Posts Tagged ‘theatre’
Theatre, Sensationalism, and Double Standards
Like many of you, I was surprised to see Lindsay Lohan had been cast to play the part of Karen, the manipulative temporary secretary, in a London production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. It’s not unusual for British actors to shoot a movie during the day and do a play at night, but it’s different for Americans and I think of Lohan as a movie performer. There’s a huge difference between memorizing a few lines (that might have been changed two minutes ago) for a movie shot and preparing to do a major role in a live performance.
Lohan’s performance during the first preview appears to have been a bit ragged. Reporters at the performance agreed that she was nervous and messed up a few of her lines. That’s not unusual for a first preview…it’s the cast’s initial run with civilians in the house and everyone’s nervous. The pressure must be even more intense for someone who is trying to turn her career around. Given Lohan’s issues, I imagine the production paid a substantial sum for insurance against her ability to fulfill her contract.
That said, a few flubbed lines is nothing to be ashamed of in a first preview. My wife, another friend, and I saw several shows in London just before Lohan started her run. A very well-credentialed stage actor in Great Britain, a play based on the News of the World phone hacking scandal, jumped his lines twice in about ten minutes. In Richard III, Martin Freeman, the beloved actor who plays Dr. Watson in the popular BBC version of Sherlock, mushed his way through a line during a heated exchange and closed with “…or something like that.”
Both Great Britain and Richard III were well into their runs (in fact, Richard III just closed), so there’s nothing to say except that it’s live theatre — things happen. No one reported the other actors’ errors, so let’s give Lindsay Lohan the benefit of the doubt for a while. If she’s still missing lines after the show officially opens, then we can complain. Until then, let’s hope she can model her recovery after Robert Downey, Jr. and enjoy some success after a long string of bad decisions.
Improv, Party Tricks, and John Cleese
John Cleese is a comedy genius, distinguishing himself as a member of Monty Python, speaker, and Oscar-nominated screenwriter. I respect his thoughts on comedy and life, so I listened to his recent interview on the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast podcast with some interest. About halfway through the session, the subject turned to improv:
As a scripted comedian, what do you think about the rise of improv?
The delights of improv have always rather escaped me. I don’t know why it’s considered a major art form. I don’t mean that it’s not interesting or skillful. But over the years all the comedians that I’ve respected—I could also say all the comic writers—are people who put words down on paper and went on working on them until they felt they couldn’t improve them anymore. That seems to me the most important and interesting part of comedy. The other is sort of a party trick, which I respect, but it doesn’t seem to me that it should be regarded at the same level….Another way, I got a nomination, an Oscar nomination, for the script of A Fish Called Wanda. That had been through 13 drafts, and by the end of it, I really felt that I brought it all together. That’s not a feeling I have with improv. They don’t really build to any kind of dramatic climax or comedic climax.
The “improv as party trick” critique has been around for years for, it must be said, good reason: much of improv is simply cleverness and pattern-built humor that takes advantage of the audience’s programmed responses to those constructs. If improvisers create simple scenes with minimal variance and go for the cheap laughs, we’ll never be better than hack stand-up comedians doing well-worn anatomy jokes on Monday nights.
In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski makes a similar point regarding the emphasis of style over substance:
The difference between a designer and a stylist is analogous to the difference between Glenn Gould performing Bach and Victor Borge playing in the style of Bach. With Gould, we experience Bach’s creation; with Borge, we merely recognize the composer’s style. One is art; the other, however entertaining, is not.
Yes, it’s possible to argue that Cleese and the other members of Monty Python used patterns in their work when writing their sketches (it’s hard not to when you produce that much material), but let’s focus on the meat of the critique: that improvisers don’t work to improve individual pieces and that, as Cleese and Rybczynski argue in separate contexts, a performance can be a clever stylistic pastiche but not (or at least most often not) art.
Improvisers live in a world of first drafts. Unless we’re doing fake-prov, where we pretend to hear the suggestions we want and perform our scripted set, we’re honoring the audience’s suggestions and creating a piece on the spot. Even putting a known character into a new situation, a contemporary version of commedia dell’arte, is constrained by our co-writers in the house. I’ve said before that improv is a very forgiving art form: the audience says “banana”, you say “banana”, people laugh, and the person who gave the suggestion thinks they’re a genius. As with all first drafts, though, some of what we do will be terrible, much of it will be funny, and some of it will be hilarious. We can try to improve the scene as we go along, but we get just the one chance. It’s the nature of the beast.
