Laughter filled the room as ComedySportz members senior Sam Campbell and sophomore Austin Volk acted on stage. Letting the flow of the scene guide them, they listened intently to their student leader’s instructions while deciding how to shape the story.
“It’s an environment for me to let loose,” junior Ameen Saleh said. “It allows me to crack some jokes, have a conversation with people I enjoy and create. It allows me to go wild with my imagination, which is key.”
ComedySportz is an improv competition team that meets every Tuesday after school. During meetings, they develop their performance skills and play games, which involve acting out scenes based on a single prompt. The team’s student leader critiques the members’ performances and prepares them for competitions.
The popular game show “Whose Line Is It Anyway” is the basis for competitions in ComedySportz, where the contestants play a series of games under different categories. The team’s first competition is Game Con this fall.
“Game Con is super cool because there’s just a bunch of people there with the same interests as you,” Volk said. “It’s fun watching people play the games for the first time. The unintentional mistakes make it pretty funny.”
Their usual adviser, science teacher Evan Dagger, is currently on leave, so English teacher and former ComedySportz member Jessica Wong is their temporary adviser. Her main priority is to ensure the students can cooperate well, which is important for success at competitions.
“They really have to rely on each other,” Wong said. “When you’re up on stage and you throw out a suggestion and get shut down, the scene isn’t really going to go anywhere, and it’s not going to make sense for the audience. Having the team members trust each other to play these different games and make it really funny for the audience is one of the biggest points of it.”
In the future, the team plans to compete at away games against other schools’ ComedySportz teams. In addition, Wong hopes that the team will be able to have several shows of their own hosted at TCHS, gain exposure and recruit new members.
The idea of improv may seem scary to many students, but members do their best to make it a safe space for everyone.
“The people there are always great, we get new faces every year and it’s always fun to learn and teach them new things,” Saleh said. “Even as a returning member I always learn new things every year. It’s always an amazing experience.”
TCHS School Newspaper