Funny Zone

Carlynn Sievers of Peculiar, Missouri, is a family physician. Adam Sievers is a chemical engineer. Bob Pritchett works at a Home Depot in the metro area. Steven Jones is in law school. Stasha Case works 9-to-5 with a financial planning firm.

What makes these disparate folks a similar breed is their love of funny business — improvisational comedy. Though the Sieverses and Pritchett are in the workshop phase of their training and Jones and Case are veterans, they are unanimously in thrall to an art form that’s loose, quick and visceral — the theatrical equivalent of a trapeze act without a net.

Kansas City’s improvisational comedy scene has ebbed and flowed through the years; the popular Lighten Up and Laughing Stock, for example, are now shuttered. Current venues include the fourteen-year-old ComedyCity (née ComedySportz), the younger, cruder Full Frontal Comedy and the newborn Wit Pending. What distinguishes them from each other — and there is a noticeable difference — is less significant than what makes them cuts from the same crazy quilt.

ComedyCity is the least profane. Improvisers who go beyond the double entendre are punished with a brown paper bag placed over their heads. (So are audience members, like the guy at a recent show who earned one for suggesting as an improv topic “ménage à trois.”) “We’re very proud of that,” says Comedy City’s Linda Williams of the group’s propriety. “It gives us more opportunities to do corporate work or church groups. But you can still play around with innuendo and subtleties that the adults can enjoy one way and the kids another.”

Comedy City performer Jones says, in fact, that “innuendo is the most fun.” Asked if he has to bite his tongue to quell the occasional gutturalism, he adds, “All the time.”

By contrast, Full Frontal is a slatternly shipyard whore. “We don’t go out of our way to be dirty,” says its founder and director, Tina Anderman, “but we don’t go out of our way to censor ourselves either.”

At a Full Frontal Comedy workshop last week, the company — including Case, Anderman and ten others — went through a series of practice games that included several f-bombs that never seemed gratuitous. The improvisers also worked into their banter double-headed dildos and anal sex.

Jake Walker says he places his company, Wit-Pending, between ComedyCity’s G-rating and Full Frontal’s hard R. “I don’t discourage raunchiness because if you put a limit on an improviser’s creativity, you can’t go as far as you need to go,” he says.

Walker began Wit Pending in March. “I was doing a community theater show and got so frustrated, I produced a one-man improv show,” he says. Last month’s Blankmen at Westport Coffeehouse was the troupe’s third show in its short life. (Wit’s co-founder, Erin Morely, is already estranged from the troupe; the industry seems to have a lot of turnover.) The five-man company suavely accommodated into its games such audience suggestions as brooms, Nazis, pineapples, lawyers and crotchless panties.

Many improvisers are actors. Case, for example, made a memorable Hop Sing in Late Night Theatre’s all-female Bonanza, and Jones’ Boris in the Coterie’s Rocky and Bullwinkle yielded much praise. It seems that someone good at improv can make a fine actor, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

“Some actors are terrified of improv,” says Anderman “They’ll say, ‘I need a script.’ But improv can only make an actor better because it teaches you to think on your feet. And it teaches how to risk and not be afraid. Anything can happen on stage. Improv helps you prepare.”

Jones agrees. “Comparing acting, where you are directed, and improv, where you are the director, the actor, the writer and more, improv has really opened my mind,” he says.

Improvisational comedy is aggressively interactive, dependent as it is on audience suggestions. At Full Frontal’s workshop, a suggestion for a situation involving a congresswoman and an intern ended with the tag line “Don’t forget to vote” only after becoming a spaghetti Western, an opera, a rap composition and an episode of something broadcast by cable’s Animal Planet channel.

“And when we play it in performance, we always get the suggestion ‘porn,'” Anderman says. “We ask them to get more specific, though: Swedish porn? Eighties porn?”