It's only fun if you smoke hookah first," joked the members of improv comedy troupe Quipfire! about their own show last Friday night. Though watching while entirely clean and sober, I still had fun. Quipfire!'s frosh week show was lighthearted and amusing, and though it wasn't roll-on-the-floor hilarious, audience members got a few good laughs out of the gig.
As their campus fans know well, Quipfire!'s trademark is that none of the group's jokes are rehearsed. Instead of producing scenes, Quipfire! members play games where every line is improvised, with the help of audience input. Viewers will shout out a non-geographic location or a line of dialogue, and the actors will take things from there.
The audience and actors form a close bond as a result. After seeing Quipfire! shows, audience members feel like they know the cast intimately .
It's a good thing, then, that Quipfire!'s actors are fun and full of personality. They're the kind of people you would want to spend your Friday night with anyway: outgoing, accessible and, most importantly, funny.
I'll admit that before the show started, I was skeptical of Quipfire!'s ability to make me laugh this time. I'd seen their shows several times before, so I knew what sort of games they would play and didn't think the show would have any huge surprises for me. What's more, an 11 p.m. show made for a tired and cranky reviewer; by the time I pushed my way through the crowded Theatre Intime lobby to my seat, I was more ready for a nap than for a noisy comedy show. The music blasting into the house did not help; whoever thought it would be a good idea to play Nelly Furtado's "Do It" about a dozen times in a row must have really smoked some hookah first.
Despite my hesitation, the show perked me up and made me feel better as soon as it began. I won't deny that part of this had to do with the fact that I didn't have to listen to "Do It" anymore (when the music went off, the audience cheered). More importantly, the friendly and outgoing cast of Quipfire! took immediate command of the stage and the audience.
The troupe rotates its actors every night, so the group I saw represented only a fraction of Quipfire!'s members: Edward Forsyth '08, Mary Cait Walthall '08, Rebecca Gold '09, Jonathan Weed '09, Becca Foresman '10, who is also a 'Street' columnist, and Katie Seaver '10.
Walthall and Weed opened the show by playing a game in which, while they acted a scene, a buzzer periodically prompted them to rephrase the last sentence or clause. Walthall played a schoolteacher, and Weed was her overzealous student who asked to stay after school to help her erase the board.
"That's very sweet of you, but that job is only for bad students," Walthall said. The buzzer sounded, and Walthall repeated: "That's very sweet of you, but that job is only for people I want to stay later." And again: "That's very sweet of you, but it's also really annoying."
Most of the show went on in the same vein, with actors thinking up mildly funny lines. Fortunately, they added punch in their delivery, playing with facial expressions and voices as much as they could. Walthall got into character as a raging housewife almost exclusively using her face, Foresman told a story in the style of Jean-Paul Sartre with an exaggerated French accent and Forsyth played the "world's worst firefighter" by flailing around wispily and whining, "it's hot, ow."
In the funniest game, three actors each played a different celebrity at a cafe — without being aware of his or her own identity. An actor would leave the room, the audience would yell out names and the cast would write the name on an index card that they would stick on the actors' foreheads upon their return. The actors spent the duration of the skit engaged in conversation with each other, trying to guess their own identities. For this game, Walthall was TV show character Dr. Gregory House, Forsyth was Michael Vick and Seaver played Elizabeth Taylor. Sadly, the humor in this skit — and the entire show — tended to be sophomoric; when Walthall, trying to guess her identity, spoke of her "magical doctor powers," Forsyth quipped back by saying, "it's more just kind of the powers of being a dick."
But the immaturity of many jokes is forgivable in light of the incredibly quick thinking the actors displayed. In one game, "Acronyms," Seaver and Forsyth had to start sentences with words corresponding with the letters of an acronym. Their scene was located at an amusement park, and Forsyth was able to put words to "NAACP" without hesitation: "Now An Atrocious Cascade Protruding from the guts of the rollercoaster passengers..."
Unfortunately, I cannot do Quipfire!'s humor justice by repeating it in writing; most of the laughter came from watching the actors' faces and from taking part in the chaos of shouting out audience suggestions. So if you really want to judge Quipfire!'s humor, go to a show yourself. The hookah-smoking beforehand is optional — and unnecessary.
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