A regular Carnival Cinema column of showbiz life musings by Captain Frodo –
On the way of the Showman: ‘Get Your Act Together’
By Captain Frodo
Last month we delved into esoteric reasons for why creating an act is an important part of a Showman’s personal development. This month the reasons will be exoteric and also practical. As much as this can be done in text.
The aim is to make a five to nine-minute world class act. It won’t happen overnight, but keeping this aim in mind is your best bet in getting there.
Having a world class act is not the only Way to make a living, but the benefits are vast and the work opportunities for someone who both does well as a creative ensemble worker and also has an act, has the strongest possible foundation for succeeding in our business in the long run.
There is no easy Way to explain this as a universal process. It must be learnt in action. Each evolution is a delicate blend of its own inherent life and structure and the environment it needs to grow in. On the stage, on the street, in the shopping mall or wherever it finds a Showman facing a Crowd.
For the purpose of this column, I will describe a Way to create an act which I know worked, at least once, because it was my Way. I have since used these lessons and techniques to help other Acts evolve. Hopefully, it can serve as a road map of inspiration.
My Way to my Act:
Before finding the seed of my Act I created and disposed of many acts I look back at in disbelief. This is part of the weeding out process. I threw out acts like seeds across any Crowds that will give you attention. The Crowd was the soil and their responses and reactions told me about the resilience and vitality of whatever hairbrained idea I was working on. The acts or aspects that scratched a hold in the Crowd Soil, as evidenced by their reactions, showed me where there was room for evolution.
So how did I find the seed? It all began with a junky stealing my suitcase containing my street show props, during a show.
It was the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1998, the day before Fringe Sunday, which at the time was the biggest earning day in the whole year of a street performers calendar. I started my show on the Royal Mile by putting down my showcase. Then I did my crowd build in front of it. After securing my front row I turned to get my case to begin the show properly, but my case was gone.
Next day, Fringe Sunday, I HAD to do shows – with none of my props. What to do?
There were a few wire coat hangers in the back of the Space Cowboy’s van. Squeezing through one of them could be a thing. Being in a tight spot, the coathanger seemed like a good fit, and it was. I had a quick think about it:
“I’ll do that thing where I bend my arm down behind my head so my elbow meets the shoulder on the opposite side. Then swing it around and call it an impression of a helicopter.
I’ll get some mileage out of getting it over my pierced nipples.
Then I’ll do that gut suck thing where I suck my stomach in, like I had learnt from an article by Fakir Musafar some time in the past. Then tuck my balls away between my legs.”
This was my Tennis Act 1.0. Done with a coathanger. These bits of schtick are still staple parts of the act. But in 1998 that was all there was.
Later that year I was performing in the Kamikaze Freakshow as the Incredible Rubberman. I had swapped the wire coathanger for a tennis racket, as the wire dug into my flesh and kind of disappeared. The choice was practical.
The weekend before we left Edinburgh, where the show was based, for a European tour, I went to a car boot sale with John Kamikaze, and spotted a tennis racket, I bought it for five pounds, thinking this would be good to have, in case my other one broke.
A few weeks later in the backroom of a punk youth club somewhere in Holland, I cut the strings off the spare racket with the sword John used to chop a melon on my neck with. I gave it a go. It was too big. About two inches or so.
{Trying to fix mistakes or failures can create novel solutions. The time, energy, or money spent makes us motivated to find a way to make the investment work.}
Not wanting to give up on five pounds spent, I played around with it for a while and discovered that, with some effort, I could squeeze my leg through it at the same time as the rest of my body. I showed the others. They didn’t think it was as impressive as the smaller racket. Admittedly I did it sitting on the stained backstage couch and didn’t have any schtick apart from the feat itself.
A lot of the tour happened in Holland and in a coffee shop somewhere I had an epiphanous solution to the problem of not wasting my five pounds. I could do the two rackets at the same time.
