Will Hines Dot Net

I almost deleted this post like ten times. But screw it, what else is a blog for but this kind of self-indulgent proclamation? Non-UCBT-improv nerds should certainly skip the rest of this entry.

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I’m very excited for Harold Night Time Machine tonight. Creep, Arsenal, Dillinger, fwand — each one undisputedly the best team on Harold Night while they were around. For all the weirdness and clunkiness that a Harold can bring out of an improv group, when it’s working it’s magic and these teams were all magic. As an old man of this community, I’m invoking my right (as I always do) to tell war stories of when I witnessed the greatness as it happened. If I overstate, it’s to get closer to what it felt like at the time.

Creep: The actors’ team, the musical theater team, the nerd team. Once Creep settled into place there was suddenly great acting on Harold Night — big rich pauses, amazing characters, elaborate stage pictures and sometimes a ridiculous step dancing entrance just to remind you that this was a team that went to see Rent together at the Ziegfeld on opening night. They were shamelessly silly (Hiller?) and weird (Birch?)– just as likely to quote Philip K. Dick (Anthony A.) or X-Men (Eliza) as they were Company or A Star Is Born (all of them) — but always swaggering and confident and hilarious. They liked pregnant pauses and big long first beats. They liked to look at each other and wait before striking. I don’t think they would play game from beat-to-beat with guns to their heads, yet they made compelling and hilarious shows time and time again. How long were they around? 10 years? If you were warming up you knew when they were done because of the thunderclap of applause.

Arsenal: Arsenal had been Gigawatt, which had been My Kickass Van — so they’d been around a while. But at some point, you looked up and they had Peter Gwinn and Kevin Mullaney and Chris Gethard (I heard a rumor Delaney almost joined but instead he and Gethard and Gwinn became the Stepfathers — I don’t care if it’s not true, it feels right) and they were suddenly monstrously powerful. When they locked in, that whole team was a fluid machine adapting and bending and doing something new each time. They had real openings that were inspired by the suggestions, they did meta scenes that were amazing, and they would brake every rule of the Harold without having bad shows. Human pyramids, antebellum tableaus, Flynn’s dog on stage with Gwinn mercilessly needling Gethard and Mullaney could still find a callback. These guys were too good right? I’m glad they put Porter and I on the team eventually to properly destroy it.

Dillinger: Maybe the best Harold team ever and certainly the only great team who could satisfy every ridiculous contradictory rule of the Harold and still have great shows. And these punks had the nerve to be super-young, on their first team (I had never heard of Zach Woods and just barely of Anthony King when they were formed) and just be better than everyone. And they could do anything! What’s the most boring weird opening? The Pattern Game, right? They did it, and they did it right, and made it funny and smart and used it in their show. The second beats always heightened, they found game, they didn’t force it. Lennon would be blowing the room away when Wengert would walk on out of nowhere with the best move of the year, followed by Tanouye finding a way to tie to the first line of the show followed by Zach…. I mean, it was some sick shit. They always came out to a song with the word ‘love’ in the title. They beat The Swarm in Cagematch. When Reuben Williams took Anthony and Joe, the rest re-grouped and became The Shoves, another one of the best teams ever. But there was something special about Dillinger, maybe BECAUSE they weren’t around that long. I’m sure they’re the most in their heads about the show tonight because they’re they types of people who like to do it right. Relax guys, — honestly it’s just nice to see you again.

fwand:  If I had to pick one team to never fail, it would be these guys. And that’s ironic because they failed all the time — in individual moments. What I mean is that fwand would, in many of their shows — have moments that were absolutely terrible improv: bad listening, playing to the definite bottom of their intelligence, verbal and physical abuse, unnecessary meta scenes, ham-handedly forced games, enthusiastic calling out of things with complete disrespect and often just losing track of what was going on at all  — but despite all of these individual efforts to be the worst team ever, they could not help but in EVERY SINGLE SHOW I EVER SAW (and I saw a lot of them since my brother was on this team, the lucky son of a bitch) – be the funniest, most awesomely fun, awesomely cooperative team on Harold Night. Once fwand settled in, they were just always reliably amazing. An airplane that would chop its own wings off and somehow still fly higher than everyone. Beasts. Unstoppable. You could shoot bullets at them and it would not slow them down. These guys were blessed — something in the combined chemical makeup made shit work all of the time.

One more note on fwand: they had been Mailer Daemon, which had been another hilarious and out-of-control force of nature type team. And I still think that MD might have been funnier. But fwand did something MD could never do — those organic transitions. The dumbest-seeming team on Harold Night picked the hardest opening and transitions and worked at — failing for awhile after having been on top as MD — until something clicked and it worked.  They melded in and out of those things while I watched, amazed at how well it worked. No one’s done it since. An out-of-control tornado that’s able to focus and work hard? That deserves a spot in our Harold Night Hall of Fame, which is mostly comprised of people like me in McManus saying rambly things like this post to students who feel compelled to listen! But it’s DCM week and for the old people like me, we get to do stuff like that so I will and I am and I have.