Comedy Central

The only thing predictable in an Otter Nonsense show is laughter--plenty of it

Ben LaBolt '03 has traveled to Burlington to shower in front of a crowd. No, he's not an exhibitionist, at least not in that way. He's fully clothed; the water cascading over his body is imaginary.

While most of Middlebury is deep into books and finals on this May afternoon, four members of Otter Nonsense, the College's comedy improv troupe, are at UVM teaching high school students about improvisational comedy.

"We're all kinda crazed; we're all kinda stupid," LaBolt confesses to the teens who are attending the Young Play-wrights Festival. LaBolt is hoping to encourage them to cast off their inhibitions, and they don't take much urging to join a wild warm-up, yelling "shoo shoo wah" at the top of their lungs while running around like chickens.

When the bedlam dies down, the Otters ask for a location. "A bathroom!" yells someone. Another adds, "On a yacht!" And that's how LaBolt, a political science major and co-leader of Otter Nonsense, has ended up lathering himself on stage, demanding a towel from his cringing servant, played by Toby Lawless '03.

They are setting up one of the classic Otter bits, a short sketch known as Three Scenes, in which an improvisational scene is recreated in very different styles. After Lawless and LaBolt have set up the scene between rich yachtsman and servant, a genre shift is elicited from the audience: "Kung Fu movie," someone shouts.

Immediately LaBolt's latherings become complicated shower-based sword twirlings along with requisite grunts and shouts. Lawless provides towels with the same martial arts joustings, and after he speaks his lines, he continues silently mouthing dialogue with tortured grimaces, introducing the hilarious bad dubbing that these movies are known for. The audience howls with laughter.

For the last of the scene shifts, someone has called out "Dr. Seuss" and suddenly, unbelievably, the Otters speak entirely in verse to each other —verse with a recognizable, characteristic Dr. Seuss singsong. The teachers who have brought the high school students here clap and laugh and look at each other, astonished by this spontaneous eruption into poetry. Some of the rhyme is gibberish, but most is funny, appropriate dialogue for the scene unfolding in the bathroom of a yacht. "Amazing!" one exclaims.

It is amazing. Amazing that they can receive any prompt and spontaneously turn it into a full-fledged comic scene. Amazing that they can so predictably take the unpredictable and run with it. That's where the fun is, of course, and it's where it all began.

Otter Nonsense was born in 1991, when Gene Swift '94 and Matthew Lane '94 decided Middlebury needed some laughs and they needed an outlet for their humor. The pioneer Otters, Mark Feldman '94, Kelly Cole '94, Stephanie Tucker '94, and others, put on their first show that fall to a standing-room-only crowd at McCullough. Among that crowd was Rodney Rothman '95, who saw the show during his first semester at Middlebury and was immediately smitten.

"They drew 500 people to McCullough and totally blew everyone away," says Rothman. "They were having a great time. Nobody was censoring them. Up until then, cracking jokes had done nothing but get me in trouble. There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to be a part of it."

Of course, good humor—and laughter—doesn't always come easily.

"I like to call improv comedy the extreme sport of the art world," Claire Wyckoff '04 says of the intense nature of the job. "And I think that attracted me to it—the living in the moment, the rush and the fear, but you can take comfort in the fact that you can't create expectations for what has yet to be explored."

Lawless attempts to explain the state of mind necessary to accomplish improvisational comedy. "If you take anything from this at all," he tells beginners, "remember this: Say yes. Your immediate instincts are to say no. But say yes."

It's a delicate balance, this saying yes to your partners on stage. It means following a lead, being unselfish, going with the flow. Saying yes means really listening to your fellow Otters as they create character and situation.

"If you make a person look good on stage they'll make you good," says Lawless. "It's about working together."Yet the Otters do more than work together. Most are friends, many are roommates. Creating a strong group takes care and attention, and for that reason there are Otter sleepovers, Otter field trips, Otter dinners. They cover each other's backs on stage and off. The kind of friendship and trust the Otters establish allows them to be open to each other, mentally agile, and in sync on stage.

Otters arrive at McCullough for their final Sunday evening performance of the 2002–03 year. While Lawless and Dave Heyman '03 discuss rhyming, Meredith Steele '04 riffs on the piano. An improvisational comic pianist, Steele is a rare breed, even in improv. With the Otters, she's learned how to musically catch the comic thread that is unrolling on stage, and when the timing is just right, she can, with her piano cues, nudge the players into song.

McCullough begins filling up for the 10:30 show. The audience is eager to laugh, eager to release some exam-week stress, and the Otters don't disappoint.

The last skit of the night turns out to be a showstopper when a prompt from the crowd produces a scene which evolves into a full-scale musical production. It was totally impromptu, Lawless says later that evening. "None of the Otters knew it was going to happen, but they all committed to it. It ended up being a great way to close the show."

The prompt "wear deodorant" has been picked up by Lawless, who, in a thick accent, asks Heyman, "Where deodorant?"

Heyman is annoyed by the simple-minded Lawless and, on the spot, decides he must be a foreigner in more ways than one. Heyman declares that he has chiseled Lawless out of a block of ice. Lawless runs with the caveman identity he has just been assigned and in broken English laments that he is lonely. In a split second, Steele picks up the cue on the piano and Lawless and Heyman launch into a duet.

While Steele improvises a beautiful melody and Lawless and Heyman exchange soulful rhyming couplets, the rest of the Otters sway behind them, occasionally kicking their legs like some rumpled Rockettes. They suddenly galvanize into an impromptu dance, their movements are in sync like a demented wave, and they swell and roll over the stage, following each other's lead, wherever it takes them.

Rachel Morton was editor of Middlebury Magazine from 1995 to 2002.