By Cathalena E. Burch
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona
Published: 10.21.2007
Anything goes in improv.
Take Saturday's performance of Whose Live Anyway? at the Rialto Theatre.
Sure, you had your complement of audience members clamoring onstage to join in the fun — and what fun they had.
There were the requisite audience shoutouts for sketch ideas — desert hookers and porn were hugely popular, and soundly rejected.
Then there was the bug.
It crawled up Chip Esten's back apparently from just above his butt, and made its way to his shoulder and down his chest before fellow improvateur Ryan Stiles swatted it away.
Like the Grand Poobah of improvisation that he is, Stiles incorporated the bug into the sketch.
So much so that Esten begged the question afterward: "There was a bug on me?"
"There was a huge cockaroach," Stiles told him, and his fellow comedians Greg Proops and Jeff Davis nodded in agreement.
OK, it wasn't a cockroach; it was more like a moth, or one of its distant relatives.
But the ease with which it became a character in the action was so fluid that it earned the troupe laughter and respectful applause.
"That's why they call it improv because (expletive) happens," Proops said.
He wasn't referring to the bug, mind you. He made his comments a few minutes earlier when his microphone kept fading in and out, harkening back to the mic mishaps he experienced with Drew Carey's improv show here two years ago.
It is hard to pinpoint the funniest moment from Saturday's 90-minute nearly sold-out show, one of three in Arizona and one of only a handful the foursome do each year. Some highlights:
● Stiles and Davis were buckle-over funny in the "new choice" Hot Dog Heaven game. The game includes a third cast member's shouting out for a new storyline in mid-sentence. So what started out as a manager checking in on a hotdog maker turned into a macabre and funny scene that included a "Luke, I'm your father" moment followed by the closing bloody woodchipping scene from "Fargo" in which father and son jump into the meat grinder. The skit was so funny that Esten, calling out for the new choices, fell over laughing.
● Poor Brenda, who works at a furniture store and lives in a cabin. She probably didn't expect that she would spend part of the night being serenaded opera style by Davis and Esten, or that Davis would muss her hair not once but three times.
● Other audience participation included Christine and Jeff, providing not so effective sound effects for biker dudes Stiles and Proops. The humor came when Christine provided a feminine but realistic sound of a motorcycle and barked like a dog when she meant to squeal like a pig.
Esten and Davis also proved to be fine singers, whether doing a country song about a girl who doesn't want to touch their meat (they're butchers and she's a vegetarian!) to a doo-wop ditty about a rump to roast.
Don't ask.
