it came from crim dell
trailblazing
it came from crim dell
jump! December 1989
I have heard many rumors about IT. Some positive, some negative, some completely off the wall. I really don't know what to make of IT. I came home late one Sunday evening and find a note under my door...
"Meet me at 4:45 tomorrow in front of Swem library. You will know me by my flat-top haircut. This will be your only chance to meet IT, so don't blow it."
I meet my contact at the appointed time, and he whisks me over to PBK. Everyone meets in front of the call board and my contact makes the introductions. "That's odd," I think, "these don't look like comical people." As I would soon find out, these are the ten most hilarious people on campus (apologies to Patton Oswalt -- I haven't had the chance to catch any of his shows yet.)
They give me some basic background information on the group before starting the rehearsal. The inception of IT (pronounced either as "it" or "eye--tee") was five years ago. The letters IT stand for improvisational theatre, which basically means they spout comedy off the top of their heads, and don't have to worry about that usual dramatic pain in the butt, memorizing lines.
For this reason, every snow I attended two rehearsals and two performances within one week, and IT never got the least bit repetitive.
So what exactly is improvisational theatre? They basically go on stage and play a series of different games, designed to give structure to the improvisation. But no one--neither the audience or IT themselves--has any idea what will happen. Except that it will be funny.
At 5:10 the rehearsal gets under way. The first game they play is called a Harold. No one exactly knows the origin of the name. A Harold is a fairly long game that involves the entire cast. It really is a series of small games and skits put together into one really big game. They start with a theme that the crowd suggests, build a (usually pretty raunchy) chord singing the theme, play a word-association game, and then go into a series of skits.
There are three basic storylines, which they go through once, then have an intermission game, further develop the three basic skits, another intermission game, comeback to the three basic skits, then link the three storylines together in a conclusion. And it moves from funny to hilarious as they progress.
Before they start they warn me, "It's really hard to be funny in rehearsal." Then they request a theme for the Harold. Since the audience only has one member (me), the pressure is on me to come up with a good theme.
For some reason (credit the amazing Commons salad bar if you wish), I decide on "cottage cheese." They seem to think that cottage cheese is a suitable theme for a Harold, and the improvisation begins.
The three basic skits for this particular Harold are a man and his wife playing basketball together, a new Rocky movie, and a little girl and Ben Franklin flying a unique type of kite. IT loves to parody the movies, music, tabloid stories, world crises, and William and Mary traditions such as Crim Dell.
As the Harold rolls on weird things happen. The husband and wife progress from basketball to a serious argument and talk of divorce. They argue about who gets the kids, the basketball, the helium machine, and the cottage cheese bricks. Cottage cheese bricks? They were invented earlier on in the Harold.
The audience discovers that the kite that Ben Franklin and the little girl are flying is not your everyday kite. It is actually the
Two cast members link arms, walk forward and say, "Hi, I'm the Schizophrenic Answer Man. Ask me any question about cottage cheese."
little girl's brother, who has been filled with helium. Ben accidentally flies him into a telephone pole or some other sharp aerial obstacle, and he becomes deflated.
They reinflate him, but all sorts of nasty complications develop.
From this they move to The Schizophrenic Answer Man which can also be done itself. Two of the cast members link arms, walk forward and say, "Hi, I'm the Schizophrenic Answer Man. Ask me any question about cottage cheese," But they alternate words: one says, "Hi," the other says, "I'm," the first says, "the," and so on.
Searching my soul for a question about cottage cheese, I finally ask him which is better, large curd or small curd cottage cheese. He doesn't seem to understand the terminology, so I try to explain small curd and large curd. He finally answers,"Large curd and small curd are differentiated by the integral curd size that can be found in Sheboygan, Idaho." I must admit that these complicated calculus terms somewhat confused me; the Schizophrenic Answer Man seems to know a lot of math, but certainly not much geography. Meanwhile, the husband and wife have made up and decided not to get a divorce. But there's a new twist. The wife dreams that she is fighting 81-year old Rocky Balboa. So they employ a convenient way out of a skit that's gotten just a little bit too weird: "And then I woke up from my hideous nightmare."