The lack of a climax is a serious concern, especially for long-form improv. The worst improv scenes noodle around a subject, the performers try to force a laugh by going for the joke, and the moderator or team ends it before the audience wanders off to the bar. Mixed short-form shows, such as ComedySportz, use different types of games to add variety and maintain interest. The moderator, what we call a referee, is responsible for moving the show along and deciding when games should end. A four-minute scene might not get a dramatic climax, but the good ones do. A seven-minute musical comedy needs a payoff that happens in the closing song–it’s expected of the genre. In a real sense the referee’s the editor, finding (or, worst case scenario, manufacturing) an end point for the scene. It’s up to the players to create it.
Long-form shows often take a single suggestion and build a series of interconnected scenes along that theme. Some groups, such as Shakesprov in Portland or Cast on a Hot Tin Roof in Chicago, perform entire plays in the style of a specific playwright (Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams, respectively). Rybczynski’s critique that these performances might be entertaining but definitely won’t be artistic fails if the performers dig in with the intention of honoring the author and genre and create a piece worthy of the group’s aspirations. If Borge played Bach in a concert performance, it would be art. Interpreting Suddenly Last Summer as a comedy would be a travesty. Performing All’s Well That Ends Well as Shakespeare wrote it is both.
To sum up, I think Cleese’s argument that improv is a party trick that owes more to cleverness than art is fair, but could just as easily be turned on run-of-the-mill sketch comedy, stand-up, or essayists. Skilled improvisers strive to be more than surface-level funny, honor the intentions of the audience, respect the artists from whom we borrow, and build to a dramatic or comedic climax. But we can always do better.
Spend a Five or Break a Twenty? The Denomination Effect
I’m sure many of us understand the denomination effect on a visceral level. If you’ve ever been in a store, saw something you wanted, but hesitated to buy it because you’d have to pull out a big bill, you’ve experienced this effect. Why did you hesitate? Because you knew that breaking that $20, $50 or $100 bill made it that much easier to spend your change.
Perhaps that’s why prices near a dollar amount, particularly $4.99, $9.99, $19.99, and $99.99 are so attractive to the consumer’s eye. You’re trading one physical item (a printed piece of paper) for another (perhaps a flash drive) and getting a tiny bit of money back. I wonder how much of the attractiveness of prices just below a currency denomination depends on the fact that you’re getting some change back as opposed to the first number being one less (e.g., $19.99 versus $20.00). I bet the two phenomena are intertwined in some interesting psychological ways.
You also see the denomination effect at work in gambling, but the effect works differently there depending on the game and situation. Knowledgeable poker players experience the reverse effect, becoming less likely to get involved in hands when they have fewer chips in their stack. They hesitate to invest in a hand because, when you are low on funds, the relative value of each chip goes up. Other players can use this hesitancy to their advantage and bet big to drive the small stacks out of a pot, but the small stacks can make a modest bet to induce a bluff raise from a big stack, but the big stacks can raise and hope the small stacks will think they’ve fallen into their trap, but…
You get the idea. Poker’s fun, but bring aspirin.
Test what you know, but avoid congruence bias
A few posts ago I discussed confirmation bias, where individuals interpret everything they experience as reinforcing their existing beliefs. It’s not surprising that humans fall prey to this trap. We have to make sense of our surroundings, so we develop mental models to do so. They’re our models, based on our mental, so it’s no surprise we think highly of them.
No model of the world can capture all of its complexity. We can model industrial processes at a certain level, but we can’t get all the way down to the interactions of individual atoms. Fortunately, we don’t have to to generate accurate depictions of reality. As statistician George E. P. Box noted, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
Many humans realize they will move through life more effectively by testing and updating their mental models, but you need to test your model correctly. If you test your mental models and other hypotheses through direct testing, rather than testing possible alternative models, you are experiencing congruence bias. You’re testing your model, which is great, but you’re not entertaining other ways of approaching the problem, which is not so great. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that scientists work within a paradigm, which is the dominant framework for creating, testing, and determining hypotheses at a given time. When experimental results aren’t as expected, scientists can either work to shore up the existing paradigm or create a new one.
My wife, Virginia Belt, is a director and formerly taught acting at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She emphasizes the need for actors to try different tactics to get what they want. Think of the young child who tries everything he can think of to have you buy him a treat at the grocery store or the cat that really, really (really) wants a piece of sausage from your pizza. You can take the same approach to life. If you find your model isn’t working well any more, such as after a promotion at work, joining a new improv group or entering into a new relationship, try different tactics to see what does work. Ginny always exhorts her students to make positive choices, to focus on what they want rather than what they don’t want. If you call Domino’s and say you don’t want anchovies, you’ll either get no pizza because you haven’t given them enough information or get a pizza that costs $50 because it has every other available topping on it.
As anyone who has ever tried anything new well knows, individuals who break away from the pack meet a lot of resistance. Having the strength to break out of congruence bias at a personal level is tough — having the strength to do it in the face of a tenure board is even tougher. Let’s leave the paradigmatic fights for the professionals and focus on our own world views for a while. We’ll be better off in the end.
Review of Memes in Digital Culture, by Limor Shifman (MIT Press)
In addition to my other ventures, I’m the editor and lead reviewer of Technology and Society Book Reviews. Some of the books I cover related directly to my work as an improviser and speaker — Memes in Digital Culture is just such a work. This review originally appeared on January 5, 2014.
Title: Memes in Digital Culture
Author: Limor Shifman
Publisher: MIT Press
Copyright: 2014
ISBN13: 978-0-262-52543-5
Length: 200
Price: $13.95
Rating: 94%
I purchased a copy of this book for personal use.
I’m a fan of the Essential Knowledge Series from MIT Press. These small-format books provide useful information on a variety of digital culture topics, including Information and the Modern Corporation and Intellectual Property Strategy, which I have also reviewed. In Memes in Digital Culture, author Limor Shifman of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem develops a framework for analyzing memes in the networked age.
Memes as Entities
An early meme familiar to Americans and other western audiences is Kilroy Was Here, attributed to James J. Kilroy, a Massachussetts shipyard inspector. More recent examples are the Pepper Spraying Cop, Scumbag Steve, and Socially Awkward Penguin. Richard Dawkins introduced memes in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In that work, Dawkins argued that memes are small units of culture transmitted amongst a population, like genes. Dawkins’s framework posits that memes have three main characteristics: longevity, fecundity, and copy fidelity. Shifman points out that the Internet enhances all three of those aspects, allowing exact digital copies of memes to spread quickly and to stay around longer in the Facebook timelines, Twitter feeds, and hard drives of users.
Dawkins created his original theory of memes before networking technologies became commonplace. Shifman extends his work by defining an Internet meme as:
(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.
Many commentators use the terms meme and viral interchangeably, but Shifman argues they’re two very different things. Her definition of memes emphasizes the transformational aspect of creation and sharing, such as adding a new caption to a common image. Korean rapper PSY’s viral video “Gangnam Style”, which was viewed more than one billion times on YouTube, was immensely popular but not, at least at first, a meme. Later take-offs on the theme, such as an homage to the wealthy former U.S. presidential candidate called “Romney Style”, marked the transition from viral video to meme.
Analyzing Memes
Shifman argues that memes can be analyzed in three ways: content, form, and stance; and interpreted through economic, social, and cultural/aesthetic lenses. Content, form, and stance capture the creative elements of a meme, including the contributor’s attitude toward the subject matter and subtext inherent in the creation. For example, the “Leave Britney Alone” video creator puts forward, through subtext, the idea that it’s OK to be a gay male wearing a wig and eyeliner. It’s also possible to break memes down into genres, including Reaction Photoshops (Photoshop-edited images are sometimes called “shoops”), Photo Fads, Flash Mobs, Recut Trailers, Misheard Lyrics, Bad Dubbing, and LOL Cats.
Chapter 8 focuses on memes in the political realm, particularly involving citizen participation. In the U.S., that trend included the Occupy Wall Street movement and the “I am the 99%” percent meme. Shifman and her colleagues also investigated memes in France, China, Israel, and Egypt. Because many regimes monitor or censor the internet in general and social media in particular, activists use code words to obscure their discussions and intentions. Memes also bring the difference between what Erving Goffman called the frontstage and backstage political venues into sharper relief. The frontstage represents the public face of a politician or campaign, while the backstage represents the venues where the real work gets done.
Final Thoughts
Like the other Essential Knowledge Series books I’ve had the pleasure to review, Dr. Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture provides a solid overview on an interesting topic. I can easily see academics adopting her text as required reading for digital media analysis courses and executives reading it to gain insights into meme culture.
Curtis Frye is the editor of Technology and Society Book Reviews. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Improspectives, his look at applying the principles of improv comedy to business and life. His list includes more than 20 books for Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media; he has also created over a dozen online training courses for lynda.com. In addition to his writing, Curt is a keynote speaker and entertainer. You can find more information about him at www.curtisfrye.com.
When You’re “Due” — The Gambler’s Fallacy
I travel to Las Vegas once or twice a year, both to play poker (where I convince myself I have an advantage) and to dabble in other games (where I definitely don’t). Since 1993, when I started playing while on the East Coast, I’ve seen thousands of players succumb to the insidious gambler’s fallacy.
