Let’s start with the easy ones that everybody knows:
-The likelihood of a prop malfunctioning is directly proportional to its importance to the plot.
-The likelihood of a prop breaking is inversely proportional to the ease with which it can be repaired or replaced.
-The resemblance between rehearsal props and the props you will have to use during an actual performance varies inversely with their complexity and degree of difficulty to use.
-Props and costume elements that require the most rehearsal to get used to will be the last things you get during the rehearsal process. This goes double for costumes in period pieces, especially corsets, tall powdered wigs, neck ruffs, and shoes with heels a good two inches higher than their wearer has ever had on his or her feet.
Based on a similar principle to all of the above is something called the New Element Tolerance Threshold. This is impossible to determine in advance. You only know you’ve passed it when every new element you introduce in rehearsal—prop or costume—breaks the first time you use it.
If you are in a production where publicity photos are taken near the end of the rehearsal process, one of two things is likely to happen:
1. The photos will differ significantly from the production, in ways immediately obvious to the untrained eye. Key elements of costuming, set design and props may be utterly unlike the ones in the final production, or may be simply nowhere to be seen. If wigs or hats form an integral part of the costume design, people will walk around bare-headed. If it’s shoes instead, they’ll have bare feet. Actors will be unavailable for the photo shoot, and will be missing from photos of scenes in which they feature prominently. Significant moments in the show will be re-staged to make a better composition for the camera when photographed. In all cases like these, the publicity photos will be posted in a prominent place in the lobby, causing considerable consternation, first among members of the audience when they see what the show actually looks like, then among the cast and crew when one audience member after another tells them about this.
2. If the publicity photos do resemble specific moments in the show, this will be the last time anyone in the photo can be counted on to reliably remember their lines, blocking, and other business during that moment. (Suggesting that the photo be displayed to the audience during these moments, as either an alternative or a means of comparison, will not go over well with anyone concerned. I know. I’ve tried it.)
I’m gonna interjeck with a case-in-point exampull here: this is whut Uncle Fun and Sparky’s Real Live Cartoon Radio Show shood otta have looked like, as conseeved in th’ mind’a th’ author:
This is whut th’ publissitty fotos looked like:
An’ this is th’ acktuwall show itself, live onstage an’ everythin’.
Thanks for the blackmail pictures, Sparky. Unlike what I’d been describing before these rude reminders of the recent past, a lot of the shows I’ve done have been conceived intentionally as comedy, which brings with it another set of circumstances altogether. Being peculiar in the first place, comedy has its own peculiar set of rehearsal rules. In its essence, playing comedy is simply feeding an audience cues for laughter, and letting them do the rest. Playing to an audience that isn’t responding is like working with an actor who doesn’t know their lines…assuming you’re doing everything right, which in itself can be a big assumption. Therefore:
Every comedy performance is a dress rehearsal.
If you think that’s a little scary, try its corollary on for size:
If your comedy performances stop being like dress rehearsals, you need fresh material.
It’s one thing to make them laugh on cue; it’s another to hear your punch lines coming from the seats before you’ve delivered them.
The need to be half a step ahead of the audience, but not much more than that, is what makes comedy a constant challenge. In no area is this truer than when you need to work in references that assume an audience's prior knowledge of current events, history, and everything else that can loosely be termed 'culture'. Here, you run into a rule which seems utterly counter-intuitive, but which is absolutely foolproof:
To figure out the level of sophistication of cultural references that will work best with an audience, take the estimated average IQ of your audience, and divide it into the average IQ of the general population.
This never fails. Audience look like grade-school dropouts? Now’s the time to drop names like Walter Gropius and Gustav Mahler. Doing a turn for a Mensa convention? Mention the Three Stooges, and you’ll have the geniuses rolling in the aisles.
For this one coming up, you need to know what a ‘throwaway’ is. Basically, a throwaway is a joke or gag that isn’t meant to get a big laugh, but is just meant to keep the comedy momentum going until the next big laugh comes along. (So far, my entire career has been one long sequence of throwaways.) The importance of any particular throwaway in a comedy performance can be determined using the following formula:
The degree to which the presence of a throwaway is essential at a given moment is directly proportional to the length of time it takes to work out the throwaway’s exact wording, timing, and delivery, before it, and the jokes that follow it, get any kind of laugh at all.
Almost the reverse applies to comedy routines, when taken as a whole. Here, the rule is as follows:
The longer it takes to work out a routine, the less likely it will be to get a laugh.
Before this posting begins to obey that last rule, I’ll sign off, but not before tying things together by referring to the first rule I mentioned off the top of this piece:
EVERY PROP IS POTENTIALLY A COMEDY PROP—AS LONG AS IT WASN’T DESIGNED TO BE A COMEDY PROP IN THE FIRST PLACE.
After all, a banana peel is only a piece of litter…until someone steps on it.
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