IT was formed in 1984, after a group of students from William and Mary attended an improvisation workshop at Yale. The Yale improvisational theatre group, Purple Crayon, ran the workshop.
IT was loose and unstructured during its first two years of existence. Rehearsals were irregular, and the cast was open to anyone who was interested in doing improvisation. The open cast concept got out of hand, so in 1987 they held formal auditions for the first time.
In the spring of 1988 they held auditions again, but the cast placed more emphasis on them this time, because the founding members were graduating. With the founders gone, 1989-1990 is going to be a test for IT; this is the year IT will either become an established, well-known group at William and Mary or fall into obscurity. At the beginning of this semester, according to one
Searching my soul for a question about cottage cheese, I finally ask him which is better, large curd or small.
member of the cast, "There were some anxieties in the company concerning the future of IT."
Auditions were held again at the end of September. It seems that they went quite well. The current lineup consists of five veterans and five new members, and, much to the credit of the rookies, I could not distinguish the two groups.
On Thursday IT does a show in the Dupont Pit. The show starts five minutes late. Nobody seems to notice. RA Brad Pincombe gives the company a quick introduction, and IT is off and running.
Once again, they open with a Harold, "the mainstay of our show." The three skits are an Orchesis interpretive dance, a boy scout and his scoutmaster trying to start a fire in a torrential downpour, and a humorous examination of that eternal pest, the mosquito.
The first intermission game is something called a Lost Script. One character is the narrator. The rest of the cast, none of whom speak throughout the entire game, just basically move around in all sorts of contorted positions, as if they were playing a drunken game of twister without the mat. Then the narrator commands them to freeze and explains to the audience what is happening.
This particular Lost Script is a never produced episode of the Love Boat. The only celebrity passengers on this episode are Sid and Nancy from the Sex Pistols, but all the usual Love Boat crew members are on board. In the first scene, Isaac the bartender has fixed himself one drink too many and is passed out on the Aloha deck. Also, the ship's doctor is attempting to look up Nancy's leather skirt.
In scene number two Nancy becomes frustrated because she failed to pack enough pills for the cruise. When the doctor won't give her any more, she attacks him with a used syringe. More importantly, Isaac (suffering from a mild hangover) invents popping, the foundation of break dancing.
Scene three reveals the doctor showing Sid some of the wrestling moves he picked up in the navy, and, meanwhile, "total chaos is breaking loose on the Acapulco deck."
In the final scene Sid converts the doctor to slam dancing, "thwarting Isaac and putting off break dancing for another ten years." The captain is now blind in one
He finally answers: "Large curd and small curd are differentiated by the integral curd size that can be found in Sheboygan, Idaho."
eye, as a result of Sid's unsuccessful attempt to pierce his eyelid. And all is well on the Love Boat as she pulls into port.
The capacity crowd of freshmen loves it. The crowd hoots, hollers, and applauds as a member of the cast bursts forth with a brilliant barrage of improvisational wit.
The rest of the Harold includes the birth of the Three Stooges, people putting whiskey in other people's milk, freak nuclear accidents, and the Swedish Chef.
Next is the Alphabet Game. This game is played by two people who, in a setting supplied by the audience, have a conversation in alphabetical order. Each time one of them speaks, he must start his sentence with the letter of the alphabet that they are on. Certain letters, such as q, v, x, and z, are really tough to handle.
In this Alphabet Game, the setting is an airliner. The captain is flirting with an attractive female passenger who greatly shocks him when she reveals that she is Amelia Earhart. They end up flying into the sunset en route to Zaire, of all places. (Hey, they have to end on Z.)
