Had a nice evening at Vince Waldron's monthly "Totally Looped" show up in Hollywood. Here's how this works: Vince, who is an award-winning writer-director-producer, assembles a troupe of talented actors skilled in improvisational comedy. Then he shows film clips that these folks have not seen. Then they have to do live dubbing, ad-libbing dialogue for the clips to make them address a topic that the live audience has suggested. The troupe last night consisted of (I hope I don't leave anyone out) Dan Castellaneta, Rick Kuhlman, Deb Lacusta, Rick Overton, Angela V. Shelton, Danny Mann and Edie McClurg.
If I may digress slightly — and since it's my weblog, no power on Earth can stop me — the Art of Improv Comedy has sustained some body blows in the last few decades. About the time performers started going from Saturday Night Live to huge movie careers, a lot of actors who didn't really have the chops for improv, or even a lot of interest in it, decided that was the new route to film stardom. Suddenly, improv classes were flooded with applicants…and that wasn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. Improv training is a good thing for actors even if they intend to spend the rest of their careers working off scripts. It trains them to hold onto the character they're playing and how to react to others in a scene and, most of all, how to listen. If you're doing an improvised scene, you'd better listen.
Not every actor can improvise. Some of the most honored actors of all time, starting with Sir Laurence Olivier and working down from there, could not. Others should simply not try. In the late eighties, I went to a number of alleged improv shows which were not really improv and/or not really good. The former were playing the old Morey Amsterdam game. If someone challenged Morey to tell a joke about a kangaroo, he often came back with this one…
So one day at the zoo, the kangaroo goes crazy. He screams and then he leaps out of his cage and runs off. The zoo keeper runs up to a lady standing by the cage and asks, "What happened?" The lady says, "I don't know. I just tickled him with my umbrella and he jumped up and ran off, that's all." So the zoo keeper says, "Well, you'd better tickle me 'cause I'm the one who's got to go catch him."
That's not a great joke but it was great for Morey's purpose because you could plug in any animal. If they wanted an ocelot joke, the lady tickled an ocelot with her umbrella. If someone asked for a platypus joke, the lady tickled a platypus. A lot of what gets passed off as improv comedy these days is like that: Fill in the blanks. So it's nice to see the crew Mr. Waldron has assembled. They're genuine improv performers, operating sans template. I especially love the little rambling introductions that Dan Castelleneta stammers out for the clips. Not only do we not know where he's going with them, it's obvious that Dan doesn't really know, either. That's the beauty of improv and the fact that he's very funny is an added bonus.
I would single out the other performers individually but I have a problem. As they dub the clips, they're sitting there in the dark doing rapid voice changes so it's not always easy to tell who's talking. Afterwards when we were mingling, I wanted to compliment whoever came up with a couple of specific lines but I wasn't sure which one to praise. My sense was that these people are all really good. There were some tech problems with the projector during the show, with some clips ending in premature blackouts. Being good improv performers, the players just worked it into the scenes and kept on going. The s.r.o. audience was delighted.
The next "Totally Looped" show is September 9 and details are at this website. I'll remind you when we get closer to that date but if you're near Hollywood (they're in the theater right next to the Improv on Melrose) you might want to jot it down now. They don't do these shows often enough.
P.S. At the end of the show, Edie McClurg announced that Dan C. just won his third Emmy for his voiceover performances on The Simpsons. Good pick.