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Harpo Does Something Funny
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(Troper describes Harpo Does Something Funny here.) The script doesn't show the actor's lines, but instead tells the actor to just improvise. The trope is named after the Marx Brothers, whose scripts allegedly would frequently leave a note to this effect for Harpo to improvise something. The more formal term "retroscripting" is used to describe a script made up almost entirely of directions like these to allow a mostly improv performance. The reason to do this is that some actors are just naturally funnier than anything a scriptwriter can come up with. As such, this is possibly the highest compliment that can ever be paid to a comedian. The only problem is that even if the comedian is hilarious, if such notes are not used well enough, the resulting scene can be jarring or out of place. Sometimes the actor produces huge amounts of improvised material, which can be edited down to the best-fitting parts (with the rest becoming hilarious Deleted Scenes to add to the DVD Bonus Material). Compare The Cast Show Off, Throw It In!, Audience Participation, and Official Fan-Submitted Content. See also Corpsing, which is always a risk when the other actors need to be able to keep a straight face. Not to be confused with [Trope Name], which has some overlap with this in the scripting part. |
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Each scene in The Thick of It was filmed twice, once as scripted followed by an improvised version. The finished programme used material from both takes. | |
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Finding Nemo had Albert Brooks improvise poorly telling a joke. The filmmakers said on the DVD commentary they had a lot of unused audio from different takes, with one shown on the commentary going on for several minutes. Similarly, for the punchline at the end, he improvised several different jokes, which are shown one after the other. Ellen Degeneres also improvised Dory's sleeptalking, with quite a bit also being left out. Brooks was initially annoyed that he had to do his lines in his booth by himself but got over it. Imagine trying to rein in Brooks and Ellen from improvising if they were in the room together? | |
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You Bet Your Life was a Quiz Show that depended on this with Groucho Marx, although he was also fed lines prepared by the show's gag writers in case he needed something pre-prepared from the guests' preliminary interviews. | |
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When Woods was cast as Hades in Hercules, the writers basically threw the script into the air and said, "Screw it." They wrote most of his dialogue this way. | |
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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a memetic take on this. The main goal is to defeat Calamity Ganon before he breaks out of Hyrule Castle and finishes what he started, and also hopefully cleanse the Divine Beasts to help you...but given that the entire game runs on Take Your Time, you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want with no rush. Hell, you can even rush straight to the final boss in little more than your ratty clothes and sticks as soon as you leave the Great Plateau. Granted, actually defeating the final boss in this state is... a task. On another note, there's all the other silly shenanigans Link can get up to while steadily working to save Hyrule. He can help put a town together with a requirement that only people with "-son" in their name maybe live there; gather korok seeds that turn out to be pieces of korok poop; screw around with various enemies and make their lives miserable; and a whole lot more. However you slice it, Link will defeat Ganon... eventually. |
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In Cheers, most of Cliff's "little known facts" were improvised by John Ratzenberger, with the scripts simply cueing him into his lines. Cliff is also notable because Ratzenberger didn't just improvise his lines, he improvised the part: after unsuccessfully auditioning for the part of Norm, Ratzenberger asked the producers if they had a "know-it-all" character, and made up Cliff on the spot. | |
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The second was that most British-related insults Film Brain used ("wanker", "bloody", etc.) was thrown in by him. | |
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The Simpsons: Homer's "D'oh!" was originally scripted as "(annoyed grunt)", which Dan Castellaneta originally read as an elongated "d'owwwh" before truncating it to the iconic shorter form. The scripts still use "(annoyed grunt)", even when it renders episode titles (like "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)") nonsensical. The writers mention on the DVDs that recurring guest Albert Brooks (Hank Scorpio, Russ Cargill of The Simpsons Movie, among others) likes to improv, so they tend to write his scripts with only the basic story details, and then just let him go off. This is most obvious in "You Only Move Twice", in a scene where Scorpio rattles off all the places in town that sell hammocks, punctuated only by Homer going "Uh-huh. Yes... Uh-huh..." because Dan Castellaneta has no real reply ready and he's just following along. Though he does pick up on it to add "Oh, in the hammock district," at just the right time. Professor Frink's dialogue is often punctuated with "(Frink noise)", where Hank Azaria will occasionally insert "glavin" or "m'hey" |
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Parks and Recreation: According to the creators, scripts often included the line "Chris does something funny." Also, Garth Blundin doing his infamous filibuster in season 5 episode 19 was essentially letting Patton Oswalt ramble about every bit of Star Wars he had in his head. |
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The entire character of Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski. John Turturro agreed to be in the film under the impression that his role was much bigger than the one-scene Spear Carrier it actually was. He was really disappointed to learn otherwise, so The Coen Brothers (who are normally very meticulous with their scripts, to the point that things that seem like ad-libs frequently aren't) made it up to him by basically telling him go crazy with the character. The result? A flamboyant, scenery-chewing, and hyper-arrogant bowling player/pederast who did six months in Chino for exposing himself to eight-year-olds, dresses in bright neon purple, and seems to be constantly dancing for no reason. Talk about a One-Scene Wonder. | |