IT used the James game at Dupont: "There I was on Crim Dell. The stars were bright, and I had the woman I love by my side. This was going to be the moment of our lives. I got down on one knee and pulled out the little box in which were the last two years of my hard-earned money."
And then, lo and behold, James emerges from the murky waters of Crim Dell, slithers up the bank and says, "Joe! Can I have those condoms back that you saved up for? Can I just have one of them?"
The crowd at Dupont loved IT. I did a quick exit poll after the show, and all the comments were favorable: "I've never seen anything like it before," "On a scale of one to ten, I'd have to give it a 100," "It was riotously funny,"said Danny Holley, Vince Indelicato, and Jane Halta.
This year's cast is: Craig Cackowski, Derric Gerlach, Jeff A. R. Jones, Melissa Lanning, Charlie Mercer, Mark Milhone, Dave Sturdevant, Louisa Turqman, Joe Wajszczuk, and James Wilkins.
Each member has a certain mannerism or habit that he is known for among the group. James always ends up being God or some other omnipotent being. Mark brings sexual innuendo into scenes which annoys Melissa. Dave is known for his flat-top haircut, which somehow became the motif for his first IT show. He is letting his hair grow out now, and he wonders if he will lose his identity.
One day in rehearsal Joe and Charlie are playing the alphabet game. James shows up late, and as soon as he walks in, they get stuck on the letter V. When they finish, another cast member observes, "It was going very well until James came."
Another chimes in, "Yeah, as soon as James came the whole thing fell apart, just like yesterday. Are we seeing a pattern here?"
Suddenly a new IT game has been invented. The name, of course, is "And then James came ...." Two characters do a skit, then at a crucial point the rest of the cast yells, "And then James came." You could say that James in this game is an improvisational jester from hell.
Their next show is the Fire and Brimstone Halloween party. The audience trickles in slowly, so, once again, the show starts late. They open with an Orchesis, which is a free-form parody of the college dance group that is quite similar to a Lost Script game.
Following the Orchesis is a Harold. They have some trouble getting a good theme from the crowd. Some of the suggestions are "Schizophrenia," "Criminal Activity," "Mild Psychosis," (there must have been a psyche major in the crowd) and"Peanut Butter and Jelly" which IT decides to use.
The Harold is good, but just not as funny as the one they did at Dupont. The crowd is extremely tough, only laughing at the most hilarious of lines. The lack of crowd response makes the show difficult for IT, because, as Dave explained to me, "The audience response gives us so much energy. The show takes off once the audience gets into it."
The company is frustrated after the show. I am instructed to burn my tape of the show. A female member of IT slowly comes up to me, embraces me, and whispers seductively to me, "I'll have sex with you if you burn that tape."
This is the year that will make or break IT. The Dupont show was crucial, since it was the first with the new members. The fact that it went so well is great encouragement for the company. Spirits are up now, and the cast is looking forward to the next auditions, which will be held sometime next semester.
As one cast member told me, "It was really scary going into that show, but now we know that we can still do it, even though we lost the founding members last year."
Winston Polhamus is a freshman at the College from Danville, Virginia, where he worked on his high school literary mag.
Thanks to jump! magazine and Winston Polhamus, wherever you are.
trailblazing
Past is present in the funny pages.
By Arion Berger
By nature and by tradition, newspaper comic strips are populist ballyhoo, a capitulation to the masses. Newspaper moguls have always used the same yardstick to determine which comics to carry and which news to cover, and pictures and words are the marketing gimmicks behind the dailies' lucrative ad-selling business. The phrase "yellow journalism" borrowed its sensational color from the funnies before it ever referred to writing. But if it's history that determines the place of newspaper strips in the popular mind, the shape the form's humor has traditionally taken--lazy, sexist, Catskillian, anonymous--is even more unbudgeable. In the short, hundred-year history of the funnies, the fun ossified young.
