The Greatest Improviser who has Ever Lived!

Composed April 10-11, 2008
Postdated April 3, 2008
Hamburg
The Box

Thorsten Neelmeier is simply the greatest improviser that has ever lived.

Generally known as Neele, we’ve known him since the 2000 Amsterdam Improv festival and subsequently traveled with him and the rest of Hidden Shakespeare as fellow members of The International Clowns.
We play all of our “Clowns” shows in English (or in a hodgepodge of languages) and while Neele’s English is far better than my nonexistent German, it’s not as good as some of his fellow Hidden Shakespeare players.

I used to believe that this was the reason behind his playing style: He’d generally hang back and support where necessary, including the insertion of jaw droppingly perfect comedic gems which would kill everyone in the audience as well as on stage. This type of move is the origin of The Legend of Candy Stomach, for which one must scour my alternate journals.

Now that I’ve watched him play in German, I now know that that’s simply his playing style, and his self-conscious English has very little to do with how he plays with us.

I also learned that he’s the most brilliant, most committed improviser who has ever walked the god’s green earth. This is how it happened:

After a couple of nights with mein guter freund Frank, Neele was kind enough to host us for our last night in Hamburg. He cooked us weiner schnitzel and EVERYTHING!
As he led us up to the spare room where we’d be sleeping he pointed out the very comfortable looking futon (it indeed turned out to be perfectly comfortable) on the floor, and next to it pointed to a shiny metal footlocker. Neele looked at us seriously and said in a menacing voice:
“Zat box. Do not open it!”
Of course, I know he’s clowning and cannot put my bags down quickly enough to see why I’m “not” supposed to open the box.
Jenn queries, “Why not?”
“Inside, there are…”
And I recognize the face Neele makes when he can’t think of an English word.
“eeet is bigger san a mouse?”
“A rat?”
And I recognize the face Neele makes when he has made a solid connection with an English word”
“YES! Eeet es rats een se box!”



Of course I immediately know that Neele is clowning, why the hell would there be rats in a box next to where we’re supposed to sleep in real life? I can’t wait to open this box that I’m “not” supposed to open. Before I have an opportunity to do so, he calls in German to his lovely goth/punk teenage daughter.
Neele actually has two lovely teenage daughters, and a lovely wife (not a teenager) but neither of them are in this story, though we do appreciate all of them opening their home to us.

Jenny (Neele’s daughter, not Jenn who hates being called Jenny) enters and opens the box, and reveals that inside…
Well inside the box there are a pair of fucking rats!
Seriously, a pair of fucking rats!

To be fair, they’re clearly pet rats (or lab rats) and not nasty, awful, scary sewer rats. They’re tame and soft and not at all scary, except for the simple fact that they’re FUCKING RATS!
Apparently it’s a ‘thing” for goth/punk teenagers in Hamburg to keep rats as pets. Probably because it freaks old assholes like us out to sleep next to a box full of fucking rats!

Neele admitted later that he felt a little creepy when he let the rats crawl on him, and seemed to feel guilty for not enjoying something which his daughter clearly liked. Of course we voiced the likelihood that he felt creepy not because of any problem with father-daughter bonding, but because they were FUCKING RATS.

It was SO FUNNY to us that there would actually be rats in a box that this is what I believe actually happened:
Neele began to make a clowny joke about what was in the (probably empty) box and knew in his heart that RATS would be the funniest thing ever.
Being such a talented and committed improviser, he simply WILLED the rats into being. Hard to believe if you’ve never seen it happen on stage, and I admit that few have ever seen such commitment happen in “real life”, but this was an exceptional occasion, and the one which has led me to the conclusion that Neele is simply the greatest improviser who has ever lived.
His daughter Jenny would easily have played along, if she’d had to, but the truth is that Neele simply willed the whole history of the rats into being in that moment of brilliant creation. In fact, he post-created the fad of goth/punk teenage girls taking fucking rats as pets as easily as I’m post-dating these blog entries.

We noticed there weren’t any holes punched in the metal footlocker.
“Can they breathe in there?”
“We don’t think so.”

If your alarm clock isn’t working for you any more, try setting it with a recording of rats squeaking and scratching at the side of a metal box next to your head. I promise you’ll bolt right the hell into your day no matter how many absackers you’ve had the night before!