Starting with your first improv show, you’ve probably heard one line a thousand times, whether it’s from a coach, teacher, or your own teammates. The suggestion to “just have fun” is the most ubiquitous advice in improv.
While having fun is, obviously, fun for you as team, it’s also important to remember that the show is never just for you. There are good people paying good money, and they want to be as entertained as possible!
If you put in time and do hard work beforehand, that’s when everyone will have fun.
So especially when it comes to a competitive show like FIST, don’t focus on “just having fun.” Play to win instead. I guarantee you’ll end up having the fun you’re looking for and have a better chance at advancing to the next round.
What’s your other choice? Play to lose?
7 secrets to playing like a winning FIST team
After three championships and coaching more than 100 FIST teams, these are some best practices that I’ve observed that get the FIST audience to have a kickass time. Obviously, you don’t have to hew to every one of these points. Feel free to flip the script until the show is uniquely yours!
1. Make the audience feel welcome
If you rile a crowd up and make them excited, they already want you to win. Cross the stage giving high fives to the audience. Go into the audience and say hello to someone you don’t know. Give out candy. Do a call and response. Whatever you can do to get the audience to immediately feel connected to you, do it.
2. Play fast
There’s no time for narrative in FIST, so quickly jump into a character and let it lead the way. You have a limited amount of time, so be quick and move around. A lot of the audience won’t have seen improv before, so they’ll have no patience for people standing there saying nothing. Especially for the opening, if you just stand around yammering for to long, you’ll lose the audience. Get the suggestion and start. Five or six scenes should do ya for your show.
3. Stick the landing
You’ll get a dim from the booth with two minutes left. Take that opportunity to do an ending to the show that will take less than two minutes. Ideally, you want to control the ending of the show, not get blacked out by someone else.
4. Keep it positive
Two people can be yelling at each other in anger, but something has to be positive, or you’ll start to alienate people. It could be the the topic, movement, location, accent, props, whatever. People need at least something redeeming or they won’t care about your characters or scene.
5. Come up with a fun and challenging format
Discover something fun to play with. I did a winning show based solely on a modified game of tag-out. I did another where the format involved seven one- or two-minute scenes and then 30-second callbacks in reverse order to as many of the longer scenes as possible.
6. Bring people
Every vote counts in FIST. And don’t you want your friends to see a great show? FIST is immediately understandable and accessible as a show format, so it’s perfect for your friends who aren’t familiar with improv—and for your friends who are! If not now, then when?
Playing like a winner makes you a winner in the end
Ultimately, the best part of FIST is learning, playing, and playing with your friends. If you do that, you’ve already won!
This advice should give you a pretty good start when it comes to thinking about your playing style during FIST. But if you’d like more tips about how to play like a FIST winner, consider taking a workshop from me by dropping me a line at tophercoaching@gmail.com.
