Farts in Improv
“The only way to connect with an audience, of one to one million, is to let them know you’re a human, too. One who fails, fucks and farts just like them.”
We’ve all been there. You’re on stage performing a great scene about a caveman who thinks he’s a lawyer... and Shaun Lothian lets slip yet another fart. Every time you get on stage with this guy, he drops silent croakers out his gut. He’s nearly as bad as Briony Redman. You long to wave your hand in front of your nose and point to the culprit, but Shaun knows your hands are tied. You’re a professional big salary improviser, prohibited under Del Close Statute 3.vi to never break the fourth wall. If you shatter the spell an audience is under, one this invested, folks could get hurt. They’re in too deep, they need to know, nay, demand to know, whether Drongo can get ‘The Peterson File’ without head-boinking another client with his club.
After the show you shove Shaun up against the wall, demanding fist-satisfaction. But when you catch the dewy tears glistening in his brown fawn-like eyes, your anger evaporates. It’s not his fault his bum is a leaky spigot. It’s a physical reaction. He’s suffering a fight or flight response. He was scared. He got “The Fear.”
We all get The Fear. Even Chris Gau, part-time C&A catalogue model and full-time writer of Netflix’s ‘Borderline’ four years ago, gets The Fear. The Fear can pounce at any time: While you’re standing on stage in front of sixty judgemental eyes. In a workshop. In a class. You feel its tentacles tightening when there’s an agent in, or the one (and only) time your work-friends come to see your “silly little Whose Line skits.” The Fear assumes many forms: The blood pounding in your ears, the dry mouth or the churning in your stomach. It’s the malevolent voice whispering that you’re terrible at improv, worthless, that everyone hates you. Specifically, that person in the front row wearing a yellow sweater. The one with their arms crossed. The one who looks like your ex.
And once “The Fear” sinks its fangs into you… That’s it. For the rest of the night, it’s your master. Making you hug the dusty curtain on the back line, second guessing every move. It’ll keep you up at night, staring at the ceiling, “Why did I make Drongo the captain of a steam-liner? Drongo was meant to be Houston’s top criminal attorney! That’s probably why, in the bar, Yellow Sweater said how funny the others were, but couldn’t look me in the eye. Ugh… Drongo sad.”
What is The Fear? Why does it always pick on us? How and why does it cause all those icky feelings? And most importantly, how can we stop this fucking prick? Introverts assume the answer to this last question must lie inwards; in a good hard think. Extroverts hope bravery will work, fending The Fear off with feats of brashness. Which one are you? Ask yourself now. Go on. No one’s looking. How do you try and keep The Fear at bay? Maybe one night you’re one and the next, the other. And why don’t these barriers work: The introvert’s lonely shell or the extrovert’s rictus smile?
Let’s first get to know our enemy. Under what circumstances does The Fear appear? According to research conducted by the National Institute of Harolds, The Fear’s one constant is it only appears in front of an audience. Whether that’s thirty paying punters watching you toot your sax or one wincing local as you mangle your French vocab. Occasionally you might feel The Fear on your lonesome, but even then it requires the memory or thought of other people to really get its juices going: “Oh God, I can’t believe I have to do that presentation in front of my area manager,” or “Oh God, I can’t believe I made Drongo do ‘The Caveman Rap’ in front of my area manager.”
So, The Fear only materialises when there’s an audience… but why? To start, let’s empower ourselves by invoking The Fear by its full Voldemort name… “The Fear Georgia Millicent Carter Vivien of Feeling Vulnerable”. Or for short - The Fear of Feeling Vulnerable. Whether you realised it or not, every stumbled word, every memory-induced night terror, every pre-show pee – has one root cause… None of us, ever, EVER, want to feel vulnerable in front of other human beings.
