Improv troupe a hilarious outlet for students

Home Culture Improv troupe a hilarious outlet for students
Improv troupe a hilarious outlet for students

Whether in acting or public speaking, humor is both a way to engage the audience and to lift them out of the mundane, according to the students of Misdirection, Hillsdale College’s improvisation club.

Misdirection is all about practicing and developing the sense of humor, said senior Kyle Smith, the club’s president.

“Our improv exclusively focuses on comedy,” he said. “It’s good acting practice, a way to blow off steam, and a good way to get the creative energies flowing between you and your audience.”

The club meets on Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons in the Sage Center for the Arts to practice improvising humorous sketches. Modeled off of the popular television show “Who’s Line is it Anyway?,” the scenes always germinate from a game the members of the club agree on, said Smith.

“All improv occurs in the context of games,” Smith said.

Junior Chris Lanctot, another member of the club, said these games can involve drawing random lines of prose from a hat and reading them off as part of a scene’s dialog.

“We were acting out driving my wife to the hospital during childbirth, and the line I pulled out the hat was ‘it’s a horse, it’s a horse, it’s a horse of course,’” Smith said.

“It tends to be hilarious,” said junior theater major Mark Keller. “Improv is embodying a character without the limitations of a script – you can more fully become that character.”

Alternatively, a moderator might intervene and require performers to change the last word of their sentence. The objective is to keep the storyline moving in unpredictable and humorous ways, said Lanctot.

In one game, Smith said the audience bestows a superpower on one performer, who then picks a sidekick from the audience and gives him or her another ability.

“I gave him the superpower of an infinite supply of annoying alarm clocks to throw at people,” he said.

Regardless of the game created for the performers, there is only one consistent rule: go with it.

“The number one rule of improv is ‘always go with it,’” said Smith. “He didn’t say, ‘That’s not my superpower.’”

Moving through the changing circumstances of the scene smoothly is the key to learning comedy, said Lanctot, who joined the club because of his high school involvement in stand-up comedy.

“You don’t try to be funny, you let humor come,” he said. “You just get into character and let it emerge naturally.”

Smith said humor is a sense that you either have or do not have, but there are ways to develop the sense by “identifying surprising truths” and “creating unnecessary conflict.”

For him, comedy is a means to communicate lasting truths to the world. Getting a laugh creates a feedback loop between the speaker and audience that reinforces the message, he said.

“Mark Twain, Ronald Reagan, and Winston Churchill all agreed that humor is the best way to leave your mark on the audience and the world,” he said.

Lanctot said humor was a way to make people’s lives better for a few hours.

“You’ve got to lift people out of their mundane life, at least for an hour or two,” he said.

Smith said he hoped more students would join the group, and encouraged any kind of involvement.

“Come and watch. Or just come and heckle us,” he said.

                                  tgaiser@hillsdale.edu