If I squeezed one leg through the racket whilst attempting to stand on the other leg it would add a new level of animation to the act. I did it that night and I was right. It was a major improvement, a whole lot of new funny visual material and a few extra contortion moves.
{The next level. Finding a way to make two ideas into one. This is a major source for novelty creation. More about this later.}
The Kamikaze Freakshow followed the American old-school style of having one talker (barker). So, I did no script, no verbal material in the act.
{As the observant reader will notice each of these steps adds complexity to the act. It is fleshing out and taking it from a simple stunt to a fuller routine.}
By this stage, the year was 1999 and I was partying like that was exactly which year it was. I was doing my double tennis racket squeeze in my street show where I did talk. My Schpiel grew tighter and the gags, groans, and jokes increased.
{This is paramount. Comedians always work on upping their laugh count. Us Showmen aren’t just after laughs we’re after, oohs, aahs, groans, surprises, smiles, giggles, leaning forward in interest, even anger and confrontations. INTERACTION count can always be upped.}
Then early in the new millennium, I made a new act for a tour of Belgium and Holland. A few years earlier I had learnt to play the musical saw but didn’t have an act for it. My idea was to mix microphone trouble slapstick with playing the saw. Cutting a finger off in the process. In hindsight, that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. I rehearsed a whole bunch of gags with the microphone stand and as I did the act the first time, it became clear almost immediately that though the idea might be good the reality was anything but. The Crowd looked at me like I was some second, or third, rate kids clown.
{Slapstick is a dangerous bit of schtick. If you go on stage and pretend to fail, but it doesn’t look real, you fail at failing. In the mathematics of showmanship, a double negative does not make a positive, its just twice as shit. You die the double death of clowning. Hence the reference to bad kid clowning. Kids laugh at bad slapstick. This fact is a big part of what has given the general public the belief that clowning and slapstick is for kids. Whilst a lot of the problem lies in bad Craft. Good slapstick is funny for adults or anyone, even if you have seen it before. As the old vaudeville saying goes: “A joke is funny but once, a slap in the face with a sausage is always funny.”}
So my new saw act died. But like the Lord and Saviour, it found itself resurrected three shows later in a whole new incarnation.
{It is always good to learn a new skill. A physical skill, or failed act, however odd, easy, or difficult, is worth learning, even if you have no idea how you are to use it. Some occasion or opportunity when this new skill will be just perfectly suited will arise. If you got a key, you’ll find a lock.}
The microphone slapstick “key” found a “keyhole” in the double tennis racket act and as it turned out it was a perfect fit.
{As mentioned, two acts fusing into one can have unexpectedly novel outcomes. Many of my favourite acts have this foundation, two things intertwined in the same act. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was to be the pivotal moment of development for my act. Adding slapstick to an act which already was a physical comedy contortion act, strung together with verbal comedy, and confetti.
The problems of bad slapstick are all solved when it is strong enough to be perceived as real by the Crowd. Your “failures” must pass the Turing test for clowning. If the audience can’t separate a real accident or fumble from your pre-planned material you have created an artificial reality. On top of this, the “failures” must be structured to create a triumph in the end. even if this triumph is a gigantic failure to top everything that came before it.
To reach this new level of reality an obstacle can be a great tool. Something that justifies and explains why you’re being that clumsy. For some it can be the level of stupidity of their character, for others, it’s the surreal nature of their character’s world or interactions with the real world. For me, the solution was standing on one leg. A man standing on one leg with his other leg half stuck through a tennis racket, is the picture of out of control. From then on all my slapstick became real and the positive response from the Crowd was immediate.}
I worked on that act with all these components and it grew, getting longer and longer.
The next step of development was when I joined Circus Oz in early 2004. By this stage, my act was running 16 to 18 minutes. In the Happy Sideshow, the act had been the smoke and relax break for the rest of the gang so no one had pulled me up on the act’s duration. At Circus Oz, after a bunch of chatting and workshopping with Mike Finch, we settled on a 14-minute version.