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Gorilla, Interrupted: Due to time constraints, the director wrote a loose, 50-page outline for a film to shoot in seven days. This led to many scenes that relied on the actors simply improvising their lines and finding a way to get to the next scene because they didn't have time to rehearse and deliver extended dialogue. However, one of the four main actors felt uncomfortable improvising and wrote his own version of the script filling all the blank spaces with gags largely inspired by Monty Python. The director ultimately had to reassert his control of the film. | |
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The Dukes of Hazzard: Much of the physical comedy involving Boss Hogg and Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane was improvised and/or ad-libbed between Sorrell Booke and James Best. The producers had realized the duo's comedic chemistry and Best — as he once recalled in various interviews — said that many of their own ideas were better than what was originally written in the script. | |
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You, potentially. The more interactive video games — say, Half-Life 2 — tell you to go from point A to point B, but leave it up to you to decide how to get there. Want to fuck around and build a castle out of oil drums, spray rude pictures on the walls with bullet holes, or get an NPC to glitch out and ragdoll in the middle of a dramatic speech? Go wild. There's a whole cottage industry of people on the internet sharing funny clips (of varying quality) about the shenanigans they get up to in video games. The Elder Scrolls and Grand Theft Auto series are rich with these scenarios (a lot of GTA missions can be completed in 1/10 the intended amount of time by using a Disc-One Nuke, for example). It was a major selling point of the Deus Ex series, where you were supposed to find creative ways to complete a mission with minimal bloodshed, but you still had the freedom to do things any which way. (See also Emergent Gameplay) The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a memetic take on this. The main goal is to defeat Calamity Ganon before he breaks out of Hyrule Castle and finishes what he started, and also hopefully cleanse the Divine Beasts to help you...but given that the entire game runs on Take Your Time, you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want with no rush. Hell, you can even rush straight to the final boss in little more than your ratty clothes and sticks as soon as you leave the Great Plateau. Granted, actually defeating the final boss in this state is... a task. On another note, there's all the other silly shenanigans Link can get up to while steadily working to save Hyrule. He can help put a town together with a requirement that only people with "-son" in their name maybe live there; gather korok seeds that turn out to be pieces of korok poop; screw around with various enemies and make their lives miserable; and a whole lot more. However you slice it, Link will defeat Ganon... eventually. |
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While making Darkwing Duck, Jim Cummings quickly developed a habit of ad-libbing the middle part of the title character's Mad Libs Catch Phrase to the point that the scripts often read "I am the terror that flaps in the night! [It doesn't matter what I write here, Jim is going to say something funnier]!" The same thing happened in OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes, where the scripts would often have some of Lord Boxman's lines listed as simply "Jim sputters" since he can improvise a lot of funny-sounding vocalizations. |
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For his role as Johnny in Airplane!, Stephen Stucker was given the straight lines of the characters around him and was allowed to write his own responses, as discussed in the DVD Commentary. | |
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In particular, the entire second act is a re-do of Hamlet in about a quarter of the time. When they get to this point, they bring in an audience member (usually the one the "Adam" role vomits on) to play the part, encouraging the other audience members to recite a mantra for part of Ophelia's psyche. | |
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The King of Comedy had Martin Scorsese giving Sandra Bernhard freedom of improvisation given she lacked formal acting training. And given she plays a deranged Loony Fan, it's more like "Harpo Does Something Terrifying". | |
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Dream SMP: Most of the major events are at least partially planned, while the dialogue within them is improvised, leaving the participants with much more room to fill in the blanks. Eret the content creator has given more details on how exactly the scripts are made and planned on Tumblr. | |
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Sonic the Hedgehog was similar, with Carrey remarking that his directions at times were "Here's the room and this is the music, just do something to go with it." This led to some truly hilarious interactions between Dr. Robotnik and Agent Stone, as Lee Majdoub was able to keep up with Carrey's outbursts with spontaneous acts of Cold Ham even when having to react to things like Carrey putting his fingers in the man's mouth with zero warning. | |
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In Seussical, much of the Cat in the Hat's dialogue has "ad lib." written all over it. | |
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In Scrubs, the Janitor's dialogue was sometimes left blank (or the script says something along the lines of "Whatever Neil Says") so that Neil Flynn can just improvise. Most of the outtake reel shows the other actors Corpsing at Flynn throwing out wildly different dialogue every take. | |
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Most of Rick and Morty is retroscripted, but it's taken to an extreme with "Rixty Minutes", in which nearly all of the interdimensional TV shows and commercials are clearly the voice actors improvising for comedic effect. | |
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On The Carol Burnett Show, each week's show was taped twice, once as a dress rehearsal and then again as a "final" performance, both times before a studio audience. Very often the dress rehearsal take of a sketch, which frequently involved adlibbing from cast members such as Tim Conway, was edited in for the actual broadcast. (Here's one good example.) | |
