There’s inherent value to comedy; it has the power to comment on modern issues and ideas in a way that most other mediums can’t; it’s inherently communal; it can be dark, light, depressing and, yes, even unfunny at times, but it always has one goal in mind — make the audience’s day a little brighter. After all, laughter is the best medicine.
I love comedy, specifically the way a person’s mind is brought fully into light. Their silly little quirks, the loose screws that haven’t kept the hatches fully battened down, and the general goal of bearing it all for the world to see.
Last week, I went over to Tallgrass Theatre to see Comedy XPeriment perform. Normally stand up is more my scene when it comes to laughs, but I’ve always loved improvisation of anything, including my days giving speeches back in high school, so I decided to give it a shot.
The first thing I noticed walking into the performance area was the bleacher-like seating arrangement taking up roughly half of the room. In the middle of the performance area was a folding table with pieces of paper, pens and a hat with a note on a whiteboard asking for suggestions for scenes later in the show. While normally I would observe from the sidelines at a semi-interactive performance, I had some time and wanted to see how the troop would handle past historical events, so I threw in two suggestions — November 22, 1963, Dallas, Texas, and the Boston Tea Party with the hope that the troop could make one of those funny.
The music playing over the loudspeaker as people came in and took their seats was far from organized in any fashion that made sense to me. It shifted from a punk-rock version of “Rainbow Connection” to one of the many fight songs you’d expect to hear on St. Patrick’s Day, then into Rush’s “Tom Sawyer.” After 30 minutes of sitting and waiting, the troop finally burst through the curtain.
The performance started normally. The troupe introduced the concept of improv and the “games” they would play before they started. In the first game of the night, Freeze, two performers would start having a dialogue in a character and, at any point in the scene, another member could tap one of the two people on the shoulder to transition the conversation. The person tagging in would replace the person tagged out.
When watching any kind of performance, you have to capture my attention within the first 30 seconds to a minute of the actual performance starting, and it should be for the right reasons. Because I’m now trapped in a room.
I kept cost in mind while at this event, and while I’ve yet to see a holistically bad live performance up until this point,I’ve been to concerts and performances that either didn’t retain my attention in the right kind of way or were cerebral messes scattered across a soundstage in the back of a dive bar. In those cases, I at least got variation in what I saw, and the night wasn’t a total loss. For the $15 price of admission, this was different.
As soon as all four performers had taken the hot seat in their first game, it was apparent to me that clean improv comedy is extremely hard to do, and this wasn’t very funny. As the performers continued to cycle through characters and scenes and finally finished their first game, the room felt claustrophobic as I realized that I hadn’t so much as chuckled through the entire first game.
The second game they played used a topic from the audience, who chose a wedding. Two more of the performers were given books and asked the crowd for two numbers between one and 200 corresponding to a page number. This is where the performance went from a feeling of being trapped to performance torture as I watched a performer stitch together this scene between two random romance books and a wedding.
For the third game of this now treacherous night of live performance. They took a movie from the audience to speed up and acted out a synopsis of the entire movie. They started with roughly two minutes on the clock; the movie they got from the audience was “Jaws.” There’s a way to make THE shark attack movie funny… this was not it. Through every rendition, the only thing that truly stood out to me was that they made the same joke about chum four times. While yes, that is mildly interesting, I wouldn’t call it entertaining. By the end of the game, I had just seen three people reenact “Jaws” in eight seconds… backwards, and I hope you’re fortunate enough to never have to.
By this point in the night, I would have rather shaved with a rusty razor blade than sat in that seat any longer. Their fourth game of the night was a dating show where the contestant had to leave the room as the other three performers got characters from the audience — Pluto from Mickie Mouse, Medusa and Abraham Lincoln. This game unfortunately followed the suit of the rest and couldn’t make me even crack a smile. At the end of it, they broke for intermission. Realizing there was another hour of performance left in the night, I opted to get out of dodge while I had the chance and left before they could ever get to the suggestions in the hat, now having found my 10th circle of hell.
Now, with events that are hopefully not as painful as this one, onto the brief.
