The Mixed Signals, the College's comedy improvisational troupe, performed its first show of the semester to a full house last Friday evening.
In improvisational comedy, or improv, a cast of actors takes the stage performing short comedy sketches, akin to "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" Each game has a premise and after that point, everything the actors say and do is entirely spontaneous and never rehearsed.
One of the games played in Friday night's performance was called "Party Quirks." Cast member and senior history and secondary education major Alyssa Phillips was the host of a party. Invited to this party were three other cast members who were given a strange quirk or identity by the audience.
Cast member and senior communication studies major Sean Curry's quirk was that he licks himself clean. In order to facilitate Curry's quirk, cast member and senior communication studies major James Introcaso arrived as Pig-Pen from Charles Schulz's comic strip "Peanuts."
"This man is the answer to all my problems!" Introcaso said. Curry began to lick Introcaso clean and stopped right over his crotch. "Well it's a good thing I'm not 9 years old anymore," he said.
The group premiered a new game called "Soap Opera" at Friday's performance.
The actors asked the audience for suggestions of a gravely serious situation as well as a lighthearted one. They combined these events to act out a soap opera-like scene.
The serious event was a grandmother's suicide while the lighter situation was a rubber ducky's deflation. Hilarity ensued.
Introcaso played a father and junior philosophy major Vegas Lancaster played his son. Both grieved the death of "Old Ma Quackers."
Cast members Andrew Timmes, junior computer science major, and Mike Davidoff, senior mathematics major, entered as Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie, respectively.
Davidoff lamented the loss of his own rubber ducky.
"Maybe we can take a bath together?" asked Davidoff of the grieving father. "You cheating slut," muttered a slighted Timmes.
Dead grandmothers and ambiguously-oriented puppets aside, no group and no celebrity were safe from the quick-witted minds of The Mixed Signals.
In the game called "World's Worst," a category is supplied and the cast must come up with examples of the world's worst version of the suggested category.
During Friday night's performance, Davidoff greeted the audience as the world's worst zoo keeper. "Hello, I'm Michael Vick," he said.
The "world's worst activist" was cast member and junior English major Laura Hargreaves. "What do we want? Women's rights! When do we want it? Right after I cook dinner!" she chanted.
The audience never stopped laughing. "The show was ridiculously wonderful," sophomore nursing major Laura Matricciano said. "I will be at every performance this semester."
The cast was pleased with the performance as well.
"We had a great turn out. It was a great first show," Lancaster said.
The Mixed Signals performs regulary on campus and in improv comedy compeitions, so be sure to catch them for a quick laugh at its next performance.
