Shtick in the Muds Need Not Compete
At ComedySportz Tournament, Getting Sacked Is Half the Fun

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 2, 2003; Page C01

After watching an 11-second opera set in a batting cage, the audience, composed of 100 ComedySportz players, starts clapping and chanting:

In the New Games workshop, we're playing new games.

In the New Games workshop, the games aren't the same.

After the skit about the Hawaiian leprechaun tormented by his sadistic Marine drill sergeant dad, the audience claps and chants again:

In the New Games workshop, we're playing new games.

In the New Games workshop, the games aren't the same.

But Jeffrey Menkin doesn't want you to get the wrong idea about all this. "We're not really a cult," he says, smiling. "We just act like it sometimes."

Menkin isn't a cult kind of guy. He's a 44-year-old strait-laced lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which prosecutes Nazi war criminals. For the last 11 years, he has also performed improvisational comedy in Washington's ComedySportz troupe. In other words, he's just your average Nazi-hunter/comedian -- not a cult kind of guy at all.

But when the New Games workshop ends, Menkin joins the rest of the ComedySportz players as they march out of the Regent University auditorium in Alexandria, stomping their feet in pseudo-martial unison as they sing the official "ComedySportz March":

We wear nice shoes and we wear nice shoes.

We wear nice shoes and we wear nice shoes.

Oh, ComedySportz of America,

We wear nice shoes, shoes, shoes.

These are our shoes!

And in unison -- well, maybe semi-unison -- they each lift up one foot to show off their shoes, some of which are not, if truth be told, all that nice, really.

Menkin smiles at the goofiness of this ritual. "We're really not a cult," he says. "We just play one every year."

He's right. ComedySportz is not a cult. Founded in 1984 in Milwaukee, it's a franchise of 19 improvisational comedy troupes -- 18 in U.S. cities and one in England -- that stage wacky, zany, madcap comedy competitions at clubs, theaters and private parties.

Every year for 16 years, they've gathered for the ComedySportz National Tournament. This year -- this week, in fact -- they've gathered in Washington, doing private comedy workshops by day and putting on public performances at D.C. Improv by night, including two shows tonight.

Fortunately, the Justice Department has gotten this Nazi war criminal problem pretty much under control these days and consequently Menkin was able to take a week's vacation and attend the convention. He loves the excitement of improv, the thrill of creating comedy on the spot using nothing but a couple of goofy suggestions from the audience.

"There's an adrenaline rush you get being out there without a parachute," he says. "Everything happens right in the moment. You have to create your own world. Your fellow performers will support you, but there's no script. I'm not into extreme sports, but I guess that's why people sky-dive."

ComedySportz players talk like that. They get lyrical, even mystical, when they discuss improvisation.

"Improv is the greatest drug ever," says Kent McCarty, captain of the ComedySportz team from Eugene, Ore. "Improv is addictive."

"It's like stepping off a cliff," says Patrick Short, captain of the team from Portland, Ore. "Ninety-nine percent of the time your teammates will get the parachute to you. But sometimes you crash. When you crash, you have to enjoy crashing. You have to get into it."

Those crashes make for great stories, and when 11 ComedySportz players from various cities gather for lunch at a Cuban restaurant in Alexandria, there are lots of tales about what happens when improvisational comedy goes horribly wrong.

One guy says his team played a corporate party only to be told that the company president had just died and consequently they probably shouldn't use the word "president" in any skits. Another guy says his troupe played a corporate party where the CEO stood up and announced that business was bad and he had to lay off 45 people. The CEO proceeded to read the names of the 45 unlucky souls, all of whom were present. When he finished, he said, "And now, ladies and gentlemen, ComedySportz!"

And then Menkin tells his story about "Oxygen Deprivation," a ComedySportz game requiring that one player's head be submerged in a fish tank at all times. To avoid drownings, the players take turns sticking their heads in the water.

"We had a player with a beard and when he took his head out, there was all this, um, stuff in the water," Menkin says. "Nobody would put their head in after that. That was the last time we played that game."

Although he told that story to people who were attempting to eat lunch, Menkin was chosen to referee the ComedySportz competition at the Improv on Thursday night. Dressed in a football ref's striped shirt, he bounded up onstage.

"What you're about to participate in," he told the packed house, "is competitive improvisation!"

There would be two matches: Madison vs. Eugene, and Indianapolis vs. Minneapolis, which Menkin dubbed the "-apolis competition." All the teams could call on the assistance of the evening's special attraction -- Greg Proops, star of the TV improv show "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" The winners would be determined by a panel of celebrity judges, which consisted of the kind of celebrities you've never actually heard of.

Menkin promised to enforce the rule against "lewd, crude" humor by making offenders play while wearing a brown paper bag over their heads.

"We have one paper bag," he said. "Subsequent fouls will involve plastic bags and duct tape."

Without further ado, the show began. Somebody in the audience tossed out a line -- "Do you want butter with that?" -- and within seconds the dairy sheriff had put his son in the dairy jail for maligning mama's butter-churning and . . . well, you had to be there.

Soon, there was a vivid demonstration of extreme blueberry picking. And a film noir set in a shark tank. And a musical comedy about guacamole. And the worst possible advertising slogan for duct tape: "Duct tape -- a babysitter for the new millennium!" And a lost Shakespeare play called "The Sea Cow," in which Proops composed and recited a soliloquy in Elizabethan blank verse that included all your basic bardic phrases, such as "my liege" and "my lord" and concluded with a perfect Shakespearean couplet that rhymed "vanity" with "manatee."

For the record, Madison beat Eugene and Minneapolis beat Indianapolis. But nobody really cared about that. As the ComedySportz March puts it:

We floss every day and we wear nice shoes.

We play to win but we don't care if we lose.

ComedySportz isn't about anything so crass as winning and losing. ComedySportz is about seizing the moment. It's about making something out of nothing. It's about playing the hand you're dealt, and going with the flow and taking life's lemons and making lemonade.

"I don't know if there's a spiritual aspect to it, but there's a mind-set, a view of the world," Menkin says. "After all, every day is an improv. You don't know what's going to happen five minutes from now. When you're presented with a situation, you can deny it or you can accept it and go with it."

The 16th annual ComedySportz National Tournament will conclude tonight with two shows at D.C. Improv, 1140 Connecticut Ave. NW. The 7:30 show is sold out; tickets are available for the 10 p.m. show at $17 each. Information: 202-296-7008.