The BLANK Family

Ask the audience to fill in the blank in the phrase, “The BLANK Family”.

The blank will usually be an adjective, so the game is also known as “Adjectives”.

Present a scene from the life of the family. The default is often around the family dinner table, but it can be any situation the whole family would be involved in – a picnic, buying a new house, a graduation ceremony, a trip to the mall.

If you have more than four people in your group, you might add a guest who is not part of the family – for example, a boyfriend visiting the house for the first time. The guest must work to maintain a “straight man” role. Eccentric behaviour is often funnier if there’s a normal observer in the scene.

This is the most generic of the “family” scenes. Good suggestions are likely to be emotions, occupations, animals, and sometimes genres.

The basic idea is the same, but each has its own strategies,

Leaving the “blank” wide open may provide suggestions not contained in these groups – the Punctual Family, the Invisible Family, the Suffering-in-a-Private-Hell Family

What all these games share is the comedy of seeing a group of people all behaving in the same eccentric way.