Ahhhhh Vulnerability. That nebulous phrase used by fleece wearing lecturers on Ted Talks or snake-oil self-help books with titles like “Daring to Be Caring.” Yep. Vulnerability. The thought that you’ll be seen for who you are - really are - warts and all - is a truly terrifying prospect. What if strangers, or worse, friends, see me doing something embarrassing; unfunny; failing? What will they think of me once they hear this monologue? The one about me scanning friends’ Facebook posts and hating their every success? Now everyone knows how petulant and small-minded and awful I am. To be seen like that? No thank you. So, to protect ourselves from this fear of looking, feeling and being vulnerable, we erect barriers. Glorious, convoluted and totally useless barriers. The introverts retreat inside themselves; the extroverts jut out their chins, feigning invincibility. Both crossing their fingers that these strategies protect against the red-faced jolts of shame.
We all have our own safety blankets, both conscious and subconscious, but here are just some of the many barriers I, Chis Gau, erect to combat The Fear of Feeling Vulnerable.
• I shout on stage, hoping that being big and loud will distract from the fact that I’m not an actor. Praying this will hide how vulnerable I feel. “Please don’t compare me to these other performers… they’ve trained at prestigious institutions such as RADA, and Online”.
• I corpse, wanting to curry favour with the audience. Using my chuckles to hide what I’m really feeling, “They don’t like me. They will once they see the cute, adorable, giggling me”.
• I make jokes that my character would never utter, wanting a quick gag to cover another insecurity: “Say something witty or they won’t know I’m funny.”
• I jump out of mimed sash windows, fleeing the stage, leaving my scene partners to pick up the pieces. Why? Because I don’t know what to do. “After how many years of improv training, I still don’t know what to do?! I’m NOT IN CONTROL! But I’m a teacher? Don’t let them see me like that!”
• Off stage, I gossip about people younger and funnier than me - maybe this will distract from that gnawing feeling that I’m forty-two-year-old with my best work long behind me? Four years behind me. Borderline. On Netflix. Check it out.
• I make up stories in blog posts about my friend Shaun farting in scenes. I was anxious that if I wrote about a topic as nerdy as “vulnerability in improv” you’d think I was pretentious. So, I deflected with farts. For the record, Shaun has never farted. On stage, or off. Seriously. We’re really worried about him.
Dreading the judgement of others, I erect these barriers praying that once they’re up they’ll defend against The Fear of Feeling Vulnerable and its myriad symptoms. But it never works. Ask yourself, have your personal Fear Prevention Strategies (Patent Pending) ever worked live on stage? Has swearing louder or staying silent for an entire show ever pulled you out of a Fear induced tailspin? I doubt it.
“Okay. Stop stalling. I’m four pages into this fucking post if the barriers don’t work then how do I stop The Fear of Feeling Vulnerable?”
The answer is simple… Stop. Fearing. Feeling. Vulnerable.
“Fuck you, Chris. That’s the wise mantra at the top of this mountain quest?” Wait, before you hurl your phone across the bedroom, think about it for a minute. What’s so wrong with feeling vulnerable? Why are we so afraid of it? Take this idea away from improv and the stage. Vulnerability is how you connect with friends, right? In fact, that’s how you know who your real friends are. You can be yourself with real friends… confessing your deepest desires, your worst worries and occasionally a bit of sexy filth. And they, theirs. And when you tell each other secrets you’re connecting. Sharing all the things that make you both human. Even those shameful, terrible things like eating two-day old Nutella crêpes out of the bottom of a bin. Because even if the person you’re telling this fact to hasn’t done that, they’ve thought about it, maybe just for a split second, but they have. They may not have cheated on a partner, but they’ve thought about it. They may not be jealous of their friend’s success, but they’ve sure as hell felt envy before. And it’s the same with an audience, too. In fact, Yellow Sweater is coveting the gorgeous Red Sweater on the person stage right as we speak. Every single dumb-dumb in that room is a meat sack like you, filled with worries, neuroses, emotions, secrets, flaws and farts. These are the things that make us human. And knowing that, and sharing that, is how we connect. Because being human is the one thing we all have in common. Except for Alex Holland. He’s actually the cursed spirit of an Edwardian boy trapped inside a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Think about this idea from another angle. People without flaws are impossible to connect with. The bland, unflappable heroes of Hollywood movies. They’re too perfect. People mistrust perfection. Exhibit one: Tom Cruise. Perfection puts us in our head. As we marvel at someone without imperfections it brings into sharp contrast our own – the pimples, how we eat with our mouth open, how we pronounced ‘hyperbole’ incorrectly for years. How can you relate to someone who looks, smells, and acts that good? You can’t. Because THEY DON’T EXIST. Trust me, the off-screen Tom Cruise farts. He also collects the farts of children, shunts them into a pressurized chamber called a GrambleFlit and sleeps amongst the farticles. But that’s another post.