Cutting material which is working might seem like a bad idea. It certainly will bruise your ego if it is suggested by someone else. But in reality, this was the first step of smashing through one more glass ceiling with my Act. The second step, the same as the previous, was joining La Clique (La Soirée) where the time limit became 11.5 minutes, and the act stayed at that length for 12 years.
The incredible benefit of this was not that I cut material, but harking back to the idea that material created finds a way to fit in, I slowly packed the material back into the act, without making it longer. The game was to make the gag work, without increasing the overall run time. Over the next few years, I probably put fifty per cent more material into the act. Making it solid under any circumstances.
To finish up here are few key points:
-Make sure there is a well-defined goal: “I’m going to squeeze through these rackets.” This is the premise of the narrative.
-Maintain a solid drive throughout the act with this as the aim. Do not revel in the diversions. Each obstacle is fought to be able to achieve the goal. This point really streamlined much of my material. It placed each gag in its right place. It made everything getting in the way an interruption on the Way to the goal.
-The premise doesn’t have to be stated directly. It can be purely a tool to keep in your mind as you develop your act. If your act is skill-based, say a handstand act, you must look at “narrative” even more abstractly. Your final move can be seen as the achievement of your goal. Contemplate your shapes, the development of the skill level throughout the act, find which skill pleases the Crowd the most, it often isn’t the most difficult one. Structure them with “story development” in mind. Is there ways that early tricks can foreshadow your finale move?
-Take an act you already have and find ways to add complexity to it. Look for other acts or skills in your repertoire that you can fuse with it. Often the most original material is found by finding a solution to something which at first seems like a total mismatch.
-Don’t milk every moment. Choose which moments to demand group response from the Crowd (Cheers, big laughs.) Structure these so they also develop throughout the act. Variety is king for variety acts.
-Speed up. Deliver your material faster. Cut unnecessary pauses. Of course, making sure you maintain your comedy timing.
-Don’t repeat material. Even if it gets a laugh the second time. Why repeat when you could come up with something new instead. With slapstick, scrutinise each fall and each mistake and find how it differs and develops from the last one. Don’t repeat a fall without upping the game. Don’t repeat any detail without it belonging to a carefully thought-out sequence, each building on the next.
-Layer the material. In a good story, things happen one after the other. In a great story many things are going on at once and each individual thing is layered, all coming together in the end. A simple premise, can handle a lot of complications and still be easy to follow.
For instance:
-For me, throwing confetti is an almost guaranteed laugh or reaction. I went through my act making sure each confetti throw upped, changed, or subverted the last. My first throw uses the confetti as it “should” be used, that is celebratory upon finishing my own introduction. The second throw I start subverting it. I don’t throw it, instead, I drizzle it over my skinny body as I call it muscular. The third throw subverts it further. I throw it after completing a short physical sequence where struggle a lot but achieve nothing. This now “celebrates” the failure.
This is the first 1-2-3 of the confetti and it is layered between the rest of the material. Quick visual punchlines dotting spoken and physical material.
-Another example of layering is the interruptions of chaos that hinder the progress of me achieving my goal of getting through the rackets. After, or during, each disruption of slapstick I can get a laugh by commenting on my progress, or lack thereof, on achieving my goal.
-See if you can find ways to make several things happen at the same time in your act. I am sure the response from the Crowd will be positive. They love complexity and depth.
-Make sure your final move resolves your aim and completes your goal. For me it is easy, I finally get through the rackets. The story is so simple, a ridiculous man really, really wants to get through two rackets and after a world of obstacles and complication and against all odds he succeeded.
There’s another story about a character called Frodo which uses a very simple goal, I’m gonna throw this ring into a volcano, to tell an epic story of trials and tribulations. Twelve hours of movie or forty-five hours of reading later, Frodo finally gets the ring into the lava and the Crowd cheers.
See you all along the Way.
Captain Frodo Pic by John W McCormick Carnival Cinema
Master Showman, dad, husband.
Currently performing in Opium at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.
(And Carnival Cinema Co-Founder)
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