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The Muppet and kid segments in Sesame Street are usually handled this way. The Muppeters just have their character enter into a dialogue with a child about a certain topic, and the production team keeps what they can use. | |
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Katie Crown improvises most of her dialogue for Izzy in Total Drama, as this interview reveals. | |
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In Salome, the stage directions for the Dance of the Seven Veils read, in their entirety, "Salome does the dance of the seven veils." This has the added practical value of allowing the individual production to decide how far they want to push things, as it can get pretty racy. Richard Strauss's opera adds a few more cues here, but the dance is still not described in detail. | |
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Drinking Buddies didn't have a script. Instead, the actors were told what needed to happen in the scene and just allowed to choose their own words. | |
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Human Remains was written via its two creator-performers improvising around characters and ideas while recording. They then transcribed the best parts and honed it into the final recorded version. | |
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Paul Schrier and Jason Narvy in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers were allowed to improvise quite often under certain directors. Paul even said at a Power Morphicon panel, name-dropping the trope, that a lot of times their lines and directions consisted just of the phrase "Bulk and Skull do something funny." | |
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Parodied on The Muppet Show: | |
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In an interview during the making of Me, Myself & Irene, he said, "It's amazing how blank a script will be. It just says 'Jim does something funny.'" | |
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In The Big Bang Theory, whenever scientific facts are needed in the script the writers simply leave an "insert science here" in the script, then it is up to the scientific consultant Prof. David Saltzburg, his colleagues, or Dr. Mayim Bialik to fill in the blanks, usually using cutting-edge, state-of-the-art science fresh off papers in recent journals, or in some occasions the scientists' own research. | |
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During the pre-voice acting script recordings for the Freakazoid! episode "Dance of Doom", writer Paul Rugg was told to "do something weird" as the title character, and improvised a bizarre, furious rant against the episode's villain. This was one of several moments that led Rugg to be Freakazoid's permanent voice actor rather than just a scratch track. | |
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This is how Curb Your Enthusiasm is made. The scripts are outlines; they direct the flow of the conversation in fairly specific detail, but the actual lines are left up to the actors, to make them sound more like real conversations, and they're not supposed to think of things to say ahead of time. (Apparently, Richard Lewis was doing this, and Larry David could tell, and now he's not even allowed to work from a script.) | |
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Averted in PCU: Jeremy Piven ad-libbed in his audition and assumed he would do the same for the film, but was immediately shut down by the director. | |
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In UHF, several of Michael Richards' scenes are ad-libbed, especially when his character Stanley appears on TV and says and does ridiculous things. The film's star and co-writer "Weird Al" Yankovic encouraged this by just outlining his scenes and had this to say in the DVD commentary: | |
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Individual wrestlers are frequently given pretty much free rein over their matches. In the old ECW, Paul Heyman gave Lance Storm enough leeway that Lance was occasionally allowed to change the ending to the match, and some other wrestlers, such as Chris Benoit and Shane Douglas, were known for not needing much in the way of guidelines. Conversely, giving wrestlers no leeway is sometimes used to make sure a decent match happens - see Hulk Hogan vs. the Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VI, and a Trish Stratus vs. Stephanie McMahon match on Raw. Like promos, TV and PPV wrestling matches have become more and more scripted, with agents such as Arn Anderson or D'Lo Brown laying the entire match out beforehand with the wrestlers. | |
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Many promos are done this way, with the wrestler given a basic outline of what to emphasize in his/her promo and then filling in the rest. Wrestlers who are particularly adept at this are given even more freedom and are usually more popular with the fans, often getting pushes based on their skills at cutting promos. WWE has been moving away from this in recent years, scripting promos word for word and insisting wrestlers stick to that since the formatting for the television shows has gotten so tight. Results have been mixed, as improvising a promo and "making" a scripted one are very different sets of skills. | |
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This was pretty much the premise of Home Movies. The actors were given outlines of what would happen in the episodes and the dialogue was mostly made up. An infamous scene in the first season about McGuirk and his tattoos was completely improvised by H. Jon Benjamin and Brendan Small. Also, the basis for Lynch's appearance was based on a description that Benjamin ad-libbed as McGuirk. | |
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Reno 911! is all done improvisationally. Scripts set up scenes and indicate plot points; the actors come up with their own dialogue. | |
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While The Angry Beavers was scripted, Nick Bakey and Richard Horivitz were often encouraged to improvise, resulting in some of the show's more stream-of-consciousness jokes. | |
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In the special features of the Law & Order: Criminal Intent Season 1 DVD, the producers say that after hiring Vincent D'Onofrio as Detective Robert Goren, they basically allowed him to do whatever he wanted, leading to many funny moments and one of the most distinctive characters in the crime genre. | |
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In the commentary for The Nostalgia Critic and Phelous' joint review of Child's Play, the part where Phelous transfers his soul into a pencil sharpener was largely unscripted. Doug Walker essentially wrote "Improvise, make it up, I don't care," and ended up using all of Phelan Porteous' ad-libs. | |
