Worst Shows Ever......

[cargill]

One of my favorite things to do after a bad show is grab a drink, my team mates and laugh about the show and all the stupid things I did. What is your WORST show ever?

Here's Mine:

I was on a Harold team and at one of our early Harold shows the following happened. At the second game slot (after a series of stinky scenes where no one knew who they were, where they were or what was going on), my teammate Mike initiated a Space Ship game scene. People joined in, but no one knew where the space ship was going or had any details about where it should end up. This inventing went on and on and on until it was pure diahrea. Me and two other team mates had been lucky to not be in the game and were standing at the side of the stage. All of the sudden Mike spied us trying to stay out of the game and; so after he finished his monologue about leprechauns, he called us out as monkeys in the spaceship and said we were about to parachute out of the ship. So we all became monkeys and proceeded to jump out of the spaceship..........this went on for 7 minutes. The lights were then pulled.

Another:

My team was playing a show one night and one of my team mates (David) had made my other team mate (Matt) become Cher dancing and singing on a chair. They were DYING, NO ONE would edit the scene or go out on stage. Finally, I knew I had to do something, poor Matt had been dancing on the chair for a while now. I came out with something lame and David turns to me and says," Go get em' Tiger"....slaps me on the ass and LEAVES THE STAGE with me to continue the scene with Matt dacing on a chair as Cher. The whole time I hear him laughing behind me ! We have been laughing at that one for several years now.

[beardedlamb]

The Messy Show

The year was 2000. My group, well hung jury had just returned from an amazing trip to Harvard to perform in an invitational festival, our first time out of town. We discovered longform through IGP (Immediate Gratification Players) and were psyched about trying it on our own in rehearsals. But more importantly for this story, I saw the Blue Man Group in downtown Boston. Not only would this fuel an unfulfilled and halfassed attempt at training to audition for BMG, but it would also lead to the creation and performance of the worst improv show of all time.
The Hideout was still under construction but as part of our deal with Sean we had a weekend of shows in each month for 2000 in return for demo. and construction work. The mainstage had no stage and really nice new curtains (yes, it was quite a long time ago.) The idea was to do the messiest show possible, most of it improv, some of it scripted. We had huge bags of day-old popcorn that i stole from the movie theatre where i worked. These were eventually broken over Ben by three audience members while he slipped and nearly broke his back. We had bloodbags, one of which was promised to explode on gandhi, played by jon benner in a bald cap (extremely funny, right?) We had raw chicken. We had a kabuki theatre style cooking show with lots of food. We had tomatoes for a Shakespearean scene that turned out to not be old enough to not injur the actors when hurled by the audience. We had sand. We had huge plastics tarps on the curtains, walls, and floor of the stage. It was supposed to grab all of the great fun of the messiness of BMG and explode it in all directions to leave the crowd howling.
Really what happened was the audience was alienated and confused as to why this was either funny or interesting. someone was bruised pretty badly by a tomato, i slipped and hurt my leg as all that gunk added up to a very slippery layer of shit on top of a slick plastic floor, and Ben nearly killed Andrei with a huge butcher knife during the cooking show. When the show was over, I was covered in a sticky goop of caro syrup blood and god knows what else. it hurt to rinse it out of my beard and i remember going to IHOP, as was customary after a Jury show back then, and all of us having dried blood on our heads. The waiters must have wondered.
But the best part of the whole thing, we got it on tape. And we learned a valuable lesson. Spectacle does not always equal good. Sometimes spectacle equals retarded.

There's also the Influence Show, the Obscenity Show which debuted at Wafflefest 1, and our first college show in Cameron, OK (haven't heard of it? well, they'd never heard of improv or audience etiquette.)

These are all a tie for second coming in way behind my worst improv show of all time, The Messy Show

b

[valetoile]

i remember the obscenity show! I liked it.

[kaci_beeler]

I was at the Obscenity show too! I liked it as well. The things that stick out in my mind was the jizz bar and a scene that went on really long with a rape theme. Gah. It was interesting to watch how far you guys would go, and we were warned beforehand.

The worst show I've done so far was at a Relay for Life Cancer Walk inside Dell Diamond.
Worst. Idea. Ever.

[HerrHerr]

I haven't had a worst show...yet. But I do remember the worst improv moment.

One night at No Shame we had a smallish audience and very few performers. Shannon
wasn't there that night, so we scrambled to come up with last minute performance ideas.
Having seen Bryan Roberts and Mitch Edwards do a good improv scene in a previous No
Shame, I decided to do the same. I called out to the audience, "We're going to do an
improv scene if anybody wants to join us." I meant for a couple of fellow improvsiers to
join me on a stage. They did, but so did a random audience member. I don't really
remember the scene very well, something to do with a Chinese detective and Christmas
presents, but it went horribly awry. The audience volunteer did her best...playing out of
fear, random and lost. We had no idea where or how to end it. I think the situation was
exacerbated by my outfit. I was wearing a jogging outfit--floppy orange nylon shorts
exposing too much thigh, sleeveless top and a headband--from a previous scene.

Afterwards, I turned to a friend and said, "Well, glad that's over. I can check off horribly
random improv scene on my list of hurdles to get over."

Chris A.

[andrea]

I haven't had a worst show...yet.

i thought for sure you were going to list the bedridden truth or dare show. you know the one...

