This week I was back at rehearsals with improv troupe Punderstandably- It’s really fun to get the team back together especially since we have a lot of new members – there is such a beautiful strong enthusiastic energy at the moment that it’s really fun to do practise.

Today we had a run through of the format we do for shows – we had to adjust it slightly due to having loads of members and not wanting to rely on others for audio. We did a quick run through and the other side of it we ended up having a lot more ideas of what we want to bring to the show! That’s the great thing of having a brand new team you can improve the original format and bring a new lease of life to it.

One thing we new we wanted to focus on was using games that already exist and putting our own twist on them – we came up with games that would work in the format well. Production values is something that we aim to make very important so it’s great that we like to develop on it.

Today we looked a variety of games – predominantly focusing on genre and emotion. The first game we played was the rollercoaster game where you change the genre every time the be goes. We played a few rounds of this to establish what characteristics define a genre.

We then played a game called Oscar moment – this is when you play a normal scene and then someone says Oscar moment and then someone has to act like they are acting dramatically as they would for an oscar.

It’s a really fun game and you end up putting all you can into a scene which is very fun.
This week was very good fun and I enjoyed it a lot! If you want to follow our progress or see our shows follow us at www.facebook.com/PSImprov/

Case study – Neil Patrick Harris

There are so many NPH parts that I could use as an example of drama but I am going to look at his most popular character which truly defines what I want to discuss today – Barney Stinson.
He is the most loved character of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother and he has many moments in the comedy where he uses drama to connote a point.

A lot of the time Barney uses drama is to talk importantly about things that mean a lot to him that he lives by and tries to convince the others that they should matter to him too. Whenever he mentions the bro code, the playbook or suits his actions become a lot more dramatic and over emphasised.
The use of over dramatisation is a great thing to use as a case study for the Oscar game, because it really highlights the way that it can be use to heighten the comedy. Neil Patrick Harris character became a fan favourite because of these.

Moments and because they heightened his comedic character if you compare it to Ted who is some ways plays the straight man throughout and comedy comes from being a Ross from Friends type of comedy.
The whole sitcom is based on how the “father” remember the events so by having the dramatisation on Barneys character could be a metaphor for Teds thoughts due to the jealously he has for Barney due to the outcome of the sitcom.

Due to the events being a section of the past and the “father” being in the present – the dramatically areas of Barney such as the suit loving and the ideology of him being this huge Player is probably emphasised more then it actually happened as he is unhappy as to know where the story leads and the outcome so in some was depicts him as this negative character.