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Ultra Fast Pony: Wacarb explained in the "Behind the Scenes" video that every episode has some degree of planning, whether he writes a script out or just keeps a plan in his head. The one exception is Rainbow Dash's dialogue. For her lines, he just turns the mic on and says the first thing that pops into his head. He explains it's a sort of Method Acting; he doesn't know what Rainbow Dash will say, because Rainbow Dash has no idea what she's saying, either. | |
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In The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, Steve and Terri Irwin had no script for their "documentary" sections; instead, their dialogue was completely improvised. | |
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The comedic dialogue on Schitt's Creek is tightly scripted, but a rare non-comic moment was not. Dan Levy simply wrote that Patrick serenades an acoustic cover of Tina Turner's "Simply the Best" and it is surprisingly beautiful. Noah Reid arranged and performed the song himself, giving the show an iconic moment. On the funny side, Moira's Christmas medley was arranged by Catherine O'Hara. Additionally, Annie Murphy wrote Alexis's socialite single "A Little Bit Alexis" and did the choreography herself. | |
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Marvel Cinematic Universe In Iron Man, a good deal of the script was written like this; not just Tony's lines, but everybody's. The script was just a brief summary of what they needed to say, with the details improvised. This is why the dialogue feels more natural (and also how Robert Downey Jr. was able to retool his character into a Deadpan Snarker). Jeff Bridges described the experience as a $200 million college film. During the filming of Thor: Ragnarok, Taika Waititi encouraged Jeff Goldblum to improvise and have fun with the latter's role as the Grandmaster, resulting in one of the Goldblumiest characters in recent history. Tom Holland and Robert Downey Jr. improvised the former's dusting scene in Avengers: Infinity War. |
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During the filming of Thor: Ragnarok, Taika Waititi encouraged Jeff Goldblum to improvise and have fun with the latter's role as the Grandmaster, resulting in one of the Goldblumiest characters in recent history. | |
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Almost all of the voice actors for alien characters in Ultraman Orb The Movie: Lend Me the Power of Bonds! improvised their lines. | |
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For the comic crossover DC One Million, writer Grant Morrison sent other writers fairly detailed notes on what the world and plotting of the series were like, often pretty much doing the whole issue for them. For Hitman, Morrison's sole direction to writer Garth Ennis was "Garth — Do a pisstake." | |
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On The Odd Couple (1970) some scripts were like this, allowing Tony Randall and Jack Klugman to improvise. For example, a script might say "Oscar teaches Felix how to play football." | |
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The only thing that kept Scott Steiner in WWE near the end of his run was his mic ability. The guy combines a freakish steroid physique with a Hair-Trigger Temper and a Cloudcuckoolander persona to create some truly entertaining, though often nonsensical, promos. | |
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District 9 was almost entirely improvised. Director Neill Blomkamp had specific ideas for each scene and directed the actors with timing cues for when and where certain actions were to take place, but the actual dialogue and performance for the scene was entirely improvised. They would do several takes, usually without the cameras rolling and often with several different variations on the scene until Neill and the rest of the cast decided that they had a good approach to how the scene should specifically play out; they would then film it with that direction in mind. Neill and the rest of the actors commented in the DVD extras that Sharlto Copley (Wikus) was the undisputed master of this trope. | |
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A lot of Doofenshmirtz's ramblings in Phineas and Ferb were ad-libbed by Dan Povenmire. | |
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The Takarazuka productions of Elisabeth have Lucheni adlib at the start of act 2, before "Kitsch". | |
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Star Trek: Star Trek: The Original Series, just like The A-Team example above, was surprisingly blank in most parts of the script due to time constraints, forcing the actors to fill in the blanks on their own. The now-famous Vulcan salute was actually Leonard Nimoy's idea since he had to come up with the salute on his own, so he used an actual Jewish hand gesture. William Shatner had the hardest time improvising, which was the source of Captain Kirk's signature pause in between words. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the scriptwriters often wouldn't bother scripting out the technobabble, instead just jotting the shorthand "[tech]", and letting the science advisers to the show - Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda - fill in something that sounded good. |
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The anime adaptation of Konosuba owes many of its jokes (including the popular "Yes, I'm Kazuma" gag) to notes like this, when Studio DEEN realized how funny the voice actors were (Jun Fukushima in particular). | |
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Much of Caddyshack was ad-libbed, most famously Bill Murray's "Cinderella story" scene, which was only in the script as: "Carl hits flowers with a grass whip." Director Harold Ramis told him to just pretend he was a kid, acting out his sports fantasy. In fact, none of Murray's scenes were scripted; they just let the camera roll on him. | |
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When interviewed about the process of writing Yes (Prime) Minister, Jonathan Lynn reports putting "Paul doesn't have to say this line if he doesn't want to" in the margin of scripts, in recognition of Paul Eddington (who played the title character)'s ability to "act a line with his face". See this video from about 1:18 for a celebrated example. | |