Daily newspapers that carry comics are a strange, old-fashioned breed: a stiff format for the imparting of cultural information, widely reported (in the papers themselves) to be moribund, that also harbors the raucous, vulgar people's pages fit only for children and imbeciles. It doesn't matter that newspaper content itself has become so soft, cheesy, and eager to please--even London's rigorously comicsless Times has grown weary of shoving forkfuls of fibrous international news at a public craving lifestyle Slurpees--the forms' differences are of kind, not degree.
There's no comics-page equivalent to sober front-page analyses, and no fluffy style-section evergreen on a bad day can match for pointlessness and distrust of pleasure Cathy on a good one.
If reading is stepping into a private universe, reading the comics is like stepping into a universe not just private but nontransferable. All that hilarity, all those drawing styles, all that implied farce--"action lines," plummeting superheroes, mailman collisions, children literally backflipping with surprise--lying static on the page. You open the comics section, and you can't believe One Big Happy is happening to other readers. The pages are like a benign sort of nightmare--the best thing about them is the relief that no one else need know.
Which is not to say they're horrible; they're just totally irrelevant. The reason a strip (or panel) takes the country by storm is that it manages to matter to us, here, now. The Far Side hit our most cherished cultural mores right in the tender spot. Calvin and Hobbes refused to buy the myth of childhood's innocence, a myth central to the idea of comic strips, and made imagination look risky and liberating. Where many of the older comics are sitcoms--the same basic cutouts of situations and characters held up to different backdrops--Dilbert could only take place in a modern office staffed by characters as idiosyncratic as they are recognizable.
The drunk, the layabout, the shrew, the virgin, the tyrant, the coward--most comic-strip types are caricatures of the coarsest kind, none of them flattering, except perhaps to the virgin, and she is that inhuman thing, the inviolate, characterless vessel for her panelmates' discomfort. Couples seething with sexual resentment have always thickly populated the comics pages, from The Lockhorns to The Bickersons to the inhabitants of Grin and Bear It, and their strife resonates heartily in the thudding mother-in-law cracks, the prurient treatment of young women, the me-Venusian/you-Martian couple byplay in old strips squeezed dry of humor (Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, which, if never funny, is at least inoffensive) and strips like The Born Loser and the odious Sally Forth, which fancy themselves modern. (Let's not even talk about Momma. ) The attitude toward marriage on display in these pages is not only hateful but consistent--unhappy families are all unhappy in the same way, and, worse, for the same reasons. Only Blondie and Dagwood, after all those years together, are untouched by acrimony disguised as gibing; plus, it's funny every time Dagwood crashes into the mailman.
There are bright spots amid all this neut otic pre-Freudian shadow. Perhaps the bravest and most frustrating strip today is Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse. Johnston has an unnerving honesty, it isn't the occasional cameos by gay teenager Lawrence that should shock fans, but the Sunday she drew Elizabeth, then l4 or l5, on a summer jaunt with friends, frolicking, drinking beer, driving, making out with some guy she just met--and never referred to it again. It was striking that such a careful chronicler of family life would allow the family dog to die so horribly--she killed off Farley in a river drama--but even more striking that for a day or two readers suspected it might be youngest daughter April who had drowned; Johnston is just rigorous enough to try it. But between these fearless sallies, she retreats, and even if we sense Weed's alcoholism or Tracy and Gordon's business failure just around the corner, Johnston seems content to glide, blinkered, around her own foreshadows.
The same jokes, the same characters, the same stale, alien attitudes, the same affection for golf increasing as their creators age--in three pages of this purposeless paste there's little room to hear another point of view, even if it's as harmless as that of Curtis. There have to be African-American artists out there, although it's a sure bet that the people who choose the strips will insist there simply aren't. But if Robb Armstrong can make something as simple as Jump Start happen (although not in the Post), surely young artists with even marginally more assertive strips are being turned away for the unspoken charge of being "too black."
