The 2013 Milwaukee Comedy Festival closed-out yesterday with yet another Teen Comedy Show. The show has gone through many transformations over the many years the festival has been around. This particular time around, the show consisted exclusively of improv.
There were four acts that performed on the show, which happened yesterday at 2pm. I was actually pretty relieved to see them, because I was beginning to worry about the narrowing of my appreciation for improv.
A little bit of background: back in the early '90s, I loved stand-up comedy. And so I watched a lot of Comedy Central, which back then was almost exclusively stand-up comedy. Now I hate stand-up comedy and only really like one currently practicing contemporary stand-up, (Dylan Moran.) So my appreciation has shrunk considerably.
This year at the festival I didn't laugh at any improv going into Sunday. I really love T.I.M.: The Improvised Musical, but that's it. I really don't seem to like any other improv I've seen. And so it was seeing the teen comedy show this year. Because prior to this, I hadn't actually laughed all that much at the festival . . . at all . . .
I guess I didn't really realize until I saw a few different teen comedy teams that improv comedy really is the natural domain of someone who is somewhere between childhood and adulthood. I feel that improv requires a playfulness that looks awkward on most adults and a sophistication not given to most children. So it fits teens a lot more comfortably than it fits anyone else.
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I suppose that it helps quite a bit that most of the teams involved in the Teen Comedy Show were the products of classes taught by Patrick Schmitz through First Stage Children's Theatre. The local comedy guy has great instincts for improv. Kids learning from him would tend to pick-up on those instincts and learn it for themselves. And I've been to enough teen improv over the years at Comedy Fest that I'm ready for competitive improv to become the next major cultural phenomena.
Prep and College sports are so passé. And there's way too much money going into the pockets of college coaches. (Most of the highest paid state employees are university athletics coaches if I'm not mistaken.) So let's shake things up, right? Let's have competitive improv on the college level. There's no room for questions about performance enhancing drugs and since the competition requires a large base of knowledge, the competition is much more integrated with the rest of the academic disciplines anyway…and it's not like it wouldn't be of interest to the general public. We've had America's Got Talent and American Idol and Last Comic Standing. . . competitive collegiate improv could be televised. There would be a real audience for this sort of thing. Patrick Schmitz should get on this . . . I think there's real money in it if it takes off. . .
Anyway . . . always fun seeing a teen comedy show. You'll see other improv actors from comedy fest around occasionally popping up in other shows at various places, but the Teen Comedy Improv kids only really come around once per year. I found myself having thoughts roll through my head like: "Oh it's the tall girl! She's funny." Don't know who any of them are, but I know enough to have remembered that there are people going through Schmitz's program every year who are talented enough to make an impression.
The Milwaukee Comedy Fest was one weekend only this year. For more information about upcoming comedy events, visit Milwaukee Comedy.com
For more information on the imrpov program and other classes at First Stage, visit them online.
