How Not to Improvise

I’ve been going to improvisation classes. To learn to improvise. Yes, yes, I know, I already am fully cognisant of methods to improvise my way through life’s hair-pin bends – I can whip up a meal from only a tin of paint and a small aubergine, I can fix a leaking water main using a pair of stripy tights soaked in mulligatawny soup and I am well known for my skills in shed-creation/restoration equipped only with a couple of old doors, some slightly mouldy flat-packed furniture and a rotting marrow.

This is comedy improvisation. It’s supposed to make people laugh. It mostly makes me laugh aside from when I cry or bang my frontal lobes on the nearest trapeze.

But last night things went seriously awry. This is what happened:

Our instructor (an experienced, wise, thoughtful sort of person who is mostly a clown but mostly isn’t) instructed his class (that’s me and another disparate dozen of desperate fools. Sorry – aspiring fools) to imagine taking something off a shelf. The important thing about this exercise was not to think what was on the shelf until it was in our hands. To have a blank and empty mind with no preconceived idea as to what might be lurking on a dozen imaginary shelves scattered around the space.

You see already what fun this class is. I’ve mangled my way through many types of education and thus it is refreshingly refreshing to be told to not think. This, I thought, I could do (although that actually countered the not-thinking thing). I applied my mind to not thinking.

After a few moments of bringing strange objects off imaginary shelves I began to be slightly troubled by who had actually stacked these shelves and the high level of irresponsibility involved. Frankly the managers of the Coop, Waterstones, even ToysRus would have been appalled. I was appalled and I’m quite open-minded when it comes to shelves, cupboards and general storage devices.

This is what they had put on the shelves:
A hippo with a flower in its mouth
A green rubber ball that smelt of wet wool
Half a red stilettoed boot with teeth-marks on
A man
A pair of cats-eye marbles fused together humming ABBA songs
A small box of kittens (assorted)
An enormous statue of a turkey
A wet sponge in the shape of a woman’s breast
A wet sponge in the shape of a man’s breast
Twelve yellow African camels
…. It went on….

But this wasn’t the end of my problems. It was one thing for the anonymous shelf stacker to load this imaginary shelf but it was an entirely different issue as what the fuck I was supposed to do with all this stuff.

I began by neatly stacking it around me – the hippo was balanced on the ball which in turn was balanced on the boot. The box of kittens I shoved under the statue of the turkey. The marbles I fed to the man. But when the bloody camels turned up I just had to say something.

‘Oh noble instructor,’ I said, feeling some sort of deference was probably due to the arranger of such an exercise, ‘I have been most successful at emptying my mind,’ I continued, just so he felt I understood, ‘but now I don’t know what the fuck to do with all these things I have gotten off the shelf. The room is becoming most crowded and as you can see these camels are chaffing.’

‘Just discard the stuff once you know what it is,’ he answered, ‘throw it over your shoulder.’

I stared in disbelieving disbelief. ‘No! What?! Just throw all these things away? No! What!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?’

He raised his eyebrows. I raised my eyebrows.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and I was, ‘I just can’t do that.’ I led my camels, men, hippos, kittens etc out of the building keeping my eyebrows aloft.

Lucky my improvisational skills at shed mending are better than my comedy. Does anyone know what to feed camels?