by essay “Good conversations have lots of doorknobs”
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs
“I used to perform in an improvised musical comedy show where we could burst into song at any time. You’d be doing a scene about, say, bringing your boyfriend to Thanksgiving for the first time and having to explain to your parents that he’s Spiderman, and all of the sudden the pianist would thunder out some chords and now you’re singing something like:
SPIDERMAN, SPIDERMAN , THAT’S WHO I’M DATING, MOM AND DAD, WILL HE EAT?, DO NOT ASK, HE WILL NOT REMOVE HIS MASK
Doing this on the spot is really hard, and the trick that kept us afloat was called “take-and-take of focus,” meaning that whoever was singing had to keep going until someone jumped in to take the spotlight from them, which should happen quickly and often. Though it’s nearly impossible to invent a whole funny song, you can probably fire off a verse, your teammate can come in with the chorus, and if you can do that twice and toss some harmony on top, the audience will go wild.
For me, learning take-and-take suggested a solution not just to songs about Spiderman, but to a scientific mystery. I was in graduate school at the time, running studies aimed at answering the question, “Do conversations end when people want them to?”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116915119
