Transcription
When it comes to fast wits, few people can beat an improv comedian. Sadly, we've run out of time.
[Laughter]
Strike chance! Hey, hey, ho, ho, we will not be paid in snow! Hey, hey, we will not be painted snow!
And while beating that speed is hard, you can implement just a few basic habits to make people think that you are much wittier than you actually are. In normal conversation, first off, most people always communicate in a way that the person that they're speaking with anticipates and expects. But purposely misinterpreting your conversational partner on occasion will make you come across as much funnier. For instance, watch Brennan misinterpret a question he clearly understands by taking it overly literally.
"Brennan, are there any holes in your underwear?"
"Yes, the factory that made it put a hole in the front for my..."
"No, that's not what I mean!"
And as a side note, Brennan also demonstrates a point we'll return to later, which is expanding on the bit rather than letting it die after just one punchline.
"Is it false or true?"
"Take the point away."
"No, that is incorrect. I'm sorry, I did lie. There's three morals: one for my torso and two more for my legs."
"That's correct. You are not God. The machine is."
One way to put this into practice in your life is to make sure to answer some of the basic questions that you get often non-literally. So when asked about your profession, you might say that you're a pro xylophone player, or if you're in school, you can say that you study decorative soap making. Here's Russell Brand doing that with a question that he must have gotten all the time.
"Uh, your hair is quite unusual in all the photographs. It looks quite wild and sometimes insane. How do you get your hair to look like that?"
"My hair's held up mostly by willpower, really. I just concentrate and wish it to be so."
Oh, it's this habit also works especially well when you're telling a story or listing something out. Most of the way through, you can switch from answering sincerely to purposely misinterpreting the question, like Tom Cruise does here when asked about what licenses he has for all the stunts that he does.
"How many different licenses do you have?"
"I mean, I have, I have airplanes, uh, commercial license, jets, bunch of different airplanes, motorcycles, parachutes, boats. I have my real estate license now."
When you purposely misinterpret, socially adept people will banter back, which takes us to the next point, and that is creating improv scenes. Yes, that's what comedians do on stage, but it's also what friends do when they ping-pong back and forth, imagining a fake world that makes them both laugh. Here's an example that may remind you of your own friend group.
"That feels like you're about to do an ad for like some kind of tabletop specific like electrolyte infused beverage."
"Yeah, you guys have hydrate on your gaming table?"
"That's why nerd water!"
Playing out these scenes is an incredibly fast way to turn an acquaintance into a friend. And the good news is that if they don't come totally natural to you, there are three keys that will immediately punch up your wit in these scenarios. First off, when someone cracks a joke, don't just laugh and move on. Expand on it by pretending that the joke premise is real. Watch this interaction between Conan and Russell Brand to see how Russell's expansion on Conan's premise creates a super fun moment of banter.
"Oh my God, what goes on in your booth?"
"Find him now."
"Oh, he should be forced to live like this!"
Second, if it makes sense for the fake world you're making up, add a character with a unique voice. Having just one of these up your sleeve can make anything funnier. I have been using Eric Cartman to great effect for years, and yes, you can steal several from Brandon Lee Mulligan, who has a million.
"You can take inspiration from the casino is the Andalusian. The vault underneath it has more than 40 million dollars on hand at any given night, right?"
"Ebonies are Scrooge. That Egghead is preparing to break curfew and seek out of the house to go to a party."
"And you said she's not allowed to leave."
Third, add specificity. That means that when you wind up bantering back and forth in a scene, use words that are uncommon in normal vocabulary but make sense to that world.
"I think you were coming in that close. Eventually, we would merge what you and I. Well, if we just kept moving closer and closer to each other, and he could hug us into one glorious ectoplasm of man."
This is where the biggest laughs often come in. Check out here how Brennan's use of the word "hirelings" does it.
"You know, like if you were watching Lord of the Rings and you know, Samwise is like, 'I can't carry the ring, Master Frodo, but I can't carry you,' and like fails his strength check and like can't lift him up to town and get some hirelings and they can carry lings."
Now, if this feels like a lot to keep track of, don't focus just on being playful and non-literal, and then of course, adding a character with a voice, and the rest often comes naturally. Here's what this looks like when all three come together effortlessly.
"Something up in the fact that all the Orcs are Cockney and all the elves are RP."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is, you know, why? Why can't we have some orc being like, 'I do say, I love to destroy the world's men.'"
"Oh, sorry, is on the phone or what?"
"And and conversely, why can't we have enough?"
"Look, there's a couple things I love. I love you even know I love a nice bottle of wine."
"I'm like, why? Why now?"
All the things that we listed will help you with your improv scenes, but to get anywhere near Brennan's level of speed and wit, you have to practice something called lowering your filter. That's when you allow yourself to speak whatever is on your mind, even if you think it's not interesting enough. And yet, you still back that up by speaking clearly and confidently. For example, watch this next clip where Brennan has just discovered that the game he's playing is rigged against him. Notice how he clearly doesn't know how he's going to connect what he's saying to the final point that he makes, but he still speaks extremely powerfully without knowing where he's going.
"I highly recommend checking out the full clip, which I will link to in the description. And if we check my, it's a big old goose egg, gang. It's a fat zero. Hello, a little late addition to the numerical symbol chart, brought to us from our friends in Arabia. A little bit of trivia that I happen to know about the history of numbers. That kind of little tidbit would serve me well in most trivia games unless it had been read from the beginning. And yet here we are, introduced to the top of the game as a champion. What do you think that means?"
"Icarus flying too close to the sun. But it seems Daedalus, our little master crafter over here, had some wax wings of his own, didn't he? Wanted to see his son fall. Fall from the sky. Oh, how close the sun he flew. Well, I'm not... Dang it, I solved your labyrinth puzzle, master."
Now, the best way to develop the skill of lowering your filter is by joining an improv comedy class in your area. It will take just a few classes before you are in the top one percent of people comfortable speaking without knowing where you're going. You'll be able to drop your inhibitions in the way that most people require alcohol to do, which makes you appear incredibly socially confident. But for some reason, if you can't join a class, you can get practice today just by setting a specific intention to say one more sentence than you normally would in every social interaction for the rest of today. So that's one more line to the cashier, maybe commenting on the tabloids you see as you check out. And that's one more line to the person in your work elevator bank, maybe noting that you haven't seen them around before. As you build this habit of speaking with a lower filter, you will find that wittier things just pop out without you knowing where they come from, just because you're not self-censoring so ruthlessly.
Now, being quick on your feet and playing a character have been of particular interest to me lately because I just created a brand new Dungeons and Dragons show that is premiering on YouTube today. Brennan was actually a huge inspiration for it, hence this video. For those of you who don't know what I mean by Dungeons and Dragons, it's a comedy improv and storytelling game, and I think ours came out amazing. It even has a hilarious Trump impersonator in it.
"You look at what these people are saying and they're touching about dumpy, right? They're talking about something and you can tell so..."
"And that's you. That's that's me. And you're excited about that, which is great."
The first episode is up now, and I highly recommend you check it out because it is a ton of fun. And if you think D&D isn't for you, we added lots of artwork and even explainers to make it accessible to people who may never have heard of it before. So click the link here and watch now. Of course, let me know what you think in the comments. Either way, I hope that you enjoyed this video. Thank you to Brennan for the D&D inspiration, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.