NonverbalCharacterTheatre

Nonverbal Character Theatre

(Concept by MattVance)

Concept

A skit in which all the characters are famous nonverbal characters.

(Bob) Note similarity to Frankenstein, Tarzan, and Tonto skits from SNL...

Possible characters:

• Meow-Meow Pussycat (Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood)
• Chewie (Star Wars)
• R2-D2 (Star Wars)
• The Swedish Chef (The Muppet Show)
• Beaker (The Muppet Show)
• Animal (?) (The Muppet Show)
• Teacher from Peanuts (done as VO)
• Boomhauer (from King of the Hill)
• Clarabell (from The Howdy Doody Show -- Bob shows his age... Hint: character communicates via a horn a la Harpo Marx, Mr. Hornpants)
• Peter Boyle's Frankenstein character from Young Frankenstein
• Tor Johnson http://www.endofline.com/EdWood/tor.html
• Mini-Me ("Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!...")
• ???

Possible settings:

• Tech Support Office
• ???

Why is this skit funny?

There are things we can do here that will be funny.

Mainly, I think we can get a lot of humor by surprising the audience at their capacity for figuring out exactly what is going on -- even every word that is being said -- from the meow-meows and bork-bork-borks emanating from the characters.

Also, we get some mileage out of putting all of these characters in some foreign/mundane, and inappropriate situation. Especially one where explicit unambiguous communication is vital - Meow meow right to remain silent meow meow held against you meow meow lawyer appointed meow meow understand these rights meow meow?

Exposing sides of the characters that their original fictional contexts don't demonstrate can also be good.

What do we want it to accomplish?

I wanna see how far we can get, demonstrating the range and depth of nonverbal communications.

Fragments

• Swedish Chef puts on headphones, begins singing along to "500 Miles" by the Proclaimers
• "Meow meow Tech support. Meow. Meow meow. (beat) Meow meow cup holder?!!! (covers receiver -- to everyone) Meow! Meow meow! (Everyone starts clustering around her) Meow meow jackass!!!
• We would do well to have one performer play a series of passengers in the scene that just enter, say one line, and leave. This lets us shoehorn in tons of other established nonverbal characters that just wouldn't work well as major characters.

• Meow meow Salem Witch Trial meow meow

  • This may not be the sense with which it was intended, but I feel like this line (and others like it) could be hilarious as a reference that is never fully explained -- i. e. Meow-Meow Pussycat alludes to the Salem Witch Trial, and you never quite figure out why, and the possible explanations that form in your head are amusing, along with your pleasantly-exasperated sense of "What the hell?"

    • Ideally, this drives home the concept that the shape of a conversation can be completely independent of its content (c. f. Mad Libs).

Script

Nothing yet. I still want to flesh out the concept.

Although, an important step in script-writing might be to get together and just jam (improvise) as different combinations of these characters (perhaps as part of DaylightSavingsTheater) and see what comes up & what works...