Short form improv is the most popular form of improv, thanks to shows like Whose Line is it Anyway?. In some ways sketch comedy like SNL is closer to Short Form than Long Form.

Short form scenes are shorter (2 mins) with a much stricter structure and hence short form improv is easy to perform on television. Further the structure and the premise is already established and conveyed to the audience at the beginning of the scene, much like in sports. And so the type of humor is a bit superficial (in comparison to long form) but that does not mean it is any less funny; I still enjoy watching reruns of Whose Line and an occasional episode of SNL.

Who What Where:
In Short Form, because the scenes are only 2 min long, it is extremely important to set the base reality as concisely and rapidly as possible. This I think is my number one reason as to why one should practice the Short Form. After all, the primary and most fundamental concept of Improv of any form is the base reality and you get better at it by playing Short Form.

Finding Game:
Because time is a scarce commodity, once the base reality is set up the clock for finding the game starts ticking. Which brings us to the second fundamental concept of Improv: making bold decisions. Inaction is never funny, but action has a potential to be. It is only through constantly making choices and DOING things can one find the funny thing in the scene, and playing Short Form makes this truth even more apparent.

There are several games we played at the Short Form Workshop at BIG hosted by Kim.

Three Line Scenes
These are two player scenes, where the two players take turns establishing the base reality (Who, What, Where) in exactly 3 lines (Player 1, Player 2, Player 1).

Sit, Stand, Lean
This is a three person scene game in which one person is always sitting, one person is always standing, and one person is always leaning on something. This game is just meant to have fun and mess with your scene partners. But it also lets you get out of your mind and think with your body.

Phone Game
This is three person scene game in which one person has a phone and can ONLY say (parts of) sentences from a single long message thread. In this game, the two players without the phone have the responsibility to allow the player with the phone (who has a handicap) to speak in. Further they cannot ask this person any questions (for obvious reasons) and it is their responsibility to incorporate all of his/her statements into their scene. The person with the phone has to really be proactive and speak out loud and make sure that his voice is not lost, he is after all the element of surprise and hence of humor in the scene.

Common Pitfall: In this game, it is very tempting to shrug of the person with the phone as being crazy, but this is a very bad thing to in improv. In improv we need to acknowledge and accept anything our scene partner even if it sounds crazy to us. It is through this dichotomy of “the discovery of the unusual” and “it’s eventual justification” that humor is derived in an improv scene and saying that a person is crazy kills the justification part thereby losing the humor.

Bell Game
The number of players is variable in this game, however one of the players needs to be a host with bell. The host rings his bell anywhere mid-sentence and the person saying the sentence has to give up whatever they were saying and come up with a substitute word/sentence. Usually, the host presses the bell several times in succession to change the direction of the scene entirely. The important thing in the bell game is to not speak on top of each other.

Letter Game
This is a standard scene game. The twist each that when a player is done speaking the next player starts their sentence with the next letter of the alphabet.

Panel of Experts
In this game there is a panel, each panelist has a different point of view (endowed by the audience / host). They are asked questions by the audience about completely unrelated things and the panelists should ideally provide answers to these questions after filtering them through their point of view.