What a night! I had my first (7pm - 10pm) class at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (www.ucbtheatre.com). Opened in 1999, it is the birthing spot of some of the best comedic talent NYC has to offer. In 2006, UCB opened the first comedy training center of its kind in NYC. Students from UCB have gone on to write and perform for SNL, Conan, Mad TV, the Daily Show, Late Night with Craig Ferguson, etc. Charlie Sanders, who is our instructor, has his own show every Saturday night downtown and often appears in sketches with Conan O'Brien.
So...in this deal, I am the oldest (although I did see some older looking folks who were heading toward the Improv classes), but four of us are neophytes to UCB (everyone else is on their second or third Improv class). I was a bit worried at the start of class when we went around and introduced ourselves: these folks were mentioning comedy sketch shows on cable that I had never heard of! Not having cable may be an issue...but I'm heading to the video store today to see what I can find on DVD.
I introduced myself as a Social Worker. I thought it might be fun in a room full of improv artists (narcissistic) in New York (neurotic), creating some fresh anxiety! Instead I find out how cool they all think it is that I get paid to help people (most of them are volunteering time and helping do 'charity' work). So much for identifying any anxious narcissistic neurotics...maybe I was projecting....
Anyway! As we went around the room, we had to say what our favorite sketch show is and our favorite sketch. When Erica (no...I bet that's EriKa, with a 'K') said that she liked "really old Saturday Night Live sketches" I worried...how much older am I than these people?
So...any guesses to what my pick was favorite sketch show...come one! Monty Python! And my favorite sketch (click on the archives button on the right-hand side panel if you can't recall...8/15/07 -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMOmB1q8W4Y ) - The Job Interview! Thankfully, Charlie, our instructor, loves Monty and knew the sketch. But I got to act some of it out - which was a big hit! 'I want to be A LION TAMER! I have a hat! it LIGHTS UP!'
Talk about life coming full circle, huh? When I started my leave I had that odd experience of waking in the middle of the night and having a Monty Python review on. And then the job interview sketch played and I thought for sure I was going to hear God's voiceover saying, "listen Sandra...listen, and learn".
Anywho! I learned all sorts of cool Sketch terminology last night (game, heightening, beats, blows and buttons...sounds a little S&Mish) and we did a read-through. It's interesting to observe all these young folk. Bless their little hearts, they were trying so hard. But they were trying so hard to be funny, they got weird and abstract...and their short life-experience surfaced.
For instance, Charlie gave us the topic "Christmas morning" and asked someone to tell a story that we could use to frame a sketch. So we get the story of a guy who plays drinking games on Christmas Eve, gets drunk, ends up at IHop at 5am Christmas morning, trying to get sober enough to go open presents at his parent's house at 9am.
Huh? I'm not sure I see any humor. And the class sure struggled. I suggested we could focus on the IHop and play with the idea of where Santa goes for breakfast after he gets off of work. I probably pushed it when I suggested he walk into IHop with 208 midget illegal immigrants....But Stephanie, who sat across from me...she gets it. Her mind is sharp! She suggested we see the Anti-Claus, how Santa is just really a hard working blue-collar SOB with a big belly. Oh wait...did Billy Bob Thorton do a movie like that about a year ago? Oh well....
Then we did small group work (L&D team - I think you would have liked Charlie's teaching style, aside from the profanity! Class included some lecture, big group discussion, watching a couple of DVD sketches and discussing, small group work, and a break!). My partner was Todd. He's been writing sketches "for something, like, uh, wow, like, twenty years or something like that". I think he's 22.
Anyway! Charlie gave us some starters and one was "the office party". So Todd has a memory of going to his first office party, about 2 weeks after he started his job, and getting "totally shit-faced" (do we see a theme here?) and leaving "this nice lady's house" and going to a bar and finding a glove. Then he wore the glove the rest of the night.
That was it. Funny, wasn't it? NOT! Maybe when you're drunk, but...I did my best to help Todd develop a sketch from that experience. I used my psychotherapist experience (I'm not ready to share that about myself, yet!) and got him to focus on the aspect of going to a party and wanting to feel unique, and doing so by being slightly bizarre, only to find out that everyone in the party is just like you!
Me...I liked the Buffet Breakfast idea. People do some strange things at buffets, have you ever noticed? Anyway, thegist is that a family of four from some foreign land comes into the buffet and want very hard to fit into American Culture. The buffet they've happened upon is a pre-big Friday night football game buffet, so there are cheerleaders in the dining room, banners, everyone's dressed in school colors and yelling...getting psyched for the game.
The father says to the waitress, "we are here for the All-You-Must-Eat dinner." The family seems to have deduced that this is a competitive eating event (how American!).
After starting with small, "European portion" plates, the family sees how everyone around them is piling food on their plate, coming back to tables with 2 or 3 plates, etc. They begin to worry that they are 'losing' the event.
So they make return trips to the buffet, first taking the entire container of food, then stealing one of the carts used to pick up dirty plates, and piling food on that. The panic increases as everyone else in the restaurant finishes and starts to leave for the game. They don't want to be last!
The ending is that they are the last in the restaurant and realize that they have "lost the contest - we can no make good Americans". They are surrounded by all this food and then the waitress drags in a big refrigerator box "for the leftovers".
Ok...it's that or the lady on the airplane who comes on with her husband and her hat box - and puts her husband in the overhead bin and gives the seat to the hat box!
We'll see...my biggest challenge is that I love physical comedy, so to get my characters to stand still and just be funny using words will be a push. But this is going to be great and will help immensely in some personal development areas, such as presenting my ideas, dealing with conflict, and assertiveness (note to my 'coaches'!).
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