I’m sure that most of you at one time or another have gone to see a play. And you picked a date that it was playing, you bought tickets, and then you sat in the audience. And you watched the performance. I’m sure you’re also aware of the fact that if you went the next night or the night after that or a month later, it would be the same thing. You would see the same play. Imagine the actor in the play whose performing the play. Every night they’re saying the same lines and moving in the same directions and walking around the stage and making the same faces over and over and over as long as that play runs. And sometimes, you know, they run for years. And then they travel throughout the country.
It’s the same way with comedians. They have a prepared 60 minutes of jokes, and they go from stage to stage throughout the country repeating those jokes in front of new audiences who haven’t heard them yet. Now, imagine the tedium that the person doing the performance must hit after a certain amount of time and imagine the difficulty in trying to bring life to that same thing every time over and over when you are saying the same thing over and over. In other words, when everything is scripted and you’re repeating the script over and over, what do you do in order to bring a freshness and a life to what you’re doing even though you’ve done it so many times.
Now, the good actors have this ability to say it each time as if it were the first time even though it’s rehearsed. They sort of have this ability to bring life to the words. The mediocre actors don’t, and then it becomes flat. And it’s flat for them, and it’s flat for the audience. Now, within acting, there’s another kind of acting which is called improvisation. And in improvisation they have groups that do this; you’ll put a few people on stage, you’ll throw a scenario at them, you’ll give them each roles, and then you’ll tell them to talk without scripts, without anything pre-written, without stage directions, without break directions, without any directions, without a director. And that’s why it’s called improvisation. It’s made up as it goes along.
Now, many of us have a belief that our life is made up as it goes along, that we improvise our life as we go along and that we are constantly making decisions at each step of the way depending on the circumstances that we encounter. Well, that’s an interesting belief system, but the truth is that it’s not true because for most people, they are conditioned to react to situations in old established ways through all of the habits and habitual things that they’ve picked up over the years. So that when something happens, even though they may think that they are reacting newly to that situation, they’re reacting from what they’ve learned before.