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In Iron Man, a good deal of the script was written like this; not just Tony's lines, but everybody's. The script was just a brief summary of what they needed to say, with the details improvised. This is why the dialogue feels more natural (and also how Robert Downey Jr. was able to retool his character into a Deadpan Snarker). Jeff Bridges described the experience as a $200 million college film. | |
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Much of Taxi Driver was written this way, as director Martin Scorsese wanted to give some of his actors room to improvise. Albert Brooks and Harvey Keitel greatly expanded their roles this way (Keitel only had five lines in the original script before he got working), and Robert De Niro's famous "You Talkin' to Me?" scene was rendered in the script as, "Travis talks in the mirror." | |
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Part of the script for The Fellowship of the Ring in the Mines of Moria read something along the lines of, "The Fellowship run down some stairs." Then Peter Jackson saw a piece of concept art of said stairs with No OSHA Compliance by John Howe and started envisioning an entire action sequence around it. The final result is a five-minute extravaganza with falling rocks, falling chunks of stairs, Orcs firing arrows, Legolas being a badass with his bow, and a line created from whole cloth ("Nobody tosses a dwarf!"). | |
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In Green Wing, Stephen Mangan and Michelle Gomez were never given scripts for their scenes together as both were professional improv actors. If a plot point needed to occur, that was all the "script" said, and so for the scenes where Guy walks into Sue's office and nothing plot-relevant happens there was no script at all, such as when Guy tries to talk about love or complains about Jelly. | |
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Glee's Heather Morris is said to do this during table readings, often playing on the previous dialog of characters. Brittany's one-liners are sometimes penciled in after the initial readings. | |
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Still with Red vs. Blue, Miles Luna revealed during a talk with Monty that Caboose is the most difficult character to write for on the show. On at least one occasion he left a note in the script simply telling Joel to do whatever he wanted. | |
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The Scottish actors in Brave were given a script, but told that if there was a "more Scottish" way of saying something, they should say that. Kelly Macdonald, the voice of Merida, managed to throw in a reference to The Broons with the line "Jings, crivvens, help ma boab!" | |
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Star Trek: The Original Series, just like The A-Team example above, was surprisingly blank in most parts of the script due to time constraints, forcing the actors to fill in the blanks on their own. The now-famous Vulcan salute was actually Leonard Nimoy's idea since he had to come up with the salute on his own, so he used an actual Jewish hand gesture. William Shatner had the hardest time improvising, which was the source of Captain Kirk's signature pause in between words. | |
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Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth features Kson of Kson On Air as Kei as a hostess at the Revolve Bar. According to Kson, she was given a ton of freedom to go off-script and just generally act like herself, which is most obvious when Kei is gushing at being in the presence of Kazuma Kiryu (Kson being a noted longtime fan of the franchise and especially Kiryu). | |
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In the first season of The Good Place, the scenes with Jason talking about his vanity licence plate, his guess about how he died, and Janet's inability to identify a basketball are all improvised - in the bloopers, the two actors say completely different lines every take. | |
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In one draft of Oklahoma!, Oscar Hammerstein II cued the Dream Ballet this way: "Take it away, Agnes!" | |
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Toy Story 2: For the scene of Woody walking around Al's collection, admiring all of The Merch from his show, John Lasseter showed Tom Hanks drawings of all of the various items for Hanks to react to in-character. | |
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Jim Cornette wrote an opinion column once about how this is the proper way to have a wrestler (or his manager) cut a promo: give him a few points that he needs to hit during the promo and have him ad-lib the rest of it. | |
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Tsukiuta's stage plays almost always feature an improv scene. Usually, this features Hajime's alter-ego, Mutsuki-kun, in a sort of Boke and Tsukkomi Routine with Kakeru, though other cast members often feature as well. The spinoff series SQS features a similar segment, with Shiki going to a coffee house, and the members of Quell doing an improv scene, with Shu and Issei in different costumes in each performance. | |
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A common feature in Shiny Objects Videos is allowing for bits and pieces of improv. Even more often, a variant—scripts are changed just moments before they are filmed. | |
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In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick told Malcolm McDowell to just sing whatever song he knew, leading him to choose "Singing in the Rain". | |
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Serenity features an entire conversation between Mal and Inara over video communication that was left unscripted. Joss Whedon couldn't come up with lines he was satisfied with, so he just put in the gist of the conversation and wrote "Something Mal/Inara would say" for the two actors to improvise. He also did this for Mal's famous "Faster would be better!" during the chase scene, which is noteworthy for Nathan Fillion improvising a line that was so like what Whedon would write that fans were convinced it had to have been scripted. | |
