Improv Conspiracy Blog

Being confined to your house during a global pandemic isn't exactly the most productive environment if you want to make a movie, but in August 2020, the community members of the Improv Conspiracy Theatre set to work and pushed all their creative gears into motion to put on the first ever “Home Made Film Festival”; a short film festival dedicated to making films within a 5km radius of your house, under Victoria's Stage 4 lockdown restrictions.

The festival was a call out to a community of creatives which asked them to make something tangible whilst in lockdown. The added challenge was that they had to make it in just one week and include specific props, actions and dialogue in a unique and imaginative way. 

Many of them had never made a film before, let alone in the short timeframe assigned, but even with all the hurdles in front of them, the result was a truly beautiful collection of funny and heartfelt movies, and while all of them were amazing in their own way, they were also put to the test of being critiqued by a panel of judges who selected winners under a few categories:

- The Story Award (for best narrative idea)
- The Lockdown Award (for most creative workaround of the Stage 4 restrictions)
- The Solo Award (for highest achievement by a single filmmaker, not a collaboration)
- The Innovation Award (for most imaginative use of the guidelines)

There’s something magical about Harold Night. Not only is it a place to see some mind-blowing improv and enjoy some big laughs, but it’s also the de facto social hub of the community, with so many students, alums and performers coming through every Thursday.

We’ve seen time after time that students who prioritise Harold Night attendance tend to be among the strongest in their classes, and also end up being quite comfortable with the social aspects of our community, relative to their peers.

Still, not everyone knows about it, or why it’s so important to our community. Many of our students, especially in the lower levels (where we have the highest concentration of students) haven’t been to the theatre on a Thursday. It’s time to change that!

We’re thrilled to announce an exciting new incentive program for our students and alumni in 2020… the HAROLD HERO COMPETITION.

In short, if you're a student or alum of our improv workshops program, we’d love for you to binge on as many Harolds as you can, for FREE. Not only will you get to enjoy some great shows, but you’ll also go into the running for some great prizes. (Not a student yet? Sign up for a class here!)

One of the most useful lessons that improv can teach you is that things go a lot better when you decide to like the person that’s in front of you. 

It’s a lesson that stems from another improv gem, backed up by years of Adlerian psychology and Stoic philosophy: emotions are, in large part, a choice. Their impulse may be involuntary, but the way you use them is in your hands.

An emotional impulse is frequently generated by the actions of another person. If you were to take a person and place them in stasis, floating frozen in a blank room, what would your opinion of them be? Let’s add the caveat that they have no past actions to judge them by; they are an object of only the present. Would you have any reason to be mad at them? Sad about them? To have a problem with them? I don’t believe you would. Any way that you feel about them will be entirely your own choice. Why not make your choice a positive one?

My partner recently held a talent night for his birthday – open stage for all, he said, comedy, music, mime, ribbon – everyone is welcome. Of the ~70 people that came, I was astonished only one of the 12 performers was not a straight white dude. I was then surprised at my own surprise, because in just over a year, I had forgotten about how long it took for me to throw my own hat onto the performance stage. 

When I was 19, my ex and I would talk of moving to Melbourne and “doing comedy” – neither of us had a performance background and we didn’t know where to start. It was something that we dreamed of while we pursued safe study pathways as a homage to our Sri Lankan parents who’d migrated to Australia for a better life. Perth did not have a big comedy scene back then, so we downloaded all of the comedy content we could get our dodgy little virtual hands on and dreamt up exceptionally stupid skits. 

We continued to voraciously consume comedy as our safe study pathways turned into safe career pathways and took us overseas. After we parted ways at 28, I forgot about comedy. No one ever explicitly told me I couldn’t do comedy on my own, it just never occurred to me that I could, or should. I’d always thought of my ex as “the funny one”, and what we watched was written, produced and led by (mostly white) men – back then, Mindy Kaling was holding up the fort as the only brown female on screen.

Being funny is not easy. I do not say this because of the "sad clown" myth or the tale of Pagliacci or the fact that participation in any comedy circuit is a largely thankless task. I say it because being funny is, on a fundamental level beyond the professional sphere, the product of hours upon hours of effort. 

I have heard it said that "you can’t teach funny". I reject this attitude; it begins from a false premise. The question the people that say this should be asking is "can you learn funny?" The answer to that question is undoubtedly yes. It is proven by the fact that funny people exist. If we accept that the way a human being acts is the product of all that they have learnt (a stance that any amount of armchair psychology will vindicate), then it stands to reason that a funny person, at some point, learned how to be funny. How? Simple. Whether they noticed they were doing it or not, they paid attention.