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Improv Games

Team vs. Team Games Questions Only—One player from each team comes onto the playing field and each person must do a scene only by asking questions. If one of the players cannot think of anything to say or if he/she says something other than a question, he/she is out and another member of his/her team comes onto the field. When all of the players from one team are out, the opposing team wins the points.

Freeze—One or two players from both teams comes out onto the field and start moving their entire bodies. The referee yells, “Freeze!” and players must freeze in the position they are in. Then, they must justify why are doing what they are doing, and start the scene. At any point, someone on the sidelines can yell, “Freeze!” and the players must do so. Then, the person that yelled, “Freeze!” may come into the game. He/she simply touches people on the shoulder to remove them from the game. He may assume a pose of one of the people previously onstage, or he may assume any pose that he likes. The team that initiated the MOST scenes wins the points.

What Are You Doing?—One player from each team comes onto the playing field. After a suggestion from the audience, one player (Player A) starts moving in a random way. Player B asks, “What are you doing?” Player A must respond with something they are NOT doing but related to the suggestion. For example, if Player A was pretending to catch something, he/she could not say “I’m catching a ball,” but rather “I’m swimming” or “I’m putting on my best suit”. After Player A has responded, Player B must imitate what Player A has just said. Then, Player A asks “What are you doing?” and Player B must respond with something different than what he/she is actually doing. It’s difficult to explain! If someone reuses a verb during the course of one game, he/she is out and someone else from his/her team comes in to play. If someone says, for instance, “I’m stirring cake batter,” and what he or she’s doing actually looks like someone stirring cake batter, that person is out. When all the people on one team are out, the opposing team wins the points. (This is a very popular game.)

Note: A variation is to ask someone in the audience for his first or last initials. If they are “F” and “S”, for example, the players must use words that start with those two letters. “I’m floundering on sand” or “I’m finishing my snowman”…etc.

Naïve Debate—A player from each team leaves the room. The audience must come up with about three bizarre topics for the absent players to discuss. For example, the referee may ask them for a sport, and if the audience responds “baseball”, the referee may say, “Okay, now how do we play this game? Tell me some food you could use instead of a ball, and some animal to use in place of a bat.” Therefore the suggestions are really bizarre. The players come back and take their places on stage. The players must speak about a topic they have no clue about, and their team members help them using gestures and gibberish. Each team has about thirty seconds to talk. The referee must blow the whistle to change teams. If the person is getting close to saying the topic, the audience may cheer or clap, and when he/she actually says the topic, they may applaud loudly. The team that has “discovered” the most topics wins the points. Whew!

Single-team Games Family Vacation—One person is the narrator and the rest of the team acts out the narration. The premise is that the narrator is showing everyone slides of his family vacation. The lights go down and he begins to tell a story. “This first slide is a shot of my beautiful wife and dog at the beach.” When the lights come up, two people have assumed some position on stage, acting like the wife and the dog. Of course, they are frozen in place. The lights go down and the narration continues. The referee can stop the game at any point.

Party Quirks—Audience members (or staff members) write down strange idiosyncrasies, and one is handed to each player. Just like on “Who’s Line”, player go to an imaginary party and display their quirks. The host must guess what’s wrong with them.

Number of Words Per Person—Each person on a team must only speak in short phrases. The referee assigns a “number of words” to each person. Person A can only speak in 2 word phrases, Person B can say 5-word phrases, etc.

Audience Buzzer—Players start a scene and at any point, audience members may yell, “buzz” or “change” or “switch” or whatever the referee decides. If a player is doing a scene and hears “buzz!” he/she must restate whatever was said. For example, at an imaginary art museum, the player says, “Wow! What a delightful painting!” The audience calls out “Buzz!” and the player must say something like “Wow! I’ve never seen anything so hideous!” If he’s buzzed again, “This would look nice on my mother-in-law’s living room wall.” (Since the audience can sometimes be obnoxious with the buzzing, the referee may just want to do it.)

Blind Line—Audience volunteers are giving slips of paper on which they may write a single phrase. As long as they are not crude, the phrase can be just about anything. The pieces of paper are collected and scattered on the stage. Players come onto the stage and start doing a scene. At some point, a player picks up a piece of paper, reads it, and he/she must justify it in the scene.

Shakespeare—An entire scene is done in the style of Shakespeare, complete with long, drawn-out dramatic deaths, swordfights, fair maidens, and stuff that would make Kenneth Braunaugh cringe.

Foreign Film Dub—Two or three players must do a scene in a foreign language (that’s actually gibberish). Two or three other people on the same team must translate for the audience what they say. The audience gets to decide what language they’d like to hear.

Forward, Reverse—This is probably the most popular game at ComedySportz. Usually, players start doing a scene, and when the referee yells, “Switch!” the players must do everything backwards. They must remember their lines—which is very difficult! Sometimes, the referee can have the players start doing a scene backwards and then go forwards which gives me a headache just thinking about it.

Emotional Symphony—Each player on a team is given a different emotion by the audience and then they line up on stage. The referee becomes the conductor and he/she conducts an emotional symphony. If the referee points at a person, he/she must vocally and facially display that emotion. This is a very silly game, and it’s one game that takes very little brainpower.

Dubbed Opera—Like Foreign Film Dub, players must sing in a foreign language. Other players translate.

Moving Bodies—Two or three audience members are selected to come up on stage. They must physically move the bodies of the players. The players must justify why they are behaving so strangely. (This is also on “Who’s Line” a lot.)

Day in the Life—A person “who’s having a special day” is chosen from the audience, and he/she must retell what happened on that day. It’s the referee’s job to find out as much about the day as possible. Then, the players try to recreate what happened based on what they have heard.

Changing Emotions—The referee gets a list of emotions from the audience. The players begin a scene, but at any time, the referee shouts out a NEW emotion, and all the players must assume that emotion and continue the scene. Number one audience suggestion for emotion? Lust.

The World’s a Stage—Players choose a play or collection of short plays from a box (this is something they keep in the closet at all times.) Usually one person can say anything he/she wants, but the others must only read lines from their scripts. This is hard to pull off, but very funny.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong Now? (aka, “Audience as God”)—Players do a normal scene, and at any time, the audience may yell out some sort of disaster or problem that will then befall all of the players and they have to deal with it.