But somehow there is room for the parading of private beliefs m the most belligerent manner. Johnny Hart, now a froth-mouthed Christer nutcase with a flaming sword in one hand and an increasingly shaky pen in the other, seems to have forgotten what"B.C." stands for as he draws his offensive, self-righteous, tyrannical admonishments each Christmas and Easter, and bullies us all us "cute chicks" and "fat broads" and "four eyes"--at random intervals the rest of the year because it's assumed we're not doing right by his vengeful god. Hart should have been banned from the comics pages at the moment of his conversion--if not for offensiveness, then for senility. Although, to be fair, that never stopped Hank Ketcham.
Most comics-page humor, whether dated or progressive, falls within established boundaries--even a strip as absurdly well drawn as newcomer Liberty Meadows keeps its jokes free of the boldness and experimentation creator Frank Cho revels in with his art. Cartoonish humor has its language, one that may have sprung from cultural mythology or mere pervasiveness, that is spoken nowhere but understood on those three pages. The antiquated lexicon still translates easily, although you wouldn't find the front page throwing around such cavalier symbols--igloos, tepees, Christmas carolers, XXX'd jugs of moonshine, nickel lemonade stands, neighborhood-bars-as-confessionals, even stodgy visions of heaven and hell.. Steven Spielberg's Animaniacs, a TV cartoon too smart for many kids, uses retro-chic as its excuse for employing classic animation conventions; a hungry character will be accompanied by a few bars of "Shortnin' Bread," anvils are a popular weapon (followed by pianos, safes, and flowerpots, in that order), and any spurious idea is received by a thought bubble containing a screw and a baseball.
There is one aged strip, however, that is carrying on a wholly different tradition--it never depended on humor--one that has died out everywhere but within its own small daily rectangle. Mark Trail was once the proud purveyor of American can-do innocence, a slow-moving amble through the life of ranger Trail and his pals, fianc,e Cherry, and other folks who would not be out of place giving Nancy Drew a hand if she were investigating The Secret of Black Bear Creek.
Educational as well as entertaining, Mark Trail is Boy Scout-macho, conceived from a tradition that stretches back as far as our country's history, touching Meriwether Lewis, Huck Finn, and Daniel Boone along the way. Wilderness expertise and personal rectitude so unshakable it's almost priggish are the attributes of such a character, and America has long forgotten to respect him. We haven't forgotten he exists, of course, but the obsessive perfection of David Lynch's Special Agent Dale Cooper with his almost insane admiration for the trees and the souls of the dead throws suspicion on all Ranger Rick types. After Twin Peaks, nothing rustically pleasant ever looked the same again.
In our world, Mark Trail co-exists with our knowledge of Twin Peaks and the myriad other available worlds of popular entertainment, but Mark Trail itself harbors no room for such self-knowledge. Insular, rambling, incomprehensible, Mark Trail would be strange even if it were but one fish in a barrel of such product. But, stranded on a tiny ice floe as all other expressions of this brand of American heroism melted away, the strip has become outsider art at its most outlandish, babbling to us with misleading calm on a daily basis.
The human characters are oddly proportioned (big, square heads) and look suspiciously alike; the animals are lovingly crafted down to their toepads. The daily three-panel strip often follows a pattern--one scene drawn in deep perspective, another a pleasing middle-distance composition. In between we "overhear" the people talking while watching a small animal perform some intimate bit of grooming very close up. Cavorting heedlessly or licking themselves thoughtfully, the animals go on being animals even while Mark and his modestly attired cast expound on animal behavior: "This is Sally. She's a little spooky but she's a good dog." Yeah, spooky dogs.
Mark Trail may be unique by default (or forfeit), but it must, at some level, also be unusually plucky to speak to us so hopefully every single day, not admitting that no one else speaks its language. But in the context of those three maddening pages of riotous id--petty feuding, soapbox ranting, venomous prejudice, and joke-mill profiteering--no voice is that much more archaic than any other.
©Washington City Paper, September 19, 1997