Hatsu

I.

In Hunter X Hunter, Hatsu is when you use your Nen to beat the shit out of somebody. In improv, Hatsu is when you go for the laugh.

That’s putting it narrowly, of course. Improv is capable of more than laughs. A more thorough description would be, Hatsu is when you use the Yen you’ve mustered to evoke an emotional response from the audience. Laughs, tears, cheers. It’s finally time!

Hatsu is the most personal technique of all. It’s your sense of humor, your style. It’s when you surprise everyone instead of just keeping the ball in the air. It’s a wily beast, and disagreements in how to operationalize it have led to many a schism in the improv community.

The first thing to learn about Hatsu is that it’s not Ren. You use Hatsu to make the audience laugh. Audience laughter consumes Yen. That’s why you can’t do the same joke twice; the Yen is used up. The rhythm of a successful improv scene is, everybody uses Ren, then people start using stabs of Hatsu, then back to Ren, then back to Hatsu. And of course, everyone is also using Ten the whole time because we never stop listening.

Let’s use this Ren/Hatsu rhythm to analyze some existing scenic frameworks:

UCB / Game of the Scene

1. Establish the base reality. (Ren)
2. Notice the first unusual thing. (Ten)
3. Frame the game. (Gyo [1])
4. First game beat (Hatsu)
5. Rest the game / return to base reality (Ren)
6. Second game beat (Hatsu)
7. Rest the game / return to base reality (Ren)
8. Third game beat (Hatsu)

IO Chicago / Wants and Tactics

1. Establish the characters and their relationships (Ren)
2. Establish what the characters want from each other (Ren)
3. A character tries to get what they want in a surprising way (Hatsu)
4. Return focus to the relationship (Ren)
5. A character tries to get what they want in a surprising way (Hatsu)
6. Return focus to the relationship (Ren)

…etc.

Annoyance / Stick to your Deal

1. Establish your characters’ “deals” (Ren)
2. Your deals clash? (Hatsu?)
3. ???
4. Profit

I should really read Mick Napier’s book.

II.

There are a lot of ways to think about Hatsu! I don’t have a silver bullet. The best I can do is show you how to use Yen to point you in the right direction. Now that we’ve introduced the three most important techniques in Yen, let’s see how they work together:

1. Ten – Keep all the Yen you’ve generated on the stage. By listening closely and honoring every word spoken, don’t let any ideas get lost.
2. Ren – Generate a whole bunch of Yen. Starting from the improvisers onstage and the suggestion, build up characters, relationships, the setting, and whatever the scene is about.
3. Hatsu – Consume that Yen to evoke an emotional response from the audience. Use what you’ve created with Ren, the characters, relationships, everything, to make the audience laugh, cry, and cheer.

Here’s a sort of Chicago-style example from a hammy show I did recently:

I think the suggestion was “banana”. God, if I had a nickel.

I start the scene hacking through brush with a machete (if I had a nickel). My teammate Emily comes onstage as another explorer, following behind. Over the next few lines, we establish that Emily’s character is attracted to my character and wants affection, but my character wants to get back to camp, and so is brushing off her advances.

Picture a stage filled with glowing Yen aura. It’s primarily surrounding me and Emily, with a thick cord of it connecting the two of us, mostly made of the Yen that Emily put into her want. You can also see the glowing Yen machete in my hand, as well as some tendrils reaching out across the stage to vaguely outline trees and shrubs.

At this moment, my teammate Shareef explodes onstage, as if he’s crashing through the brush. “I finally found you!” he says, and I rush over to hug him, relieved. This gets a laugh, because we’d established that Emily wants to be alone with me, and this throws a wrench in her plans.

That entrance, and that hug, are Hatsu. We made those moves because we wanted to use all the Yen that Emily and I had put into her want and our relationship. Imagine Shareef’s entrance as punching through the Yen in Emily’s want, punching with it, sending a glob of it flying into the audience. He joined the scene to make use of what we’d built.

Then, Shareef says, “I’m going to go look for water,” and I reply, “I’ll go with you!”. Now we’re both using Ren, pouring our Yen back into Emily’s want, so we can use it again. Emily’s about to lose her chance to be alone with me! Lots of Yen there. So, she tries another tactic: she says to me, in a half-deranged, half-sexy voice, “I can’t get pregnant.”

With that line, Emily takes all the Yen we’d put into her want and our relationship and hurls it into the audience. Huge laugh. And there’s not much Yen left onstage to work with after that, which is what you want when a scene ends, so we edit.

But the remaining Yen is not lost! The next scene begins with a cruise ship captain worried that some of his passengers haven’t returned from their trip into the Australian bush. All the Yen we’d put into our environment remained onstage.

This isn’t a textbook-perfect improv scene. I started the scene with problems, we’re lost, we need water. But Emily was on her shit, so despite those little roadblocks we ended up with a ton of usable Yen onstage, which we all contributed to building, and all got to use some of for Hatsu. It was fun, and from the audience’s perspective, it worked!

III.

I want to focus on Emily’s line, “I can’t get pregnant.” Such a wild line. At first glance, it appears to break the common improv advice, “don’t try to be funny.” I have no doubt she was intentionally being funny. So why is it okay? I want to use Yen to disambiguate the difference between a funny line, and a joke. It’s a question of efficiency. When we’re improvising, we want to create yen, then use it. Ren, then Hatsu. A joke is Hatsu without Ren or Ten. When you make a joke, you’re inventing again. You’re using your Yen to make something that’s disconnected from everything else, and throwing it straight at the audience, without letting your teammates contribute to it, and without making use of any of the Yen already onstage.

Some people are really funny, they can keep an audience entertained forever by lobbing joke after joke at them, but this hampers their growth. People with naturally strong Hatsu are more likely to ignore Ten and Ren because, from their perspective, they don’t need it. But imagine how much funnier they could be if they learned all of the basic techniques!

When we improvise, we’re working with two finite resources. Yen, and time. We want to hit the audience with as much Yen as possible in what little time we have. Jokes, by ignoring all the Yen already onstage, are inefficient. They get laughs, not cheers. Here’s how you can tell if an improv move is good. Not just funny, or even really funny, but good. The kind of moves we should strive for in practice.

Ask yourself, “Would that move be funny in any scene?”

When an improviser gives birth in a scene by having someone crawl between their legs, that’s funny, but it’s always funny. When you take all the chairs onstage and toss them into a big pile, that’s funny, but it’s always funny. The line “I can’t get pregnant” toes the line a little. It’s shocking, so it will always get a reaction of some kind, but the big laugh came because it was making use of all the Yen already onstage, so I call it a good move.

In improv, the strongest move is the one you can only make now.