The 3 Fundamental Questions of Improv

Going from infinity to 1 real quick

Every improv scene starts with an entirely blank slate. The actors don’t know a single detail of the scene or where it’s going; they just have to jump in and find out. 

You will notice, when you watch improv, that despite the infinite range of places the actors can take a scene, it tends to get very specific very quickly. Within the first 10 seconds, you might find out that the characters on stage are two doomsday preppers stuck on a sinking pirate ship. Or they’re a mother-daughter duo that’s painstakingly made it to the finals of an elite breakdancing competition. Establishing the nitty-gritty details is important because, the more specific a scene is, the more invested an audience gets in the characters and the story. It is more relatable, and therefore has greater potential to be entertaining. 

Where do those details come from?

It may seem daunting to come up with all the details necessary to build a strong scene, but it really comes down to three fundamental questions. When you walk onto the stage, you should have cursory answers to the following:

Who? = Who am I?

What? = What am I doing?

Where? = Where am I?

And then all you have to do is commit to those elements of your character. I am in an advanced course now and have been studying improv for a year, and we still spend most of our time in class talking about the “who, what, where” of each scene. There is nothing more important.

Answering those questions with a scene partner

Because improv is a team sport, you are almost never on the stage by yourself. When you’re acting with someone else, you get to rely on one another and build on top of each other’s “endowments” (pieces of information that your scene partner has contributed to the scene). Thus, we can add layers to those three fundamental questions, unlocking more juicy details:

Who? = Who are we? What is our relationship to one another? How do we feel towards each other? Why do we care about each other?

What? = What are we doing? What are our motives? How do we feel about what we’re doing?

Where? = Where are we? How did we get there? How do we feel about our surroundings?

Practice, practice, practice

Watch a couple clips on YouTube of great improv groups like Shoot From the Hip, and you’ll notice a pattern of establishing the “who, what, where.” You, as the viewer, should be able to answer those three questions at the end of any scene, no matter how long or short it is. Sometimes, they can be established all in one sentence!

The challenge, of course, is doing it quickly. And the only key to improvement in that department is practice. The more scenes you do, the more partners you work with, the more improv you watch up close, the stronger those muscles will become. It takes time and dedication, but you’d be surprised how much and how quickly you can learn.