Serious Club debut: improv-a-thon

One of the night’s first games was “Celebrity Café.” Serious Club members Daniel Lockley (’10), Azalea Ebbay (’10), and Benjamin Bateman (’09) took turns running on and off the stage as members of the audience shouted out absurd identities for each member to play: Bono (Bateman), Jesus (Ebbay), and Frodo Baggins (Lockley). The conceit of the game was that none of the actors knew who he/she was playing, and had to ascertain their own identity via clues given by the other players.

“How’s your Dad?” Frodo asked Jesus.

“What happened to your hands?” Bono asked Jesus.

“What’s that ring on your hand?” Jesus asked Frodo.

“I guess we’ve both been stabbed,” Frodo said sympathetically to Jesus.

Although “Celebrity Café” was one of the most successful games of the night, the game “1, 30, 15, 5,” was also a crowd-pleaser, as four members acted out a scene in a minute, then thirty seconds, fifteen seconds and finally, five seconds, by which time entire sentences had been condensed to syllables, and one character went from calmly cooking dinner to hitting another player with a frying pan in less than a second.

“Knowing we were being watched, judged, and potentially ridiculed in the dark corners of the Trail Room made us all stay on our toes,” said Lockley.

In “Channel Changer,” four rotating members played a sequence of rapidly changing channels, shouted by the audience, including the Oxygen channel, the DIY channel, and Wolf Blitzer. In another, “Death of a Salesmen,” four members competed to “sell” a difficult item. Someone in the audience shouted, “pet rock!” When Bateman managed to out-sell Serious Club founder Brad Jonas (’10) in the game’s final moments, Jonas immediately fell to the ground, his arms flopping.

“[The show] exceeded my expectations in every which way. I had remarkably low expectations though.  The way I pictured it in my head was just us performing for a mule and a guy with a trombone that would play the ‘Waa waaaa’ sound after every joke,” said Jonas, the self-proclaimed leader and “iron-fisted dictator” of the Serious Club, which began last spring when Jonas tabled at the Activities Fair.

“People foolishly wrote their names and e-mails down and we started meeting on Friday afternoons and playing games in Council Chambers,” Jonas said. “[The club was] just my friends at first, but it has slowly grown to encompass enemies, acquaintances, and neutral parties as well, and is in the process of becoming officially chartered and budgeted right now.”

Turnout at the show—the club’s first widely-publicized on-campus event since their founding last year—impressed all of the Serious Club’s members.

“The turnout was amazing! I’m glad to see so many people interested in hilarity and willing to support a rag-tag bunch of kids known as the Serious Club. I believe we were all on top of our respective games. The lights, stage, [and] laughs really fostered that,” said Raleigh Overlie (’09).

Future plans for the club include another improv show at the end of March, a possible event with the Juggling Club sometime in April, and hopefully a final show closer to the end of the year.

“We should get mics next time because I was told that some people in the back couldn’t hear the humor spilling forth from our quieter members’ mouths over the sounds of so much boisterous laughter,” said Jonas.

The Serious Club meets Fridays at 4:30 in Council Chambers.