Humour through failure in improv

There are games in improv which are designed to make you fail. For instance, you have "Chain Murder". In this game played with a 3-4 people, one person stays on stage while the rest go somewhere else so they don't overhear the discussion. The audience suggests 3 things: who get murdered, where they are murdered, and the murder weapon. The first person knows all this and tries their best to act out the clues to the next person. If the next person thinks they get it, they "kill" the first person with the murder weapon. The second person then does the same for the third person and this chain continues till the last participant thinks they know the answer. Finally, starting from the last person to the first, the improvisers confidently proclaim their guesses which are wrong most of the time. From the perspective of the audience, the more wrong the improvisers are, the funnier it all feels. And it is in this failure that the humour is generated. Interestingly, unlike in charades, the point…