Corpsing / Theatre

• Panto traditionally features at least one scene where the Dame or the Villain (usually) will try and force each other, or the rest of the cast, to corpse. This frequently becomes the subject of backstage score-keeping too.
• Martyn Green recounted a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore that was interrupted when a sudden loud orchestral chord in the number "Carefully on Tiptoe Stealing" startled a theater cat, which ran screaming across the stage. The cast might have been able to recover and carry on with the show, if only the next two lines hadn't been:
  Chorus: Goodness me, why what was that?
  Dick Deadeye: Silent be, it was the cat!
  • And cue complete cast corpsing.
  • Green recounted another incident in The Mikado, when he was playing Ko-Ko. Ko-Ko, Pitti-Sing (played by Margaret Philo), and Pooh-Bah (played by Hilton Leyland) had just been knocked for a loop by the revelation that Nanki-Poo was the crown prince in disguise, and now unless they could produce him alive a Cruel and Unusual Death awaited. Leyland very uncharacteristically flubbed a line...
  Leyland as Pooh-Bah: Merely cobbobobative^* corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
  Philo as Pitti-Sing: Cobbobobative detail indeed! Corrolobate... corrolov... Oh! Stiddleficks!^* Corroborative detail indeed! Corroborative fiddlestick!
  [Audience starts cracking up]
  Green as Ko-Ko: [unflubbed, and with great deliberation] And YOU'RE just as bad as HE is.
  • And cue Margaret Philo corpsing.
• A Very Potter Musical: Watch Darren Criss as Harry Potter Hagrid bounces him. There are times when he can barely get the words out. In the same play, Joe Walker (Tom Riddle) is watching the dead Moaning Myrtle get dragged offstage. There are three problems with this: One, Moaning Myrtle is played by, um... this guy.◊ Two, Madam Pomfrey isn't able to drag him off so he has to push himself around with his feet while pretending to be dead. Three, his wig falls off and he has to crawl back onstage to get it. While being dead. Poor Joe can't hold back a grin.
• The play Oblomov is based on a Russian novel about a character who almost never leaves his bed, briefly has a romantic attack, finds out he's incapable of love and goes back to bed. Theatrical presentations would have necessarily been grim had it not been for the most famous presentation casting Spike Milligan as the lead. Milligan proceeded to act up to such an extent that they renamed it Son of Oblomov, and apparently considered it his job to try and corpse his fellow actors whenever possible. Only one - Joan Greenwood — managed to keep her dignity intact despite Milligan doing things like rowing the bed offstage with an imaginary oar or — on one occasion — conscripting the Boulting Brothers (twin filmmakers) to sit in the bed with him for the entire play.
• Rik Mayall and Ade Edmonson are infamous for their corpsing in the Bottom live shows.
  Eddie: Oooooo—look at those rocks, amusingly shaped in the form of a woman's breasts!
  Richie: [sits up straight] Bloody hell!
  [Eddie pulls open a door behind Richie, only for "oriental" music to briefly sound off, causing confused looks from both of them]
  Eddie: [to the sound team] That's right, give the fucking game away...
  [Eddie disappears behind the door for a moment, then returns with a medkit, while the door does not shut completely behind him]
  Richie: Eddie! What on Earth is that?!
  Eddie: It's a Japanese army Second World War medical kit, in mint condition!
  Richie: Wow! But Eddie, where on Earth did you— [turns back to see a door was left swinging open, sporting a Japanese WWII war flag]
  [they both stammer, and after being prompted by Richie, Eddie runs over and slams the door shut while the crowd laughs and cheers; you can actually see tears on Rik's cheeks as he curls into a ball to cover his laughter]
  Eddie: [flipping off the crowd while Rik stammers over his next words] There was a little mistake there, wasn't there? Did you spot it? Fucking bastards...
• With the amount of ad-libbing that goes on in the Tsukiuta plays, this is common.
  • Particularly charming was the completely scripted scene in Kurenai Enishi where they first arrive in the other world. Gaku Matsuda, making his role debut as Haru in that production, broke out laughing during that scene in almost every performance, particularly in response to Shun (Taka, who was also making his role debut).
  • In the bluray performance of the 12th play, Ura-Zanshin, the SQ guest members expanded their joke about Shiki "in a can", and Tatsuki Jonin (Aoi) turned away to do this. Keita Seto (Tsubasa) came up behind him and put an arm around his shoulders, drawing the focus to him (as if it wasn't already) and making him laugh even more.
• This happened a lot during Kristin Chenoweth's final performance on Wicked.
