模倣子 Macromemetics and Improv Comedy

Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index 

Introduction 

I thought I'd just call a pause for a moment and review some memetic concepts, make sure there's not too much jargon muddying the waters. I thought I'd make a direct and consistent appeal to Improv Comedy and link that directly to memetic concepts. The match-up is pretty good.

What is Improv Comedy? 

This is kind of an ambitious question, but a basic concept of improv is to "make an offer" and have others in the group or troupe or whatever "accept the offer." Not accepting the offer is known as "blocking." So that's the dynamic: offer, accept the offer, or block the offer. Obviously, when one comic makes an offier and it's accepted, then both comics get a "bump" (1) or a "payoff". The comic making the offer is taking a "risk." The risk is that their offer will not be accepted, they try to pitch the first half of a joke, making themselves look ridiculous, silly, not funny, for a moment, until somebody else picks up on it and completes the joke.

I'll see if I can think of some examples.

Mapping it onto Memetics 

These concepts: "making an offer," "accepting an offer," "blocking an offer," "taking a (comedic/social) risk," "getting a bump/payoff," or "getting made to look silly" or "getting left holding the bag" are all concepts that relate directly to macromemetics.

Making an offer is deploying a meme, and accepting that offer, or helping that offer to work, is resonating with the meme, or deploying alliance memes to support that meme. Agents are the comics, the ones deploying the memes. Blocking an offer is deploying an immunomeme.

A comic putting a bit out there, making an offer, is hoping to move the act to a new and better state. This means that all the other comics, or actors, will have more chance to throw out, make offers, of funnier and more high-stakes bits, that will give everyone more places to go, which makes it more exciting for everyone, including the audience.

By the same token, a memetic agent is putting memes out there, and if they are accepted, if they resonate with the rest of the cohort (the audience and the other actors/comics), that is, the others reply with "favorable" memes, the system moves to states that give the originator, and his/her allies, more chances to deploy more and more powerful memes.

If a meme or bit is blocked, however, then the system moves to a different place, one where fewer people have the chance to do anything, or where the original comic/agent does not get to move things in the direction they wanted.

The risk that an agent takes is called "memetic debt" and the hope is that this will be "paid back" when his/her meme "lands" or "resonates" with the "audience" and the "other actors" which we just call the memetic cohort. One of the things agents most fear and try to avoid is "residual memetic debt," which is where you take the risk and it doesn't get paid back, so you are left with part or all of what you risked.

Residual memetic debt is kind of like loss of face, or lost of reputation, or even just "accumulated pain" associated with this rejection, like when a comic is trying to be funny, trying to put some energy out there, and others do not extend the joke, do not capitalize on the offer, and instead shut the original comic down and go in a totally different direction. When an offer is paid back, it feels good, partly because there is no residual memetic debt, and partly because the system, the act, has moved to a place that makes it easier for the comic to put more offers out there, and hopefully more impactful ones.

Summary & Conclusions 

I should probably wrap it up here, keep it short and sweet. Concepts such as "offers" and "accepting" or "blocking" from improv comedy translate pretty directly onto "memetic deployment" and "resonance/alliance" and "immunomemes".

There's the idea of "residual memetic debt" which is related to the comic whose offer gets blocked and is left holding the bag and looking stupid. One takes a risk, or incurs memetic debt, in the hope that it will be paid back by others' reactions.

Finally, a big deal is that the object of improv is to put offers out there, get them accepted, and this moves the act to more and more sophisticated states, where there are more and more offers that more and more actors can make. A memetic agent also wants to move the system forward, into memetic states where he/she and his/her allies have more and more opportunities to make high-stakes high-impact memetic deployments.

A bad improv show is one where the actors are not resonating, not clicking, or are working against each other, some pulling one way and others another. Memetic systems, full of agents and memes, moving from state to state, looks quite the same. Factions, or powerful individuals, may pull the system in one direction, which others pull it away from there, and there may be many agents who simply feel powerless. Powerlessness leads to violence (or apathy) just as how in improv people not cooperating leads to frustration and a bored (or angry) audience.

That's where macromemetic engineering comes in...

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(1) "bump" is kind of my term, I think. I'm not sure if this is actually used in the field of improv.