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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) mixes this with Audience Participation. Which means the correct response to Get Thee to a Nunnery is "FUCK YAS ALL!" In particular, the entire second act is a re-do of Hamlet in about a quarter of the time. When they get to this point, they bring in an audience member (usually the one the "Adam" role vomits on) to play the part, encouraging the other audience members to recite a mantra for part of Ophelia's psyche. A better example of this might even be the fact that that same night had an audience member named Hercules...cuing off-the-cuff jokes about Olympus. Eventually, the proper reproduction of the play ended with the "Daniel" part picking up a local mountain to squash Claudius (the "Adam" role), with a joke about how much strength that would need. The published version of the script includes several footnotes along the lines of "At this point Adam very often rambles for a minute or more about current events, weaving a conspiratorial tale of nuclear fallout, corrupt politicians, debauched evangelists and/or whatever bug he has up his butt at the time", or noting a punchline as the default joke if the performers can't pull anything better from recent headlines. The most direct example of this trope, however, is just before the intermission, when one cast member has fled the theatre and another has chased off after him, leaving the third alone to entertain the audience for a few minutes. The stage directions simply read "Daniel stalls"; this can cover anything from playing the accordion to fire-eating. |
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Original airings of Saturday Night Live are always live, but sometimes they'll use rehearsal takes for rebroadcasts. However, Lorne Michaels severely discourages improvisation in most cases because the timing on the show is so tight, to the extent of banning guests from the show for doing so. That being said, the writers have often found they can spice up a dicey sketch by adding "KENAN reacts" to a page or two. | |
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Most of the off-the-cuff comedy from Match Game (CBS) came from Gene Rayburn, Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly, Richard Dawson, and some of their semi-regulars like Betty White and Dick Gautier. But once in a while, a celebrity not renowned for cutting up does something unexpectedly funny. Case in point: A question was "The loan shark said to Cleopatra, "I can give you the loan but we'll have to hold your ______ for collateral." Each celebrity panelist said "asp" and prefaced it with a differing adjective like "big" and "half" to make it sound like "ass." Trish Stewart, an actress from the soap opera The Young & The Restless said "dumb asp," prompting panelist Jack Carter to belt out "She's one of us! She's in trouble!" | |
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A non-comedy and non-improvised example occurred in Game of Thrones, where a line in the script for the episode "Spoils of War" instructed the series' horse master Camilla Naprous to "do her tricks" during a battle involving hordes of Dothraki horsemen. Camilla decided on having the Dothraki stand on their saddles mid-gallop (with the aid of a special stirrup) and start shooting arrows. The episode's director loved the idea but dismissed it as impossible. Camilla's horsemen proved him wrong. | |
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The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee originated as an improv show and often casts improv comedians. The script encourages the actors for Rona and Panch in particular to improvise when describing the spellers and using the spelling bee words in a sentence, respectively. Logainne's speech in Act 2 is also left open for the actress to improvise, though a few example speeches from previous performances are included. | |
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World's Greatest Adventures is planned more than scripted, with most of Talltales's actual lines ad-libbed. | |
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One of the running gags in the Leverage episode "The Rashomon Job" involves Sophie's British accent getting more and more exaggerated with each retelling of the episode's plot. According to Word of God, her dialogue for Parker's version of the story simply read "Sophie: Absolutely incomprehensible British-sounding gibberish", with her actress (Gina Bellman) making it up herself. | |
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In From Dusk Till Dawn, the first scene where the vampires reveal themselves and a massive battle ensues was simply marked in the script as, "All Hell breaks loose." Also, Salma Hayek's dance as Satanico Pandemonium had no choreographer; Robert Rodriguez just brought her in and let the music move her as it would. | |
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Most of Jonathan Winters' dialogue in The New Scooby-Doo Movies episode "The Frickert Fracas" sounded improvised (he was known for improvisational comedy and had his own syndicated show at the time), but it has since been noted that it was scripted so it can pass muster with CBS standards and practices. | |
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In Hitch, Kevin James was asked to improvise all of his silly dance moves, and did accordingly ("Q-tip! Q-tip! Throw it away! Throw it away!"). | |
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Hamilton famously has one segment, "The Reynolds Pamphlet", that has the company improvise crazy moves. | |
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The Monkees: The group was not only allowed, but encouraged to improvise, and gaps were often left in the script to facilitate this, especially where Micky Dolenz was concerned. | |
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My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks: The freestyling during Snips and Snails' rap was genuine freestyling courtesy of Lee Tockar and Richard Ian Cox. It was also supposed to be bad, so without any kind of prior instruction, lines, or a beat, they came with something on the spot, and it was left in as a perfect example of Cringe Comedy. | |
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At some point, the script for Welcome to Night Vale's second-anniversary episode apparently read, "CECIL: (honest opinion about the impression)", referring to Steve Carlsberg's squeaky-voiced imitation of Cecil's boyfriend. The result: | |
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Team Fortress 2's Meet the Sandvich trailer was created this way, as was documented on the game's development blog. The writers came up with the basic scenario before letting the voice actors loose, their improv making up the entirety of the video. That being said, a large majority of the lines didn’t make it to the video, most of them coming from the Soldier. | |
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In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Equestria Games", actor Cathy Weseluck wasn't given any lines for when Spike the Dragon has to sing Cloudsdale's national anthem. She also wasn't told how long the song would be or given any of the music beforehand, making Spike's incredibly desperate, awkward fumbling through the song seem more genuine. | |
