Clown Parade Improv Festival A 'Creativity Love Fest'

Author: Erich Kahner

The Otter Nonsense Players hosted the First Annual Clown Parade last weekend at Middlebury College. Improvisational comedy groups from six colleges, along with four professional improv comics and one adult group, participated in the two-day comedy festival.
The event coordinators, Ben LaBolt '03 and Toby Lawless '03, came up with the idea for the Clown Parade after attending similar festivals around the northeast.
"With this year being the seniors' last, we wanted to take part in a comedy festival at home and in the process establish something at Middlebury that may last a while," said LaBolt.
He expanded on the Clown Parade's purpose, "Basically it's just a creativity love-fest. Aside from the performances at night, we attend workshops and learn from each other during the day."
The first round of performances took place Friday night in Dana Auditorium. TheatreSports, from the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H. - or, what one member called, "the armpit of New England" - was the first team to take the stage.
They performed several skits, starting off with a game of "Oh Sir Walter Please Do Not Touch Me There" and ending on a spoof of the penultimate scene of the Eminem film "8 Mile," in which members of TheatreSports exchanged insults in a rap-off.
Stupid Broken Children, a group of post-college age comedians from Portsmouth, N.H., performed next, followed by Combo Za of Williams College. A mock movie review marked Combo Za's routine.
The gist of the fictional movie, "Running with Scissors," was revealed in a series of acted out clips: two kindergarteners are involved in a murderous plot to capture the teacher's favor and the coveted "gold star."
Skidmore's Ad-Libs provided Friday's finale. They won the loudest applause on the evening.
Their first act, performed with the Nutcracker Suite chiming in the background, involved an innocent country girl waiting at a train station.
The girl danced around stage among abandoned suitcases until she opened one and was stunned when a dead body rolled out.
Julia Langbein, a senior member of Columbia University's improv group, Six Milks, attended Friday's show. "Festivals like this provide us with a chance to keep us in touch with what's objectively funny, rather than what is just funny to us," commented Langbein.
The following night in McCullough, Langbein proved she could get some laughs outside of the Columbia community.
Her portrayal of a high-strung, malnourished vegetarian teenager whose first taste of deer flesh turns her into a bloodthirsty hunter established Langbein and the Six Milks as a crowd favorite. Purple Crayon, the large group from Yale University, preceded Six Milks.
Paul Dome '00, Zabeth Russell of ImprovBoston, Steve Waltien '00.5 and Bill Arnett of Chicago-based ImprovOlympic added a professional touch to the Clown Parade.
At one point in the evening, Dome and Waltien joined forces as a married couple and relived their days as Otter teammates.
Middlebury's Otter Nonsense took the stage for the final act of the Clown Parade.
The skit, "When a Crime Becomes a Date," won loud applause. In the piece, a zealous poacher and a lisping zoo animal plan their future after the two meet while the poacher hunts in the zoo. After the Otters finished, nearly all the 80 participants in the Clown Parade crowded the stage to provide closure on the weekend's events with, what LaBolt called, "the biggest game of Freeze ever."