Mime Time

Mime is one of my favorite improv tricks. I guess it's not really a trick, but it is one of my favorite things to do. Here are some of the mime related things I've learned over the years:

The Yes/No

Improvisers have one thing drilled into them from day one: Yes And... It embodies the entire philosophy of how create something out of nothing. It's great. "Yes and" gets players to agree and cooperate. Players get so caught up in "yes and" that any denials feel wrong. Even criminal.

Jill Bernard tells a story in her workshops about how other people in scenes with her would endow her character as a stripper. Appropriately, she got tired of this, but in order to avoid denying their offer she needed to be a character she was tired of playing.

So she came up with an idea she called "Yes/No." She'd play the stripper, but she'd play a stripper that didn't want to be a stripper. Her stripper characters would dance, but while she danced she'd cry and say she wasn't going to dance.

There are plenty of times in improv where your character needs to do something in order to move a scene forward. Like you might be a steadfastly moral character who would never give into temptation, but that scene where you don't give into temptation might not be that interesting. So pull a yes/no. Go ahead and have your character agree and do something, but have your character not want to do it.

Allow myself to introduce...myself.

Hi everybody,

I am Bryan Buckley. I am one of the original nine members of Mock Turtle Soup which means I am one of the few people old enough to remember that for a while we considered calling ourselves "Whose Line of Crack."

I was on Mock Turtle Soup for many years, serving as vice president, president and currently the alumni coordinator. While in Clemson with MTS, I was part of a spin-off sketch group called Ask Your Doctor as well as spoof new website The Almond and humor magazine, The Rapscallion. Some of our improv and sketch got captured on film and is now on Youtube.

After graduating from Clemson and getting married to Alyssa, I spent about 6 months in Durham, NC where we both were a part of Dirty South Improv. There under the tutelage of Zach Ward, I performed in Improv Slam and DSI Witness News as well as other small long form teams.

The job market then took Alyssa and me to Philadelphia where we got to perform with the Philly N Crowd (the number 1 comedy club in Philly. You guys rock!). We also got a chance to perform in the three-person improv competition Trioka and perform our two-person group Red Letters at the Shubin Theater.

The job market also took us to our current location: Tahlequah, OK. Here Alyssa and I have performed as Red Letters in a two-person short form show at our university's awesome Jazz Lab. We've also made trips into Oklahoma City to perform in the Red Dirt Improv Festival and also to perform at the Ghost Light Theater.

I've had the extreme pleasure of having taken classes from many cool and awesome and coo-awesome improvisers including, Jill Bernard, Mark Sutton, Joe Bill, Susan Messing, Anthony King, TJ Jagodowski , Anthony LeBlanc, Greg Tavares, Asaf Ronen, and many others.

I like economics and being nerdy which is good because they are not mutually exclusive and I will eat ice cream sandwiches no matter what stage of melting they are in.