It's Sunday night. All the work that you should have been doing all weekend now stares you in the face and you'll do anything to ignore it. You can't stay in your room because you've watched all of this week's online clips of The Daily Show (twice) and your roommate is making you feel guilty by actually being productive. There's nothing happening on campus, and even if there was, you spent the remains of your weekly ATM withdrawal on your Mask & Wig ticket last night. If only there was one more way you could procrastinate, something cheap and fun.
You're in luck. Every Sunday night, Penn's improvisational comedy group Without a Net puts on a one-hour FREE show. What's great about Without a Net is that every show is completely original, and anything can happen. Throughout the hour-long show, the group, consisting of about 10 students, enacts a series of scenarios in which they invent characters and dialogue on the spot. The resulting comedy is due to the utter abnormality of the situations, such as a cast member having to act as a schizophrenic whose alter-ego is a fish. If it sounds weird on paper, it's that much funnier to watch.
What really earns the audience's applause is the ability of the improv members to think on their feet in a witty and humorous manner. Each game relies on Mad Libs style suggestions from the audience for anything from a non-geographic location (airplane) to a historical period (Civil War) that set the stage for the new game. The games get tricky when they involve rules such as restricting what the cast can say to words that all start with the same letter of the alphabet (such as J) while staying within a certain theme (such as Chemistry). The more complicated the games, the more entertaining the show.
As Without a Net's Director John Swierk puts it, "I think what makes improv fun for the audience is that it's so spur of the moment and so audience inclusive. It's all about being in the moment and sharing some big joke between the audience and the performers." So next time you're dying for anything to do besides your Art History reading or Chemistry problem set -- or if you're just in the mood for a few good laughs -- head over to Without a Net's next show, and be ready to offer up some quirky people, places and things.
