JC Crum, an OSU sophomore (left), and Jaremy Andrews, an OSU freshman, play “hands on” with Oreo cookies during OSU Improv on Monday evening. The event was the first performance of the OSU Improv Club.
Live comedy is making a comeback in Stillwater.
On Monday night, OSU was treated to a sketch improvisational comedy show in the Student Union Little Theatre.
To be able to understand verbal quips such as “There was so much gyrating I almost lost my biscuits,” and “You try resisting that dinosaur hiney,” or to see hilarious impressions of Richard Simmons, Dr. Phil and Wonder Woman with PMS, you had to be there.
But this was no lazy comedy show that audience members could just sit back and watch — it was an interactive show in which audience participation was not only encouraged but also necessary.
The OSU Improv organization held its first staged, free-to-the-public show at 8 p.m. About 75 people attended.
Fifteen OSU Improv members put on the live comedy show in the style of the ABC Family network show “Whose Line is it Anyway,” which Drew Carey hosts.
Audience members were prompted for ideas for about a dozen different improv sketches. In the opening sketch “Radio Program,” in which a host took “calls” from other improv members with his enlightening answers to questions about audience subject idea, “babies.”
Next was “ABC,” where two OSU Improv members with audience-provided relationship “Power Rangers” had to have a conversational exchange with the first letter of his line beginning with a corresponding letter of the alphabet.
“You’re drunk, aren’t you?” one asked the other.
“Zactly,” the other humorously replied after a moment’s hesitation.
Interior merchandising sophomore Christine Orza was one of two audience members who volunteered to participate in a sketch called “Mannequins,” in which two Improv members in a boss-and-employee relationship could only be moved or put in a position by each one’s audience volunteer.
She said it was her first time to see OSU Improv perform and that she found out about the show through her friend, Tina Dicks, who was in it.
“They’re doing really good,” she said. “This is their first show, but I think they’re warming up to the crowd.
“It’s a good idea.”
She said trying to anticipate the other audience participant’s moves was “kind of hard.”
“I didn’t know what the other guy was going to have him do, and they kept fighting,” she said. “It was just kind of go with it. It was funny.”
She said she didn’t have stage fright but that when she found out she was going to be the mover instead of the mannequin she was a little nervous.
Elementary education sophomore Hali Butler and elementary education freshman Kaylee Peters attended the show together and said they thought it was “really funny.”
They said their favorite performer was OSU alumnus Winston Carter.
“Everything he did was really funny,” Peters said.
“All the guys were really funny,” Butler added.
She said she really enjoyed the games in which performers turned into two-or-four-headed characters and had to take turns supplying one word of the character’s dialogue.
OSU Improv president Nicole Vance said the club began about November but didn’t really get going until this semester. She said about 15 or 20 usually attend weekly meetings, which will be held at 6:30 p.m. Thursdays on the fourth floor of the Student Union beginning in the fall semester.
She said her favorite game is “Mixed Doubles,” one of the sketches in which two performers take turns adding onto one character’s dialogue one word at a time.
Vice president Nicole Vance said she enjoys “Replay.”
Vance said the group definitely has plans to hold another show next year and that this year’s turnout was quite a bit bigger than she expected.
“Our advertisement wasn’t that great,” she said. “We need to work on that.
“Maybe one day we’ll fill the theater.”
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