Is improv comedy related to advertising? After a night at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, our writer guy seems to think so.

By J Bisch
Dreamentia CopyWrangler

If you live in Los Angeles or New York and have yet to spend some quality time at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, you, my Internet friend, must add it to your to-do list. Pronto.

My buddy and I checked out the improv comedy haven on Saturday night, and were mystified by its level of entertainment. For starters, the entrance fee of the 92-seat theatre was $5. Secondly, the performers, known as Sentimental Lady, put on a hilarious 45-minute show based on a Native American artifact that, really, had nothing to do with the artifact itself. So essentially, I got an incredible amount of bang for my buck on a Saturday night in Hollywood. [And after living here for over three years, that doesn’t happen very often.]

But let’s step back for a second. In case you haven’t ventured into too many improv spots, this genre of comedy is based around a group of people working together to create a story on the fly. Sentimental Lady, for instance, started their show on Saturday night by asking for the audience to bring forth any props they had in hand. After collecting everything — which included a wiffleball, a horseshoe and the artifact, among others — Sentimental Lady interviewed the owner of the artifact on stage for 5-10 minutes, who proceeded to give the comedy troupe and us audience-types a background of the Native American piece. Sentimental Lady then spread their wings and created a 45-minute charade about a problematic limo repair shop that had everyone LOL’ing, if you will.

And after I had some time to think about it, I couldn’t help but notice how alike improv is to our brainstorms here at Dreamentia. When we’re preparing to work on a new campaign, we’ll roll into meetings with a few ideas; but more often than not, we’ll leave those brainstorms with a completely new idea that came from a nugget of an idea that was manifested in that meeting. In doing so, we’ll start riffing off one another and BAM — we’ve got the workings of a concept that no one was thinking about an hour earlier.

It’s wild when you think about it. At 6pm, the performers of Sentimental Lady had no idea they’d chameleonize themselves as quirky metalheads throughout the 7:00 hour. But that’s exactly what they did.

It’s team work like that that makes the creative world go ‘round. And whether the stage is inside the UCB Theatre or the conference room of an ad agency, it helps to have a cast of characters that can improv and create together.

Because two heads [or more] really are better than one.