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Doctor Who: Some of the Fourth Doctor's stuff was written like this in two particular periods. (Tom Baker was even nicknamed 'Harpo', though this was more for his hairstyle than for this trope.) The first period was during the later Fourth Doctor/Sarah Jane years, where the actors were encouraged to go off script as they were witty and creative people who got on like a house on fire playing themselves to some extent. Virtually all of their dialogue in "The Android Invasion" was written by Baker and Elisabeth Sladen, and they also both rewrote her ending scene in "The Hand of Fear" together because Sladen hated the scripted departure so much she'd actually defaced her copy of it (which she eventually gave to Russell T. Davies as a gift). During the apex of Wag the Director period, Tom would also get free reign to mess about, which was noted in the afterword to the 2012 novelisation of "Shada" - the shooting script it was worked from was Tom's copy, blank spots in which he'd penciled in descriptions of the physical comedy bits he wanted to do. This meant that several gags 'written' by Tom made their way to the book adaptation, like the sequence where the Doctor bursts into a room, doesn't see what he expects, leaves, and, after a short hesitation, enters again in the exact same way he entered the first time. "Terror of the Zygons" has a scene where Sarah and the Doctor are locked in a vacuum container. The scripted version of the screen required a practical special effect that was too expensive, so it was discarded and Baker and Sladen were allowed to devise their own scene. The script editor on "City of Death" was aware that the script for Part Four was significantly under-running, and the stage directions for a chase sequence expressly ask the director to pad the sequence out for as long as possible with shots of Parisian scenery. For Donna Noble's reintroduction episode "Partners in Crime", with the scene where the Doctor and Donna are reunited on either side of soundproof glass and thus have to mime their conversation, the script gave the lines they wanted Donna to mime and then the director let Catherine Tate and David Tennant go to town. The result is one of the most gut-bustingly funny scenes ever to hit television. The script for "The Big Bang" had no description for the Doctor's dancing at Amy's wedding beyond Amy's spoken comments that it's "terrible" and "embarrassing". All that hand waving and head bopping (terrible, embarrassing, and wonderful) is pure Matt Smith. Remember the Twelfth Doctor's first moments in "The Time of the Doctor"? Those were all improvised. So yes, the whole ordeal with miscolored kidneys was pure Peter Capaldi. |
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Kiyoshi Tamura and Yoshihisa Yamamoto featured an example best described as "Tamura and Yamamoto fight for real" in their match at RINGS's 1996 Mega Battle Tournament. As both wrestlers were in midst of a push at the time, the bookers could not decide who should win the bout, so they eventually took the shocking decision to send the wrestlers to work the planned match and, when they reached the ending, just go shoot (that is, fight for real). Naturally, as both Yamamoto and Tamura wanted to win, they struck each other for real even during the worked segments in order to have the other worn when the real stuff came. In the end, Tamura won the match with a legitimate flying armbar that almost broke Yamamoto's arm. | |
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The infamous "How am I funny?" confrontation from Goodfellas was mostly ad-libbed by Joe Pesci, to marvelous effect. | |
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The scripts of Monty Python's Flying Circus usually didn't specify the content of Terry Gilliam's linking animations. They'd simply say stuff like "Terry takes over here". The skits, however, were very heavily scripted. | |
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Weirdly, this situation seems to have become a running theme even in other media, as it lends itself to Mamoru's otherwise typically low-key role in some stories; the live-action musical interpretations frequently hire an older, established actor to play Mamoru with a more noticeable degree of ad-lib in his shorter appearances, especially if he doubles as another minor character. | |
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There was no script whatsoever during production on The Blair Witch Project. The actors were all cast for their improv experience, and instead of a script, they got an outline of the backstory of the titular Blair Witch and were then sent on an eight-day scavenger hunt in Seneca Creek State Park in Maryland. Their directions for the day's shooting would be contained in 35 mm film cans, along with clues to the next location, all while they grew increasingly cranky in real time over the course of the eight days spent alone in the woods, deprived of food during the day, and harassed and spooked by the directors at night — a dynamic that was fully captured on camera. | |
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Carry On Girls: While William's twitching was scripted, Jack Douglas reveals on the DVD Commentary that he was given free rein to do whatever he wanted with it and go as far as possible. | |
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In Sailor Moon, Tuxedo Mask's Large Ham superhero persona - specifically his random appearances and convoluted introduction speeches - was not an aspect of the original manga. When asked whether the running gag originated from the scriptwriters or retroactively from the creator herself (Naoko Takeuchi had a good working relationship with the actors), his voice actor merely stated: "I'm driving". Weirdly, this situation seems to have become a running theme even in other media, as it lends itself to Mamoru's otherwise typically low-key role in some stories; the live-action musical interpretations frequently hire an older, established actor to play Mamoru with a more noticeable degree of ad-lib in his shorter appearances, especially if he doubles as another minor character. |
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Mork & Mindy, as noted above. | |