[starkserious]

I've had two of the worst shows ever at corporate events. but the good news is we got paid big bucks to have suck ass show! One time was around Christmas when i was with ComedySportz and there were three of us who were going to roast these executives with a high tech company that is no longer in business at La Zona Rosa. We were going to do a bunch of improv scenes based on this stuff and we had no audience paying any attention to us. Finally when we did get them look at us one of our players made a sexual reference to the CEO's daughter and within two minutes after that they pulled us off stage and told us to go home. But I made them pay us.

The other one... Jen will remember... doing a corporate show for Dell....Here's what I thought about Dell after that... FUCK DELL! sometimes it is the audience's fault if they don't like you. PLus if they can't hear you, you're screwed! Make sure you always got good sound with a big audience. enough said on that.

I've had plenty of shitty shows and hell gigs to last a lifetime. i've been doing comedy both improv and stand-up for 9 years. but the single show that stands out for me was performing in Belton at a outdoor bar that had a huge stage and it was for a bunch Army guys who had just came off three weeks of War Games right after Sept. 11th. and they turned on me about half way into my show... there were three guys who kept yelling at me and then the rest of crowd (all drunk) joined in and I started to panic... but here's the irony... they were hating my jokes...so I started improvising with them and did a hestitation story taking all there insults and incorporating them into a story about an army privated named Dick Wad. Let's just say it became a very X rated story and I won't go into the details but those drunk assholes bought it and it bailed me out. But I never went back to do comedy again.

[HerrHerr]

Oh, geez, Andrea, you had to remind me...you still have those underpants?

CJA

[deroosisonfire]

the worst moment i've ever been onstage for was during a big group scene when a male turned and accidentally knocked over a female onstage so hard that she started to bleed. there was a terrible moment when she was standing crying onstage and we were all frozen in horror. it was in a chapel, not a theater, so we couldn't pull lights. finally she ran offstage and he followed to see if she was ok and i stepped forward and ended the show.

my own worst moment happened at a benefit show in front of an audience of ~500 people. we closed our set with world's worst and it was an ad for shampoo. another player needed to be saved and so i stepped out with the only idea i had. i gestured opening a shampoo bottle and looked around the audience to see who i was going to offend. as my hand lowered to gesture scrubbing my crotch i locked eyes with one of my best friends who was sitting between his parents. knowing i may as well commit i announced, "i like to wash all the hair on my body!" the audience actually loved it, for 3 years after that i got recognized on campus for that moment, but i was disappointed at having stooped so low for a laugh.

[Evilpandabear]

There was a maestro where i played a dirty french guy with Kaci & Sara. They were both into the dirty french guy, but i told Kaci in secret that she had to kill Sara if she wanted to be with me. She killed her, but Sara was some how resurrected and we were going to have a threesome. Some how i was left the last (kicker) line of the scene, and for some ungodly reason i said something about, "gang rape." i have never seen an entire audience loose smile, drop mouth, and lean back in unison, disgust, and awe. The best part was, it was a "new choice" scene, and Andy was so taken back that he didn't give me a "new choice" so i had to do it myself. Now, my memory tells me someone mentioned it during the initial offers so some how i justified it as fair game for in the scene but still it was a bad call. some improvisers still give me flack about it but we're in a comfortable place now to where we can all laugh about it. oh, and the scene got a 5. [/i]

[LuBu McJohnson]

I remember this one No Shame, it was on the day Rick James died. I did a spoken-word version of "Superfreak," with Chris Allen helping me out from the light booth. I was holding this lighter, which I kept lit until the end, when I blew it out. I mean, I got no reaction. At that point I would have taken boos as signs that at least people were paying attention, but NOTHING! After it was over I swear I wanted to hide under my chair for the duration....I think that's what I did.

[arclight]

I've blotted most of them out of my mind (hooray for beer!) but the ones that stick with me are the Velveeta Room performances. Nothing specific aside from some drunk asshat, but playing a club really makes you appreciate playing a theater.

Also, playing with the Heroes at the Cap City Comedy Club in some best of Austin thingy. In retrospect, I don't think we should have played there just because the expectations of a stand-up crowd are so wildly opposed to that of an improv crowd. Playing an unfamiliar room with too big of an audience expecting a different sort of humor just led to major suckage. I still remember Les coming over and giving us a handshake of support; I don't know how anyone else felt, but at the time I really appreciated it.

[mdalonzo]

Wow...worst show...

I can remember a show where we played opening for Cowboy Mouth, in front of about 10,000 people, and Shana got hit in the head with a beer can.

I can remember a Gravy show that was so bad that I actually quit improv onstage (and for a moment or two, I meant it...)

There was a sketch comedy show I did in college for the Society Of Professional Journalists Banquet where they wanted us to do sketch comedy in the middle of a dining room floor WHILE people were eating.

But, I think the worst show I was ever a part of was a Six Degrees a few years back when Lauren Zinn just went apeshit in the first scene, overendowing everyone, and making it virtually impossible to do even a passable show from the moment forward. I can remember not even having gone on stage yet and thinking that there was no way that the show wasn't going to suck.

BEST show ever?

Last night.

[arclight]

Was that the Lancelot show?

[Jill Morris]

I haven't had a worst show...yet.

i thought for sure you were going to list the bedridden truth or dare show. you know the one...

Comedy lesson:
Men taking off pants= funny.
Jill taking off Andrea's pants=awkward.