Meisner In Comedy

I’m writing this blog post from backstage at the Bristol Renaissance Faire, on the last day of the festival season. For the last 6 years I’ve been performing a music & comedy show that my best friend Katie and I wrote together, and we’ve been touring it to Renaissance Faires in exciting places like Iowa and Florida.

Katie and I play two Jesters named Bess & Marley, who are unemployed and looking for their next Jester gig. The show is interactive, bringing in audience members to play an array of famous artists - we incorporate music, clowning, scripted comedy, improv, and Archimedes the carrier pigeon (iykyk).

At first glance it’s difficult to associate something so presentational with the Meisner technique, but as I’ve been teaching classes this session I’ve been reflecting on how the work we do at Green Shirt Studio has seeped into my comedic acting.

Starting from the first day of Level 1 and continuing all the way through the Meisner level program, we center everything around paying attention to your partner. When we are truly in relationship, we can get out of our heads and our acting becomes alive, authentic, and natural. Katie and I have been performing together for a long time. Our show has grown and changed over the years, but there are bits and sketches that we’ve done literally hundreds of times. This is true for a lot of Renaissance Faire performers - there are variety acts who have been making the same jokes for forty years.

For comedy to hit, it has to be alive. It has to be lit from within, and it has to be 100% sincere. This is where the Meisner technique comes in! I can’t be dead inside saying my scripted jokes when my attention is on my scene partner.

Let me take you to a moment from our show. One of our sketches is a physical comedy bit with very set beats - I panic, Katie does a big fake slap, I spin around in the wrong direction, in unison we say “let’s do this,” and then we do a very silly walk to center stage. The secret comedy sauce for this sketch is that we stay fully present with each other the entire time. We technically know what’s going to happen in this bit, but we have no idea what inner life we’ll see in each other. Sometimes we see something unexpected and laugh during the silly walk, or what we see makes us do the sketch with extra intensity. The outcome is always the same, but the joke is always fresh because we as humans are always changing.

I hope Katie and I continue living truthfully under our jester imaginary circumstances for years to come!