"Let's try a short vignette for three people called 'Pole Dancer.' You be the pole, you're the dancer and you're shoving money in his g-string."
This is the kind of awkward, on-the-spot, embarrassing moment that most people might have nightmares about for weeks. But at Casual Thursday, Dartmouth students are eager to put themselves out there, on stage, in the form of various characters -- including poles, dancers and their patrons.
Casual Thursday is an improv comedy group on campus which just finished auditioning and selecting new members for the upcoming school year.
About 40 people auditioned, 14 were called back, and only four were invited to join the group. That's an admittance rate of only 10 percent, making Casual Thursday tougher to get into than Dartmouth itself.
"Deliberations were hard!" Lauren Caracciola '09, a member of Casual Thursday, commented. "We let in four people, three '10s and an '08."
Improv comedy is probably one of the most difficult tasks imaginable. On stage, a performer is forced to think at the speed of lightning in order not to look like an idiot, and then step it up a notch in order to actually make people laugh.
At the beginning of callbacks, Michael Trapp '08 pointed to the chalkboard on stage and reviewed what he called the "Two Cardinal Rules of Improv":
1.Agreement. Don't contradict something that's already been said.
2.Have a goal. Keep something in mind to make the scene move along.
And, while his back was turned, someone added a third rule: Have fun.
Callbacks certainly were amusing for everyone involved. The audience of prospective members and judges alike were laughing riotously watching characters like "Captain Disco" and "Athletic Slap on the Butt Man" try to tackle such dire situations as "potato chips are falling from the sky."
In other scenarios, players were given only one word to start with, and had to create an entire scene and story from there. "Toy car," for example, prompted a scene at a preschool in which an overzealous teacher pinned a student to the ground in order to disarm her.
As hilarious and entertaining as they were, some scenes were painful to watch. You know that terrible queasy feeling you get when you're watching some "Never Been Kissed"-esque film and the Drew Barrymore character is embarrassing herself beyond human capacity? That feeling that makes you want to hide inside your t-shirt and pretend that things like that don't actually happen to people? Well in improv comedy, they do. All the time.
Sometimes scenes stall, don't flow, or just aren't funny at all. Britanny Crosby '09, who made callbacks, commented that the hardest part about improv is that "you don't want to intentionally try to be funny. Your big goal is to carry on a scene."
Of course, improv can go from hilarious to nightmarish at the drop of a hat. "I worry about not knowing [the prompt]. They called out 'ewok' the other day, and I had no idea what an 'ewok' is. Luckily, I wasn't up there, but if I had been..." Crosby said.
This, of course, is the beauty of improv. If Crosby had been up there with no idea that an ewok is a small hirsute humanoid creature from "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi," she still would have had to come up with something, or relied on her partner for clues.
Zoe Acher '08 was also auditioning, despite her upperclassmen status. "I had a two year head start on losing my dignity and inhibitions," she noted.
"I enjoy laughing and making people laugh, so it just made sense to try improv comedy," she continued. "The whole process was worth it just to see how many hilarious and talented people there are at this school."
As Casual Thursday veteran Brent Butler '07 remarked in conclusion, "Auditions were phenomenal -- the '10s were so talented that my only concern is that Casual Thursday might be so funny it's lethal."
