Skip Navigation

shout

Cujokra: Comedy Sports

March 9, 2010 at 10:10 am
By Margaret Taylor '10

Cujokra gave winter term one last hurrah last weekend so we students could enjoy some hilarity before bunkering down for finals.  The theme for their 9th weekend improv-off: Comedy Sports.  The two teams, the “Sweat Panthers” (in athletic sweats), and the “Thunder Thighs” (black tights with lightning bolts) pretended to be at each others’ throats all evening and only the referee could hold them back.

Said referee handed out scraps of paper to the audience members before the show started and asked them to write down common aphorisms.  She then collected the papers and put them in a baseball cap, for reasons that remained mysterious.  Comedy Sports is a sport, so it was necessary to go over the rules before the games could begin.  “There are rules, but they’re unclear, and I decide them,” said the referee.

Cujokra kicked things off with the game, “Sure Thing.”  Two members of the Sweat Panthers went on stage and had to extemporize on a theme that was given to them, which was “Australia.”  Any time the referee felt like it, she could blow her whistle to make them change their line.  The skit turned into a bizarre meditation on penal colonies and Margaret Thatcher.

Other old favorites followed like “Changing Genres,” “Sit, Stand, Lie,” and “Just Like That,” where volunteers from the audience got to direct the improvisers’ limbs, and the improvisers had to ad-lib lines to go along with them.  That was the Thunder Thighs’ job, and they wound up as a pair of ballet dancers hitting on each other.  Each team got an arbitrary amount of points for their performances.

“Lines from a Pocket” finally brought out those scraps of paper collected at the beginning of the show.  The audience suggested the theme of “cupcakes,” so Cujokra gave us a rendition of two students in a cooking class discussing some homework they turned in with their professor.  They had to incorporate the lines on the scraps of paper into their dialogue and make it make sense.  The result?  “You know what I always say?  Gray tickle-muffin monster.”

The competition, of course, resulted in a tie, because Cujokra always arranges the scoring so this will happen.  A tie calls for a tiebreaker session of “Sideline Debate,” with both teams up on stage.  One representative from each team left the room, then the referee took suggestions from the audience on what the teams should debate about.  We settled on that age-old question, whether moist pterodactyls should always or never swagger pleasuring pineapples.  The representatives returned to debate without knowing what their thesis was.  Their teammates got to mime clues to them.  Hilarity ensued, and ultimately team Thunder Thighs won the evening hands down.