Going Loopy…

You know what an improvisational comedian's greatest nightmare is? Being on stage and knowing his lines. No, but I wanna tell ya…

Saw a bunch of very good improvisers last night. My pal Vince Waldron is the director of a show called Totally Looped that does (sadly) but one performance a month here in Los Angeles. Coming from me, this is high praise because I've seen good improv and bad, and even phony improv, which is the most common variety. Phony improv is kind of like what Morey "The Human Joke Machine" Amsterdam used to do, though he had the integrity not to pretend he was making it up. You'd say "three-toed sloth" to Morey and he'd tell you a joke about a three-toed sloth. He readily admitted it was a feat of (a) memory and (b) switching. If he didn't recall a joke about a three-toed sloth, he'd just tell the one he did remember about the horny rhinoceros and make it into a three-toed sloth. That was clever but it wasn't improvising.

I once heard a great improv teacher describe the art as follows: If you think of the line and then say it, you're not improvising, you're just writing on your feet. The essence of improvisational comedy is that you respond to the scene immediately and react as the character would. An improv performer must be continually challenged and not merely playing Mad-Libs, fitting a few nouns into a predetermined template.

Unfortunately, a lot of folks don't get that. Around the time people from The Groundlings (a fine L.A.-based improv troupe) began getting on Saturday Night Live — and performers from there and Second City began getting movie deals — a lot of wanna-be actors began thinking that improv training on the old resumé might net them the kind of deals Chevy Chase was getting. Improv classes were flooded with folks who either couldn't learn the basics from scratch or didn't want to bother. They just wanted to learn that trick of looking like you were making it up. I went to a couple of "improv" shows that might as well have been using TelePrompters.

So it was great to see what Vince has come up with in Totally Looped. The title refers to the fact that much of the show involves the performers being shown film and video clips they have not seen before and having to loop (dub) them live, working in a preselected title or plot point. There was a clip from Valley of the Dolls, for example, that they had to turn into a movie called Who Stole My Platypus? — a title suggested by an audience member. Amazingly, they did it. (Instead of weeping about her addiction to pills and plummeting career, Patty Duke was now sobbing about how she left the back gate open and the family platypus disappeared.) Very fast, very funny…and genuine improv.

The genuine improvisers in Vince's show are Dan Castellaneta, Richard Kuhlman, Joe Liss, Deb Lucasta, Gail Matthius and Angela V. Shelton. Kuhlman was out last night but the rest managed to become a cast of thousands without him. My favorite moments came when Liss was portraying Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne (introducing the clips) and Castellaneta wandered on as his vastly less-successful younger brother who works in a shoe store. Dan is an amazing actor. As fine as he is voicing Homer and other characters on The Simpsons, that still taps into only about 30% of what he can do. At least, that's the ballpark number that came to mind as I watched him rattling off spurious cast lists to the movies the Osborne boys were introducing, all performed with a solid underscore of sibling rivalry. Actually, everyone in the troupe is terrific but improv comedy doesn't really survive being quoted the next day. You have to be there.

If you want to be there: They do it once a month at the little Second City stage directly next door to the Improv on Melrose in West Hollywood. The next scheduled performance is July 12 but I'll remind you when we get closer to that date.