was a good indicator of the energy, time, and motivation invested in creative activity.

Let that sink in a little bit. No really. Let that sink in. Ponder it for a little bit before you read on.

I think most creative people I know would think something similar to this. If you want to be good at something, do it as much as you can. But I think we all tend to temper this by thinking that there is such a thing as talent, and talent is what separates the great from the good. Of course there is some truth to that. We have all met people who seem to have some special innate talent for music or art or comedy. We think they are great, just because they have a great talent.

In my field of comedy, I’ve often heard it said that some people are just funny. You can’t teach it. There have been a number of people I’ve met who were hilarious in their first improv class. I met Tina Fey and Jack McBrayer (of 30 Rock) years ago, when they were just starting out in improv, long before they were famous. They both seemed amazingly talented right from the beginning. Comedy seemed natural for both of them, and their success is no surprise to anyone who knew them years ago.

But maybe even then, they were simply more prolific than the rest of us. Perhaps they spent a lot more time when they were kids making people laugh or telling stories to their friends. By the time I met them in their early 20s, they had already spent much more time and effort developing their sense of humor than the average competent improvisor, as a natural part of their daily interactions.

Of course, we are talking about a correlation here, not necessarily a causation. It may simply be that those who are great at something are driven to be prolific. Perhaps those who are merely good are just naturally less prolific. In fact, that thing we call talent might not be what we think it is. Instead of talent being this innate ability to create, maybe talent is simply the drive to devote lots of time and energy to the things we feel passionate about. But I don’t that is the right conclusion. That’s not what Simonton is saying. He is saying that as long as you have reached a certain competence the chance of any one piece of work being great is generally about the same. Since we can’t really know if there is a causation either way, it’s reasonable to suppose that being prolific has a good chance of resulting in greatness.

I’ve always thought that determination and perseverance are much more important than talent. Writing is a great example. I’ve known lots of people who dabbled in writing and seemed competent at it. I’ve also known people who are great writers. What is the difference between the two? The great writers have spent much more time and energy writing. If you are competent at writing and think you can’t be great, you are wrong. The only thing that separates you from being great is time and energy.

Want to be a great actor? Act in a lot of plays, the more the better. Want to be a great playwright? Write lots of plays, hundreds of them if you can. Want to be a great songwriter? Write a new song every day. Eventually you will write some great ones.

There have been several improv wiki’s started in the past. Most notably was the wiki over at the Chicago Improv Network. Unfortunately that wiki got swarmed with spam bots and it ultimately had to be taken down. That shouldn’t be the fate of the new Improv Wiki that I’m hosting at the Improv Resource Center. This new wiki uses mediawiki, the same engine that powers Wikipedia, and it has some nice features which should thwart attempts by spam bots.

So what belongs in this new wiki? I’m hoping it will contain information on all things about long form improv of course. Info on theatres, teachers, groups, performers, books, exercises and forms. I also hope that it branch out into other areas and have information on short form, sketch and related info on comedy. We have a great start so far. A great many of the current groups in New York City have been put up in the last week or so. But there is a lot more to do.

I hope you will join me and make the new IRC Improv Wiki a great depository of improv information. It’s not hard to do. Let’s say you wanted to start a page for your improv group named “My Three Puns”. Here is what you would do:

1. Create a new account for yourself at the new wiki.
2. Go to the browser and type in this URL: http://wiki.improvresourcecenter.com/index.php?title=My_Three_Puns. Notice that the spaces in the name have been replaced by underscores.
3. Start adding content about your group.

There is some good help available to explain the formatting for mediawiki, however, don’t worry too much about it. Get the information up there. Someone will eventually come along, yes and you by formatting it to make it fit better into the overall look of the wiki.