When I'm in conversation with just one person I try a good deal of humor, exaggeration, metaphor, self-deprecation, puns, etc. I'm discovering to my full dismay that a majority of the peeps I'm around don't play along.

So I pop out of flowing improv to remind them that in a friendly conversation between buddies nothing I say need to be taken as factual, as literally true, as truth is not my goal, but mutual entertainment.

But with that pop-out I'm deflated. My social energy dials down to their apparent level and I flatten out my affect. Dullsville buddy.

The odd thing, they typically don't seem to mind that I've down shifted. They just go along as themselves, not raising their energy nor loosening their grips on literal truth.

I suspect for these folks that they hold no theory of talk. They have no frame in themselves of what the two of us are engage in and what range of speech and gesture would enhance our mutual time towards the memorable and entertaining. They are checking what I say against standards like "facts" or "truth" or something found in classrooms, courts, or investigative reporting. My statement clearly fails the truth test and they feel compelled to point that out and save me from further fiction and lies.

Funny isn't it that these same people like stand up comics, novels, theater, etc. where the weird stuff happens. I think part of the difference is in those settings they are passive and aren't expected to respond and if they dislike or don't understand something either they are alone or among a crowd of other who will hide their outlier status. But all those performances are doing what I am bringing to them in their living, breathing, interactive experience.

My dilemma to resolve is when I dial down I feel the fun of the conversations dies. When I keep trying, they either fail to respond or keep trying to dial the content back to some idea of factual, literal, or true. This frustrates me, the opposite of fun.

The factual, literal, and true is such a small narrow swatch of existence that I feel alone with my imagination but to really imagine more I enjoy the fun of wordplay, mutual extensions. In the motto of improv performance, "Yes, and."

We become just two people seeming speaking the same language but since our motives and native styles so diverge we should conceded that we're actually not speaking the same language at all.

And that's the truth.

Revu2