Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

I've been on the mailing list for ComedySportz in Philadelphia since The Gryphon and I attended with my dad and sister in May 2004.

They sent out an e-mail this week that they were having a taping for the Philadelphia Visitors Channel and wanted people to attend.

We sent a note around to a bunch of our friends to see who had an interest. One person decided to join us, The Dormouse. He drove over to our place at 5 on Saturday and then drove us into the city. We parked at a place that ComedySportz had recommended and caught a cab to one of our favorite restaurants in Center City, Serendipity.

The restaurant is changing its format and will no longer be offering sushi and Japanese food. Instead, they'll be serving Indonesian food. We wanted to get the best sushi in town one last time, before the sushi chef finds another job. Since he doesn't know where he's going to end up, we might have to sample a number of new restaurants to find him again.

They love The Gryphon, because he's one of their regular customers. They brought us out a special salad, filled our sake carafe once for free and also brought green tea ice cream, no charge. The sushi chef, Ken, even came over to say hello and to find out how we liked everything. We, of course, loved it and thanked him. I'll miss that place.

We caught a cab back to 2030 Sansom Street. As soon as I looked at the program, I recognized some of the people from last time. The same pictures were being used. Bobbi Block was the referee again. She does a fantastic job of getting the audience involved in the evening's events, such as calling people out by clapping twice and saying, "Outta there!"

They were divided into teams of three and perform improvisational games for points, which determine a winner. In that respect, it's a little bit like the popular British and American versions of the show, Whose Line is it Anyway?

This particular night, on the New Jersey Cows were captain Don Montrey, Josh Rubenstein and Karen Getz. On the Philadelphia Amish were captain Mary Carpenter, Jim Carpenter and Jessie Preisendorfer. Both Don and Josh were performing when we last saw a show in 2004.

They began the night with a seemingly simple yet challenging game, What Are You Doing? You start with an activity, suggested by the audience. The player who initiates has to be doing anything but that activity, and when the player on the other team asks what they're doing, they give the audience suggestion.

The opposing team player then has to do the action just mentioned, but when the first team player asks them what they are doing, they have to say anything but what they're actually doing. To make it even more difficult, they stay within the theme suggested by the first activity.

So for example, if the first activity is eating a cheesesteak, the player might be digging a ditch. They're asked what they're doing, and say "Eating a cheesesteak." The other player has to act as if he's eating a cheesesteak but when asked what he's doing, he might say, "Using cheesesteaks to attract wild dogs." His opponent then has to act like he's using cheesesteaks to attract wild dogs, but when asked what he's doing, give another answer.

If one of them messes up, they're eliminated and another team member steps in.

Because of the taping, there was an emphasis on Philadelphia-based suggestions, so one of the first was, indeed, eating a cheesesteak. They came up with some really funny ones, such as "Putting a cheesesteak on my head for warmth."

They went through a couple rounds, based on audience suggestions. A couple times, Bobbi just asked for the name of someone in the audience and then picked two letters from their name. The activity had to be something where the first word started with the first letter and the second with the second letter. So for "L-C," you might have "licking children" or "liking cocoons."

I don't remember exactly what order things went in, but many of the games stand out in my memory.

The Philadelphia Amish, whom we were backing, since we'd bought one of their pennants from the players when they first came out, had to do a challenging game called Five Things. Jessie left the room, taking an audience member with her who could testify that she hadn't heard anything.

Then Bobbi directed the audience to come up with five activities. To make it more difficult, she had us add more to it. The other teammates have to help her act them out, by using gibberish and pantomime.

Poor Jessie had to guess: playing tennis using a soft pretzel as a racket and a meatball hoagie as a ball; riding Toucan Sam while wearing a clothespin; making her bed using a Philadelphia Flyer as a pillow, at the Philadelphia Art Museum; sledding on Ben Franklin in Fairmount Park; and cleaning a bathroom using an Ed Rendell sponge while wearing cheese.

Amazingly, she got the first three but got hung up on the last two, partly because she couldn't get Fairmount Park. Jim was hilarious the way he acted this out. He acted out a jogger who then gets shot. He also cracked me up with his imitation of Ed Rendell: he put a pillow under his belly, ate a lot of cheesesteaks and then talked a lot in gibberish.

Jim was one of my favorites that night, because he often took the games in really ridiculous directions. The Philadelphia Amish did a game called Sing It, where they had to act out a scene based on an audience suggestion. When Bobbi heard a line she wanted them to sing, she'd blow the whistle and tell them which line. They had to create a song from that line.

The suggestion, was ride the Ducks, which are sort of amphibious tour buses that allow tour guides to travel first on the streets of Philadelphia and then in the Delaware River.

In this scene, Mary was an operator for one of the ducks, and Jim was telling her not to go in the water again because of the alligators.

She said she wouldn't if he only had a job, but he said he was lazy and then had to sing a song about being lazy. He agreed to take career guidance from her and then she had to sing a song about that.

The New Jersey Cows did a game where they acted out a story from the audience. In this case, it was the story of a trip. A family had ridden on ATV's through the jungle and then gone swimming through a cave. But the only bad thing that happened to them on the trip was encountering a French woman who swam like a frog.

Karen, of course, played the wife and Josh played the husband. The couple also included a 12-year-old daughter, but they didn't have anyone to play her so they said, "Wonder where she got to?" Don was hilarious as the French woman, especially the way he was swimming, very much like a frog. This game helped Don show off with one of the things he does well, which is stepping into a character.

