The warning lights. How shared reality falls apart.
Three modes of collapse:
1. Latency — Response latency increases. The pause, the hesitation. When actors violate "be present" and start internal computation, the rhythm breaks. The reality lags. You can literally feel the energy drop in the room. The audience experiences it as a stutter in the shared world.
2. Fracture — Shared state fractures. Actor A thinks they're in a boat. Actor B thinks they're in a car. The reality breaks because signals conflicted or were unread. This often comes from violating "be positive" — denying offers — or from violating "be present" — missing them entirely.
3. Decay — Meaning decays or disappears. If you don't reinforce the reality, if you stop mentioning established facts, those facts fade away. The scene becomes thin and boring because nothing matters anymore. The gun you established ten minutes ago no longer exists in anyone's mind.
Modes cascade. Latency often triggers fracture (partners fill the gap differently), which accelerates decay (the fracture kills momentum and meaning drains out). Scenes rarely die from one mode alone — the death spiral is latency → fracture → decay, each feeding the next.
When you watch bad improv, you can usually identify exactly which collapse mode is happening. "He denied her offer" = fracture. "She's thinking too much" = latency. "They're just talking but nobody's building — pleasant nothing" = decay. It stops being "they aren't funny" and becomes "they're suffering from systemic collapse."