Lani Schwalbe Anchorage Press

Have you ever tried to describe a color to someone who’s never seen it? First you compare it to another color – "it’s kind of a blue" – and then you try to do justice to the nuances – "but it sort of has a warmish quality" – and then you give up: "You just have to see it."

That’s something like trying to describe live comedy improv to someone who’s never seen it. Improv is like the ABC show "Whose Line is it Anyway?" but live improv has a heightened intensity, a voyeuristic glee that comes from watching comedy without a net. You just have to see it – and luckily, locally, you can. Anchorage may not have Dunkin’ Donuts, Victoria’s Secret or Red Lobster, but we do have a comedy improv troupe, and after seeing Scared Scriptless perform, I’d say we’ve got the better part of the deal.

Just before 10 p.m. on the second Saturday of every month, when you’d expect a playhouse to be winding down for the night, Cyrano’s, downtown on D Street, swells with patrons. They gather at the bar, they get a Chardonnay or a cappuccino, they enjoy one of Ron Holmstrom’s famous cookies (peddled on the premise that they’re health food because they contain all four food groups, which worked for me. But then, I’m a sucker for marketing.) The audience gradually filters into the theatre, which has been emptied of everything except a table and a group of people dressed in black. The actors greet patrons at the door, joking about hair, clothes, the President, Mentos, whatever. They’re limbering up, doing humor stretches.

It’s a muscle they’ll need. Improv, of course, is short for "improvisational." Which means no script. Minimal planning. A troupe member asks the audience for situations, occupations, locations; all depends on whatever the audience throws out. The actors have to make it funny:

"Microbiologist!"

"Minsk!"

"Waiting at a bus stop!"

I’ve done improv before, and the only thing harder is giving birth. You tend to fall back on stereotypes – sex jokes, gay jokes; if you’re in Anchorage, Spenard jokes. There are deer-in-the-headlights and man-I’m-on-fire moments. Sometimes it’s hilarious, sometimes it’s not. You can’t always blame the bad moments on the troupe, though. The audience can be as much at fault, since it’s the audience that gives much of the direction. They’re given slips of paper on which they write favorite quotes, which later become dialogue in a skit – at the show I saw, poor Christina Webber had to wring humor from "Channel 2 doesn’t have a monkey." In another skit, two audience members are pulled onto the stage, where they’re responsible for finishing the sentences of the actors in the scene. The show becomes a collaborative effort; everyone’s in the lifeboat together. If you don’t want to pick up an oar and row, you can sit in the back, but you probably won’t have as much fun.

The skits with props are probably the hardest, both to perform and to watch. In a timed event, teams of two are given a handful of props to use as anything but what they actually are. Umbrellas become fountains. Colanders become space helmets. Anything even remotely phallic will eventually become a penis. Then, as the intensity rises and the teams struggle for something, anything, to make of a pink feather boa, something clicks. The electricity of live theatre crackles through the room. And it’s damn funny.

The Scared Scriptless cast – Webber, Jason Martin, Ross Emerson, Tim Driscoll, Morgan Hobkirk, Lou Nathanson and Randall Peck – are more often funny than not. And even when the jokes are stereotyped – the profoundly overdone limp-wristed-homosexual-with-a-lisp comes to mind – there’s still something fascinating and engaging about the experience. It’s rugby for wise-asses, a comedic train wreck. You have no idea what you’re going to get and neither do the actors. An evening of improv will likely produce as many cringe-inducing moments as flashes of brilliance, but there’s a luminance to the transcendent moments that shines on the rest, making even the groaners worth a chuckle.

The Scared Scriptless troupe elicited more belly laughs than polite twitters when I saw them last month. They flew and tumbled as toilet-enthralled super heroes and kissin’ cousins in the prison yard. They were teachers, lingerie salesmen, incontinent partygoers and security guards. They made jokes out of tampons, audience members, and each other. Nothing was sacred. Everything was funny, even when it wasn’t – and that, my friends, takes talent.

Scared Scriptless beats the dinner-and-a-movie routine any day of the week. Unfortunately, you’ve only got one Saturday a month to catch the show, so get thee to Cyrano’s. Have a glass of wine and a cookie – and tell ‘em the Press sent you.