The only way to connect with an audience, of one to one million, is to let them know you’re a human, too. One who fails, fucks and farts just like them. As John Steinbeck once wrote, and in my opinion, less elegantly: “Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well, never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.” He’s talking about empathy.
If you want to get rid of The Fear – that feeling of being judged – you need to let people try on your shoes and walk a mile. You can’t judge or feel judged once you’ve both got blisters. You can’t lord it over me because last night I ate pancakes out of the OUTSIDE bin, once you remember that last night you ate out of someone’s ass. On the contrary, instead of judgment, that realisation will release a laugh of recognition. Oh! This idiot’s just like me. And those laughs, coming from a place of true connection between you both? That’ll kill The Fear dead!
And that’s why all our kludged together defensive walls don’t work. Be it feigned flawlessness or frightened flight - that delicious distance we willingly create between our fellow humans, be it a scene partner or an audience member, actually exacerbates the feeling of insecurity, worthlessness and loss of control. How can anyone relate to us; form a connection with us, if we only occasional pop our head above the parapet? That would be like befriending a Jack in The Box.
This idea of a shared and flawed humanity is not only essential to connection, it’s essential to comedy itself. Because comedy doesn’t deal with perfection and ideals, that’s drama’s job. Comedy’s currency is reality. In a drama, if our protagonist saw sixty audience members staring up at her, she would orate a pitch-perfect speech, rousing the crowd to cheers, their lives and minds changed forever. But, comedy’s different. Faced with 120 staring eyes, the hero’s mouth goes dry, she stumbles her words then accidentally insinuates that Yellow Sweater’s recently deceased mother was slain by her own hands. That’s comedy. Specifically, that example. And that’s why we’re all here right? Comedy. It’s not only fine to be nervous and unsure of what to do, it’s funny.
So with all that said, the only way to defeat The Fear of Feeling Vulnerable is acceptance. Acceptance that we’re all gross apes with weird bits hanging from us. I am. You are. The audience definitely is, I mean look at them. Unfortunately, this acceptance can’t be absorbed intellectually, from reading a longwinded blog post. It can’t be taught, with an improv exercise where you whisper each other’s names and touch each other’s foreheads together. It’s an acceptance that has to burned into
you live on stage. In the heat of failure. And the more you feel it, the less you care. And once you arrive at this acceptance, The Fear will never drag you into the shadows again.
That’s a complete lie. The Fear will absolutely get you again.
But at least you know your enemy now. So, next time you stand under the lights serving your scene partner a prehistoric subpoena, and you see your hand nervously shake… don’t fight it. Don’t put up a barrier between you and those judgemental eyes. So what if you feel anxious today? That you feel sad? That your monologue revealed a little too much of yourself? That you called your improv teacher mum? Own it. Use it. Let us see it. Share your terrible life and your awful idiosyncrasies. Be vulnerable. Because we feel all those things, too. And we will love you for it.
In the spirt of this post, in acceptance and vulnerability, I would like to confess something to you all. That’s me up there, farting. I, Chris Gau, fart a lot on stage.
Nearly as much as Briony Redman.
Chris Gau is a comedy writer & improviser from London. In addition to co-creating and writing Borderline (Channel 5) and The Literary Adventures of Mr Brown (BBC Radio 4) with comedy writer Mike Orton Toliver, Chris has writing several short films: “Bin Day” made the Official Selection at the LA Comedy Shorts and “Screen Grab” was shortlisted for the BAFTA sponsored Reed Short Film Competition. When not writing, Chris performs and teaches at the Free Association Theatre in London. Chris written scripts for Hattrick, Pop TV, Comedy Central and A US version of Borderline is currently being developed for NBC.
You can see Chris performing in: The Wilsons, The Badge & Jacuzii