He played it as trying to seduce the husband, who was just being nice and trying to help her find her swim bottoms, which had fallen off. Just then, Mary, who was on the other team, swam up and popped up between them. "Daddy!" she said, giving them a great end for the scene.

One of my favorite games was a rap game, where they had to create a rap based on a suggestion from the audience. All they had to do was stay on rhythm and rhyme. They were eliminated if they stumbled or lost control of the English language. Bobbi directed when people started and stopped. If someone used a word that was difficult to rhyme, such as "Oregon," they had to prove there was a rhyme for it. If they could, they stayed in and the person who failed to rhyme left. If not, they were eliminated.

I wasn't surprised that Karen won this one for the Cows. She was exceptionally good, the one person in the group who really sounded like she was rapping. Jessie was a close second for the Amish, but unfortunately, she stumbled and had to be eliminated.

Karen was another one, who like Jim, likes to throw nonsense into her improvisation. But Jim usually does it in a way that makes more sense within the context of the sketch.

Another favorite was Story Teller (I think that's what it was called), where they took a name from the audience, The Gryphon's name, and then took a suggestion for where he should go. Somebody said Las Vegas. They would each tell part of the story, and Bobbi directed them when to start and stop. If she pointed at someone new, whoever was talking had to stop, even if it was in the middle of the word. The next person had to pick up, even in the middle of a word, or else they were eliminated.

This was entertaining. In the beginning of the story, he had a jar of quarters he was going to gamble in Las Vegas, but his quarters and his luggage were misrouted to South America. Not defeated, he decided to see how much money he could get from the rocks in his shoes. He got one dollar, but as he was putting the money in a change machine, the change machine broke in half and all these quarters spilled out.

From there it gets pretty confusing. He starts a Laundromat with a woman he meets in Vegas, and they hire orphans to work for them. The orphans put on a show and begin to become famous but then die in a plane crash with Buddy Holly.

This game let Jim show off his absurdist humor. Someone right before him said, "When he got off the plane, he saw something he'd never seen before." Jim was next, and he said, "A volcano, with beautiful women coming out of it!"

The Philadelphia Amish played a game called Forward Reverse, where Jim and Jessie acted out a scene. They were the sole members of a marching band for a Philadelphia Eagles game. When they went to play, someone hits Jim (playing the cello) in the ear with a battery. Bobbi had the ability to make them go backwards and forwards, so she had him replay that part of the scene a lot!

They demanded to know who threw the battery. Mary stepped out of the audience with a volunteer, a boy. She said, "We did! Yes, your own son!" At the end of the sketch, Jim said to the kid, "Come give me a hug" and hugged him. Bobbi kept making them go backward and forward through this part, too. The kid was a good sport about it.

The New Jersey Cows did a game called Blind Line, where they took suggestions for lines while the team was out of the room. These suggestions were written on pieces of paper and scattered around the stage. Periodically during the scene, they were supposed to pick them up and use them.

The suggestion for a place to visit was Alcatraz, so Karen and Don were a couple visiting it, every once in awhile working in these ridiculous lines. He ended up proposing there, and they got married with prisoners as witnesses, even though there are not supposed to be prisoners there any longer (they're just hiding out). The Philadelphia Amish actually stepped into this scene as prisoners and helped them out, earning themselves a point for doing so.

At the end of the evening, they did a game called Hey Waiter, where an audience member came up to be the person being waited on. Based on audience suggestions, she would complain about something in her soup, and each player took turns coming through and making a joke based on it. They chose a girl who was about 10 and did a great job with delivery. She even got to pose for a picture with the cast at the end of it.

This one was fun, although some suggestions worked better than others. "Waiter, there's a plumber in my soup" led to a host of suggestions, such as "No, it's just piping hot" or "Yes, his name is John." However, the Philly Phanatic pretty much failed across the board.

This was sort of a lightning round, with Bobbi blowing a whistle for any joke that got either a laugh or a groan. The announcer/keyboard player, who sit in a booth in the back, kept score.

When it comes to scoring, sometimes the points came down to an audience decision by three judges who had been selected at the start of the evening. Two of them were waving Cows pennants, so it wasn't much of a surprise that the Cows won. I think both teams did really well.

One thing that was different from the last time we attended was that we were at an earlier showing, and there were a lot of children in the audience.

In fact, in the front row sat a group of boys who were there for someone's birthday party. They were definitely enthusiastic, but their suggestions tended to be more predictable than those adults produce. Bobbi tried not to let them completely dominate, but she did take quite a few suggestions from kids.

Another thing that made the evening more challenging was the amount of Philadelphia based suggestions they tried to use. These ideas weren't nearly as outrageous or inventive as the suggestions otherwise might have been, with a lot of scenes taking place at touristy places around Philly, like the Liberty Bell.

I was a little disappointed, too, that there was only one camera there and it was trained on the stage. The Philadelphia Visitors Channel didn't shoot any footage of the audience, not even for B-roll. When The Gryphon and I talked about it later, we decided they must be producing some sort of a package about ComedySportz, not airing an entire show. Still, it was fun to be in the audience while it was being shot.

Next time we go, we'll aim for the later show so there are fewer children and therefore more interesting suggestions.

More fun at ComedySportz Philadelphia:

May 1, 2006 - Jorking Baby Kangaroos

May 4, 2004 - A Night at the Improv

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

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