  • Picture it: a tense scene during the second act of Wicked, when Fiyero has his gun trained on the Wizard, Glinda and Elphaba are both telling him to flee, and he admits he loves her and is going to go with her. Cue a little girl in the audience going "Yay!"—clear as a bell and quite loud in the silence. Everyone in the theater busted up—and while the actors were quite professional and did not break character or the scene, the actress playing Elphaba was visibly struggling not to burst out laughing, and giggles were in fact audible. Unsurprisingly, the same was true of Glinda's actress.
  • The "toss-toss" near the end of "Popular" usually has the actresses breaking down into laughter with the audience.
• David Tennant and Catherine Tate in the final performances of Much Ado About Nothing seemed to make it their mission to get each other to do this. At one point, during Benedick's monologue following the scene in which he is tricked into believing Beatrice is in love with him, a member of the audience said "Yes!" following the line "Love me? Why it must be requited". David Tennant stopped and laughed before walking over and performing the rest of the speech to the audience member, pausing to allow him to answer "Yes" or "No" to the questions. When Catherine Tate walked on stage, she was clearly trying not to laugh. Later in the play when Beatrice agrees to marry Benedick, the two actors kissed for so long and in such an over-the-top fashion that the entire cast was visibly having to stifle their laughter.
• Jessica Chastain told a story about while performing The Heiress on Broadway, during a kissing scene with Dan Stevens an audience member's cell phone went off right at the moment they kissed, with a ringtone that sounded uncannily like a musical cue. Jessica had to grab Dan and extend the kiss because she was shaking from having to hold back her laughter.
• It seems to be the mission in life of the actors in the London version of Spamalot to get each other to do this.
• This supposedly happened in Lunacharsky State Institute for Theater Arts in Moscow, Russia around 1980. After some conflict students decided to prank their tutor, who combined teaching with acting in theater. He was reading a long and serious monologue in some 19th-century drama, at some point opened a wardrobe (the insides of which were not visible to the audience) and saw a naked butt of a student. Being a seasoned professional the tutor continued his monologue without a flinch. But the students were persistent and started taking turns mooning him from the wardrobe. A month later they gave up. When the tutor did not see a usual naked butt during his next performance, he broke his monologue with laughter and could only say "Where's the ass?!"
• A much-repeated joke about how to get a singer in The Ring of the Nibelung to corpse is to ask her how she likes her eggs just before the aria "Weiche, Wotan, Weiche". ^note Which can be translated as "Softboiled, Wotan, softboiled"
• The final performance of the 2014 Monty Python show One Down (Five to Go) saw a fair bit of corpsing, but the topper was probably Gilliam, Cleese, and Idle all losing it during the Crunchy Frog sketch.
  • One performance of the legendary "Parrot Sketch" by Cleese and Palin feature so much corpsing and cue-missing that it practically became a different (albeit still hilarious) skit altogether.
• A theatre production of Henry V, starring Kenneth Branagh (nonetheless) became hilarious because the whole "glove sequence" went awash at some point, and Branagh/Henry adlibbed a servant to go off stage to retrieve the said gloves. This took some time, and Branagh improvised a mourning session for all the fallen soldiers at Agincourt, one at a time, while every single corpse shook from suppressed laughter. The fact that the servant returned with the wrong pair of gloves didn`t help much.
• During a Norwegian theatrical presentation of Swedish folk singer Evert Taube and his songs, the lead singer (known comedian Rolf Just Nilsen), was supposed to feel up a Spanish senorita while trying to dance the tango with her. When the show was broadcast, his antics were so over the top that at least one of the background characters breaks completely and has to hide his face.
• The Farndale Avenue plays, supposedly incompetent amateur productions, contain some scripted instances.
  • The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Operatic Society's Production of The Mikado has a scene where the actor playing Peep-Bo comes in too early with a punchline and then keeps jumping in with it until the right moment for it arrives, having increasing trouble keeping a straight face.
  • In The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic Society Murder Mystery, the actors playing Inspector O'Reilly and Lady Doreen have trouble keeping straight faces when Lady Doreen is required to wax eloquent over a glass of sherry that is quite obviously actually just orange juice, and then lose it entirely when Lady Doreen puts the glass down on a table and the table collapses.
• A rare inversion occurred at a performance of The Fantasticks three days after 9/11. After the musical number "Try to Remember", not only was the entire audience (of only two dozen people or so) in tears but so was one of the actors. Considering the lyrics include "Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh so mellow... Try to remember when life was so tender that no one wept except the willow" it is perhaps the most Justified example on this list.

---