Funny, sexy, violent

People sometimes ask what I mean when I say identity is endowed rather than expressed. This is the story I usually reach for.

I was running an impro workshop in a prison, with long-term sex offenders, as it happens, but the results were identical to the results I had when I worked with management consultants. (Make of that what you will.)

It had taken a long time to warm up the participants, because while they didn’t care what I thought about them, they certainly didn’t want to look stupid in front of each other, because they would be stuck together for years.

Eventually, a few bolder inmates volunteered to do the odd demonstration: very simple things to begin with, which they pulled off well, winning applause, so gradually I increased the riskiness of what I asked them to do. It looked bold, and they were rewarded with louder applause. Soon enough they were finding it exhilarating, and leaping up to volunteer before anybody else did.

At this point I said, “Let’s pretend you’re at a party.” Four volunteers pretended to be at a party. It didn’t look like the most amazing party, but they were enjoying themselves.

I said, “OK, let’s do it again, but with a twist.” (Once again, I owe this exercise entirely to Keith Johnstone.) This time, I whispered a personal characteristic to each of the four. I asked one to be the “funny” party guest. One would be the “gloomy” guest. Another would be “sexy” and the last one “bashful”. I told the audience that the volunteers would be doing the same party scene but each one with a particular characteristic, and they had to guess at the end who was what.

They did more or less the same as before, but this time the funny one told jokes and laughed at them. The sexy one looked into an imaginary mirror with evident pleasure. I don’t recall exactly what the bashful and gloomy ones did. But afterwards when I asked the audience to guess each man’s secret, nobody got it right. They thought the gloomy one was “boring”. They thought the sexy one was “vain”. The funny one was “arrogant”.

So far as it went, this was as I had expected. “It’s extremely hard to make other people see you in a particular way,” I said, as if this was some absolutely stunning revelation instead of something we all experience every day.

“Let’s try it with a different twist.”

This time, the instructions were given openly to them all, and the audience heard too. “I want you to look at each other. Without telling anybody which is which, I want you to decide that one of the other three on stage with you is really funny; another is sexy. And the third has a reputation for violence.”

I went on to spell out what might otherwise have been confusing:

“You might not choose the same ‘funny’ person as anyone else. That doesn’t matter. You may find that everybody has chosen the same person to be potentially violent. It might be you! That doesn’t matter either. Just remember who you have decided is funny, sexy and violent, and behave towards them accordingly.”

They played the scene again, and it was terrifically funny.

Everybody could see instantly that person X seemed funny to person Y, because even the most boring comment from X provoked loud laughter. It was immediately obvious who was deemed sexy or violent because people moved chairs closer to them, or further away, respectively. One man had been chosen as “violent” by two others, and it was hard for anybody watching not to see him in that light too. The characteristic had more effectively been “endowed” on him by others than stimulated by the man himself.

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⬆️ This is an extract from my book A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech. I’m publishing it here on my blog as a standalone piece for the People Of The Future.

Update, July 2026: I told someone about this and she went off to try it, then sent me a text message: