The following post comes from the Online Notes of my current Improv 401 students.

“Zach’s brief diversion into the world of discrete mathematics last night got me thinking.” — Nick Mykins

It’s very often the case that the game of a scene can be put in the form of a proposition, which can be shown to be either true or false. This proposition can usually be put in the form “For all X, Y is true”. E.g. “For all things I do, it is true that you will deliberately screw me over” or “For all things I make, it is true that yours are better than mine”. (It gets kind of iffy for games that are based on a character choice)

Anyway, to PROVE a proposition of this form, you have to actually show that it holds for every single case. This is what we do when we’re playing the game of the scene; we just show a bunch of cases for which the proposition is true. We could technically have scenes last forever by doing this. It’s rarely feasible to prove a “For all…” proposition by showing each case one at a time because there are so many, and the rule of threes limits the number of examples we can give without boring the audience. So playing the game never actually completes a proof (which is fine, because we’re improvisers, not mathematicians).

However to DISPROVE a “For all…” statement, all you have to do is give a single counterexample. These are the edit points and blackout scenes. One counterexample is all it takes to formally show that the proposition is not true. After that, you’re done! Edit.

There is no grey area in formal logic, just as there is no grey area in comedy. And in the class of games that can be stated as “For all X, Y is true”, a proof is just repetition, and a disproof is contrast.

Repetition and Contrast, OUR KEYS TO COMEDY!

I replied that Nick had won comedy for the day and encouraged EVERY student to watch this clip.

It is possible to synthesize exicted bromide in an argon matrix.

AND SCENE! Nice work, Nick!