Let’s say you’re playing roulette and notice, as posted on the so very helpful display by the wheel, that five red numbers have come up in a row. Is black due? What about green (0/00)? The answer is neither. Roulette wheels are well-balanced and the little obstacles spread around the wheel, called canoes in casino parlance, make outcomes random enough to be considered independent trials. If red numbers come up five times in a row, the next number will be red 18/38 of the time, black 18/38 of the time, and green 2/38 of the time. Ironically, it’s our human urge to discover patterns that makes the gambler’s fallacy work. The wheel has no memory, but we do.
The bottom line is that when you play roulette, the proportion of red, black, and green numbers will tend toward the target ratios over millions of spins and the weighted payoffs will ensure the house earns its profit over the long run. But what about games like poker? Poker is a skill game with a healthy dose of luck thrown in, so trials aren’t truly independent. Inferior players beat better players over the short term, but only because of luck. But what happens when equal players face off?
It’s hard to find players of the same skill level at a poker table, but I tested the theory by replicating an experiment described by poker author Lou Krieger. Like Lou, I set up ten identical players in Wilson Software’s Turbo Texas Hold’em simulation mode and let them play hundreds of millions of hands against each other. Six of the ten players were just above or below breaking even, but there were two big winners and two big losers. Remember that each player followed an identical strategy — the only factor controlling their fate was the luck of the draw.
As human beings trying to extract a living from an indifferent universe, we must realize that the odds are not always in our favor and that we will go through bad streaks we can’t seem to reverse. At these times it pays to strengthen your base by learning new skills or practicing old ones, reinforcing friendships, reaching out to others for help, and offering assistance where you can. Doing these things doesn’t constitute “good karma” or “putting things out into the universe”, both dubious concepts. What you are doing is improving the chances you’ll be ready to take advantage of opportunities that you and your contacts discover.
Perceived safety increases risk-taking
In many senses, life is a series of risk/reward calculations. Choosing which school to attend, buying a house, and choosing a spouse are all risky endeavors. According to the Peltzman effect, also known as risk compensation, people have a tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
I’m sure this conclusion comes as no surprise to you. Toddlers learning to walk soon start to run, or go down stairs, with the expected results. Teen drivers (particularly teen boys) get comfortable behind the wheel and dart off in a burst of testosterone, occasionally ending up in dire circumstances. This phenomenon was very common the Formula 2 racing series. Formula 2 is a development series for the global F1 competition, which is viewed as the pinnacle of motor racing. The problem is that the Formula 2 series was plagued with multiple accidents resulting from brash moves made by the young drivers. The reason? Analysts, including current F1 drivers, argued that Formula 2 racers were overly aggressive because their cars are so safe. Romain Grosjean, a Formula 2 driver who now competes for the Renault F1 team, was fined several times and sat out for an F1 race after being at fault in repeated incidents following his promotion.
Investors make similar risk/reward calculations. Wall Street investment bankers often take significant risks because their compensation schemes reward short-term success far more than they punish failure. Why would they take such risks? Because it’s part of their overall strategy. In the Wharton School’s corporate finance MOOC I’m taking on Coursera, Professor Franklin Allen argues that one’s sense of risk is inverted when you think of investing in a portfolio of stocks rather than in a single stock. For example, imagine that you buy stock in an oil company that finds oil in 1 out of 20 wells, and each producing well returns $100. You have a hit rate of 5% which, multiplied by the return of a good well, yields an expected value of $5. Now imagine that you have a separate investment in a research company that has a 1 in 50 chance of returning $250, otherwise gaining you nothing. This investment has a similar expected value to the previous example, because 2% (1 in 50) of $250 is $5.
Which of the two investments is less risky? If you look at the expected values, they’re equally risky. However, Professor Allen argues that, when considered as part of a portfolio, the latter investment is less risky because of its higher potential return. The crux of the argument is that a diversified portfolio with numerous independent risks will tend to have a higher return than a collection of pedestrian investments with relatively low risk. The end result is safety in numbers. Just as a fair coin flipped 1,000 times will tend to show heads in about 50% of the trials, investments with independent risks will tend to earn out at their expected rate, assuming you adjudged the risks correctly in the first place. Statistics on investment return since the year 1900 bear out his argument.
Improvisers can and should take risks to make great scenes. We can do it without fear because we know our fellow players will be there to make what we say and do the right thing. Similarly, businesses can take risks as part of a diversified portfolio of ideas. Just as you wouldn’t invest in a single stock such as, I don’t know…Enron, you shouldn’t discourage experimentation and risk. That said, you must understand that risks taken within a scene or business are dependent, not independent. There’s only so much we can do to fix things if you go too far overboard. If you can’t spread out your risk, you must moderate it to be successful.
Improspectives 
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