Why Think Like a Fool? 10 Irreasons

1. There can be wisdom is foolishness.

2. What you're doing isn't working.

3. You need a workable idea that is new, great, and innovative.

4. Because you don't want to be a fool.

5. You want to think like an artist.

6. You take things too seriously.

7. You like to play.

8. Life is short.

9. To free yourself from limiting thoughts.

10. You already do.

Foolish Question: Why would you want to think like a fool?

Alt Scores for Alt Perceptions

Over the years, I've learned a lot from studying silent movie comedies. One downside of all these repeated viewings is that the movies can lose the entertainment and humor they had for me when I first saw them. One way to breathe new life into these classics is to see them with a new musical score. 

Silent film accompanist extraordinaire Ben Model has been recording alternative scores for available movies that you can buy for a very reasonable price (he even has some free ones), download as an MP3, and listen to while watching a DVD. You'll be surprised the new things you can discover from a film by watching it with different music, which has the power to adjust meaning, highlight subtleties, and make or break gags. Ben's wonderful score for Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. brought back all the excitement I had first seeing the film in New York 23 years ago.

Ben Model's Alt Score website

Foolish Questions: What music do you listen to while creating (if any) or what music do you perform to? Can you find something completely different to accompany you and observe how it affects your work? What did you discover?

NOTE: Many of the videos on my blog and on my website are hosted by revver.com who is having "technical difficulties". Hopefully they'll reappear soon.

The Guy Who Lived on the Stairs

I made this as a kind of sequel to my very first silent short, "The Guy Who Lived on a Chair", which ended with the Guy escaping from the chair onto stairs (available as a special feature on my DVD.)
But since no one who was going to see this short had seen the original, I did not really connect the two movies, and made this to stand on its own.
Another seed for this idea came many years ago in college, when I rented a house that had doors at the top and bottom of the stairs (My roommate and I called the house, The House of the Rising Pun). When I closed the doors, it made the stairs into a room, and I thought it would be an interesting place to live.
The box of eggs refers back to an earlier short in the series, "The Guy Who Juggled".
I'm glad I shot the final slide down the steps more than once, because in the first take I looked too realistically terrified—because I was truly terrified.

Foolish Questions: How could you take one of your creative accomplishments and make a sequel to it? Could you disguise it so nobody knows it's a sequel?

Nasrudin Thinks Foolishly

Besides watching myself in daily life, I have learned quite a bit about thinking foolishly from the folk hero/clown/trickster/fool Mulla Nasrudin. I was first introduced to some of the stories 25 years ago in a psychology book by Robert Ornstein, who used these jokes to help explain how the mind works. He had gotten them from Idries Shah, who published collections of Nasrudin tales.

This was also around the same time I took my first theatrical clown workshop and realized humor could sometimes do more than entertain.

Here is a web page that will give you a different Nasrudin story every time you reload the page.

Foolish Question: Can you see any of your own behavior in any of these stories?

MacGyver Thinks Foolishly

In my last post I mentioned the problem solving prowess of MacGyver. But I have to admit that I've never seen an episode of the show MacGyver. And the actor who played him, Richard Dean Anderson, studied theater at Ohio University just like I did, which the professors there were always reminding us.

Now I don't have to watch it because I found a great Wikipedia entry called List of problems solved by MacGyver

They write:

MacGyver employs his resourcefulness and his knowledge of chemistry, physics, technology and outdoorsmanship to resolve what are often life or death crises. He spontaneously creates inventions from simple items to solve these problems. These inventions became synonymous with the character and were called MacGyverisms by the public.

Just like a good clown would do.

Here's one of my favorites they list:

MacGyver builds a distraction by balancing pots and pans on a bag of ice that melts from heat produced by a toaster oven. He spreads vegetable oil in the ground to incapacitate some kidnappers. Mac smears pine pitch on pine cones to make "land mines". He then buries a sack of these mines on the road and throws a flaming cone under the villain's car to make the sack and the car explode.

But don't rely on his methods for your own problem solving:

The creative team behind MacGyver made a point of leaving out crucial elements of the inventions so that children would not be harmed.

Fool's Aid Kit

Harpo Marx has his coat and Batman has his utility belt. Last week in rehearsal, I gave myself the exercise of assembling a foolish problem solving kit—a Fool's Aid Kit that would make MacGyver proud. I wanted the kit to be made up of ordinary objects that could be used in a multitude of ways and fit inside a briefcase, bag, box, or small suitcase.

The objects I picked were: string, scissors, zip-loc bag, an old sock (that looks cleaner than it is), umbrella, quarter, a stick of gum, coat hanger, marker, tape, tape measure, rubber ball, bungee cord, and roller skate, which all fit in this suitcase I've had for awhile. I think string and tape will have the most potential so I'll challenge myself to use the other objects first.


True story: I closed the case and picked it up and...

The latch broke and everything spilled out.

Luckily I could use some of the items in the kit to make sure the case never again opens unexpectedly.

Except I forgot to put the objects back in the case before I sealed it. Which turned out to be okay because I needed the scissors to cut the string on the suitcase; I made the knot too tight.

Foolish Performers:
Assemble your own Fool's Aid Kit that your character might carry around in case of emergency.
Creative Problem-Solvers:
Assemble a kit of items you could use when the non-foolish solutions aren't working.

Theatre Etiquette 101

My third and most recent Theatre Etiquette movie, "How to Quiet a Screaming Child"