"On Thunderdome" or "I Take Improv Way Too Seriously"

Holy Cow! competed in Improv Thunderdome last night and so many things were going on that it's hard to wrap my brain around exactly what went down. First of all, Holy Cow! is a short-form improv comedy troupe, and Thunderdome participants thus far have all been long-form groups. The forums at City3.org would be a good place to find out exactly what kind of people we were up against. There was a group called Scriptease and a group called Kill the DJ. Scriptease had 3 guys and Kill the DJ had 4 guys. My troupe had 8 people (4 guys, 4 girls). Go figure. Improv comedy is dominated by guys, even though the most talked about improv personality in Kansas City media is Trish Berrong. Kill the DJ won (by audience vote) and the running bit they used was a guy pretending to be a girl by talking in a high voice and using his fists under his shirt as boobs. It was funny, but they wouldn't let it die (which, you could argue, is funny in some ways). The guys from Scriptease disappointed me. I saw them once before in the Kansas City Improv Festival. I was talking to one of their members before the show and he was saying things like, "We're all pretty tired tonight," and "I'm just not feeling it." I told him not to make excuses for his performance before he even went up there. He kind of blew me off, and then his team didn't win. Well, no surprise. It didn't even seem like he wanted to be there. Afterwards, I shook his hand and told him his group had some really good stuff happening up there, and he blew off my compliments, too! I wasn't trying to blow sunshine up his ass. I was mostly really bored during the performance. I'm not up-to-date on long-form improv lingo, but I'm trying to learn. I think they were doing something called a La Ronde and Living Room. Basically they get one suggestion from the audience for a theme, sit around and talk about it for a while to generate ideas, and then they stand up and play one of the ideas. I feel like they just threw away some of their best ideas and went with some poor choices. There was a major lack of energy, too, which was passed onto the audience and encouraged through the format. After they played out an idea, they sat back down again and generated more ideas. I'm not sure why they had to sit back down again. It seemed that they could keep going using new ideas generated through the scene. I'm interested to see Scriptease try a different format. The guys from Kill the DJ did all right, but as I mentioned before, the bit with the secretary boobs character got really old. I'm very new to the improv scene in Kansas City (outside of Holy Cow!) but it doesn't take much to realize that these groups are NOT into short-form and they have a "we're-too-good-to-do-that-cutesy-stuff" attitude. Their arguments are that long-form allows for more scene work (well, duh, you have more time) and more character work. And it's "not about being funny" and "it's more of a risk" and there's "no gimmicks, no games, just straight-up improv". Well, I'm sorry, but secretary boobs was a gimmick. It's just known that if a guy pretends to be a girl it's going to be funny. And it was. But there wasn't really any depth to the character, and the player doing the character was visibly tired of it and wanted a chance to try something new, but his teammates wouldn't let it "die". Literally, the player begged to be killed. On the other hand, when we played a group game at the end (FreezeTag but I know it as Switch) he brought back his boobs secretary character and it was hilarious. It's too bad the ultimate payoff happened in the group game instead of their set, but if you look at the entire night as one big show, it was a successful move. We were the last to perform and I was told we were going to have 25-30 minutes but we absolutely would be cut at thirty. I set my alarm on my phone to go off at 25 minutes and I did that exactly as we were being introduced. With short form, time is everything, and I specifically planned a show to go about 25-30 minutes. The lights went down on us at 23 minutes, and we had to cut our last game. My alarm hadn't even gone off yet, and I never saw the signal from the man in the booth. I was disappointed because we didn't get to finish strong. We did good, but it definitely wasn't our best performance. Gibberish murder sucked. The audience suggestions were way too easy (Library, Hypnotherapist, Sausage) and I wish I would have led the audience to give us something more complicated by saying something like, "I need a location, somewhere humans can't physically go," or something. It wasn't impressive that we were able to get "Library". Bum on the street can act out "Library". And our gibberish turned into sound effects, which were already being done by the guy in the soundbooth, which is something I'm not used to. A lot of these people performed with ComedySportz or ComedyCity and they are used to the sound effects being provided over the mic by the guy in the booth. I appreciated it and if we get a chance to do this again, I'll know that I don't have to provide sound. We were the only group to really involve the audience, and I think the audience was kind of weirded out. I had to basically beg two volunteers to come up and do Movable Bodies. It was bizarre. I could have done so much better as an MC as well. We did styles and thank GOD I said, "Give me a fairytale, something like Cinderella" or I KNOW we would've gotten Cinderella. But the styles we got were "Western" (I should've asked for something else -- it's SO overdone) and "Opera" (also overdone but at least it wasn't musical) and Horror (overdone but we were saved by soundbooth guy Clay because he added lighting effects for us which totally added something extra to the scene that we don't get with our shows at Rockhurst). At the afterparty at McCoy's, people were able to mill about and get to know each other. I got a lot of "Your show was really fun" which translated to "That was really cute. Nice try," but maybe I'm too critical. I said things like, "Your format was really interesting." "Interesting" and "fun" are so non-specific that they really mean something else, if you know was I'm saying. This is not to say that I wasn't having a great time talking to people. We even booked a show with the guys from Scriptease in March. These improv people are definitely people I want to get to know better! I want to get into their brains and talk theory and critique and I want to be a part of the group that makes Kansas City stand out for excellent improv. I'm tired of people running off to Chicago to learn "true improv". We've got tremendous talent right here in KC! I'm up against an ocean of long-form (which I appreciate and love!) but I feel that short-form is just thrown out all together as a respected form of improv. I don't know if I have to scream from the top of Bartle Hall that I'm NOT imitating "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" and I have been properly trained how to play the games. I guess the proof will come with more performances. I'm excited that Holy Cow! has been thrown in to shake things up a bit. It's going to be an awesome year for improv in Kansas City. Are you ready?