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By the time The Three Stooges' "schtick" was well-established, scriptwriters found it easier to just write in generic stage instructions such as "Moe punishes Curly" and let the boys work it out on their own. If nothing else, it was easier than trying to describe their chaos in words. Directors varied in their approach; Jules White tended to stick more to the script (but still allowed the Stooges considerable leeway), while Edward Bernds encouraged ad-libbing and got the best performances out of Shemp, who was an excellent ad-libber. As a result, many of the best Shemp shorts ("Brideless Groom", "Who Done It?") were directed by Bernds. | |
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The doll scene in Spaceballs was made like this. Rick Moranis (Dark Helmet) was given the dolls and told to "do something funny." Needless to say, it worked. | |
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In-universe: High School Star Musical, the main characters get a script like this as a surprise challenge in their acting class. They turn the page and the rest is blank - they have to improv the rest of the story. The resulting scene, and how they play off of each other, establishes their characters while showing early on how clever and aware the writing is about the craft of acting. | |
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Mick Foley was given carte blanche to do this in vignettes with Vince McMahon. | |
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More often than not, comic scripts themselves can be devoid of details other than which characters are showing up in the panel and what they're doing. For example, Transmetropolitan artist Darick Robertson referred to an instruction from Warren Ellis in a script that simply read "Splash Page: Spider walks through the porn district." | |
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Marble Hornets is largely improvised. Scripts are often only one page with important information on it. Also due to them shooting in abandoned buildings, they often find things to throw in, including one character wearing a blanket they found there. | |
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Many of the scenes with Gage and DeSoto working on a victim on Emergency! clearly involved the director and writers setting up the situation and having Mantooth and Tighe, the two actors who had trained as paramedics, just do what paramedics would really do in that situation. | |
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What We Did on Our Holiday was made by the creators of Outnumbered and used the same trick of getting the kids to ad-lib their own dialogue. | |
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The Lord of the Rings film trilogy has several examples of these, as revealed in the DVD extras: Screenwriters Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens describe how, for every fight scene, they would simply write something to the effect of "They fight like men," then hand the script over to Peter Jackson to fully block out the scene. The prologue in Mordor at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring is an example of this. The inversion is with the romance scenes between Aragorn and Arwen; Pete would be very vague and let Fran and Phillipa flesh it out themselves. Part of the script for The Fellowship of the Ring in the Mines of Moria read something along the lines of, "The Fellowship run down some stairs." Then Peter Jackson saw a piece of concept art of said stairs with No OSHA Compliance by John Howe and started envisioning an entire action sequence around it. The final result is a five-minute extravaganza with falling rocks, falling chunks of stairs, Orcs firing arrows, Legolas being a badass with his bow, and a line created from whole cloth ("Nobody tosses a dwarf!"). |
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Friends: "The One With The Ultimate Fighting Champion" starts with an appearance by Robin Williams and Billy Crystal as a pair of patrons at Central Perk (Williams and Crystal just happened to be at the studio were the show was shot, and the writers asked if they wanted to make a guest appearance), and they ad-libbed all their dialogue during their scene, which genuinely befuddled the main cast. | |
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The worst was The Birdcage, where he starred with Nathan Lane. Director Mike Nichols realized he had to find a way to rein them in, as they were so funny and so thoroughly into riffing off of each other that they were interfering with the shooting. Nichols eventually had Williams and Lane agree that they could say whatever they wanted in takes, as long as they did one take exactly as written in the script first in every scene. | |
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Ghost Stories got a Gag Dub from ADV Films very much like this; they threw out nearly all of the original script and largely improvised each scene. As they only had one recording booth, the voice actors were called in one at a time to record their scenes, and whoever got into the booth first got to set the tone and pace of the scene. The others then had to follow in their footsteps, taking as much creative liberty as they could. | |
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The same thing happened in OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes, where the scripts would often have some of Lord Boxman's lines listed as simply "Jim sputters" since he can improvise a lot of funny-sounding vocalizations. | |
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According to a DVD commentary of the Saw series, Tobin Bell wrote large parts of Jigsaw's dialogue while they filmed the movies, to the point that scripts from some of the movies would simply include "Insert Tobin Bell dialogue" in dialogue lines said by Jigsaw. | |
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The Miser: When Jacques lists the countless meals he intends to serve at the dinner held by Harpagon, the actor is supposed to come up with his own list of exotic, expensive dishes. (If your edition of the play doesn't include the relevant footnote, then it looks as if Harpagon is freaking out over the very possibility of giving food to other people.) | |
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American Pie writer Adam Herz has said that he likes to simply sketch out what he wants Eugene Levy to say rather than writing actual dialogue and such. | |
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In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the scriptwriters often wouldn't bother scripting out the technobabble, instead just jotting the shorthand "[tech]", and letting the science advisers to the show - Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda - fill in something that sounded good. | |
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