improv comedy – C-VILLE Weekly

One of my favorite things to do is laugh. A hearty laugh makes a bad day a little less bleak and a good one golden. Live comedy has always been something I enjoy and have often fantasized about trying.

As a small child, I enjoyed performing—ballet, school plays, living room magic shows. Then adolescence crash-landed and middle school happened to me (as it does to us all). Self-consciousness rooted and ran wild like the destructive weed it is. I forced myself to overcome stage fright in high school, but it’s a battle I still fight every time I need to appear in front of a group. Though I was a certified “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” addict back in the day, I thought I’d shelved my comedy dreams for good.

Then I entered middle age, and, along with all the less-fun parts like plantar fasciitis and hot flashes, I unlocked that adulting achievement of having far fewer fudges to give about getting embarrassed. And that’s how I ended up enrolled in a Big Blue Door improv class.

What

Taking a Big Blue Door improv class.

Why

To challenge myself to get outside my comfort zone (and hopefully laugh a lot doing it).

How It Went

I’m still laughing.

At the first class, anxiety and excitement duked it out in my guts—very first-day-of-school vibes. The group members quickly realized we’d have little time to sit and think about our nerves though. Our intrepid instructor told us to “circle up,” and before we knew it, we stood playing a game to learn names and one true thing about each other. I didn’t realize how vulnerable and, to quote the introverted goddess Emily Dickinson, “public like a frog” the entire experience was going to be. But, golly, improv sure feels like the right kind of hard, the kind that comes from growth.

Class continued through a series of group and partner activities. Trust grows quickly with classmates from absolute necessity. In my limited experience, improv demands that we’re 100 percent present in the moment—and 100 percent willing to look extremely foolish. Our instructor provided clear, concise directions to get us going, and gentle guidance as we went. He also shared a key insight: It’s really hard to upset people with what we say when performing, so don’t stress. Implied in that wisdom is the notion that what people co-create in real time, improvisationally, is ephemeral. That’s part of the beauty of it, and only the most memorable bits—which hopefully got laughs—will remain in folks’ minds.

Twenty minutes into the class, my nerves had mostly calmed. I was just having fun, and the activities—such as “name five things” in which participants call on each other to name five things in a category: “Francine, name five different sandwiches!”—demanded that I get out of my own head. If we got stuck, our teammates and the instructor moved us out of it. I won’t say much about my classmates because I promised them that what happens in improv class stays in improv class, but they’re awesome.

In its purest moments, the class felt like playing with friends as a child. Do you remember that—the act of co-creating a shared imagined reality with other kids in which anything was permissible? Don’t get me wrong, there were other moments, ones in which I wished the floor would open and swallow me whole to spare me further embarrassment. But those moments were fleeting, quickly erased from memory when the next laugh landed.

At the class’ end, we finished with a game centered on a glorious goat. Circled up, we all passed around a glorious imaginary goat and said a series of repeating lines about it. Writing that now, it sounds ridiculous, and it was, but that’s what made it so marvelous. I’ve been walking around my house exclaiming, “I have the glorious goat,” and it never ceases to bring a smile to my face.

Owning it: Comedy performer L.E. Zarling finds happiness in improv

It’s a Saturday morning in Richmond, and L.E. Zarling has ordered a chocolate croissant to go with her latte at Lamplighter Coffee. She looks at the pastry, covered in a heavy-handed sprinkle of powdered sugar. Then she looks at her black turtleneck sweater. “Fuck it,” she says before taking a bite. “I’m going to enjoy the hell out of this thing.”

This sort of just-go-with-it-and-own-it-while-you’re-at-it attitude is the way Milwaukee-born and Richmond-based comedy performer and instructor L.E. (Lilith Elektra) Zarling approaches most things in life. It’s certainly how she approaches comedy, which she brings to IX Art Park on Thursday, in the form of a two-hour improvisational workshop geared toward trans and non-binary people. After the workshop, Zarling will perform her one-person improv show, Wisconsin Laugh Trip.

Zarling started in comedy in 2003, when she was 33 years old. She realized that if she was the one with the mic, everyone in the room had to listen to her; and she wanted to be heard. A few years later, while living in Charlottesville, she pivoted to improv comedy and storytelling, where it’s always something new.

“The level of control that [improvisational comedy] brought to my life, being on stage and being an improviser, where you just have to go” and let go, rocked her world. Over time, performing helped Zarling, a trans woman, find her own voice and be completely honest with herself and her audience about who she is.

“I finally unscrewed the jar and let my real self out,” she says.

To hear Zarling talk about her life in comedy is to witness an animated retelling of some of her favorite performances. There’s the time she made a little kid laugh so hard, he puked (“I should have just retired then and there,” she quips). And the time when she led her 60-person audience in an impromptu singing of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” where some audience members got so into it, Zarling handed the stage over to them. During that sing-along, she realized that being “in the middle of this happiness” is her dream.

Zarling’s workshops and shows are about community, positivity, and having fun, but within that, she does some pretty serious work.

Most spaces in the U.S., theaters and comedy clubs included, are not queer-friendly, says Zarling, and she hopes to change that, even if it’s just making venues (such as IX) more aware of the importance of having gender-neutral bathrooms. She holds improv workshops geared toward trans- and non-binary people to say “you are welcome here,” in this physical space and in this artistic space. There’s a lot of confidence to be found in “having an audience and holding it and having people interested in what you have to say,” she says.

“Comedy is your chance to be in front of people, to have your voice and say what you feel,” says Zarling. “Yes, there are forces trying to work against you. But no matter who the president is, that doesn’t stop you from making your friends’ lives better. That doesn’t stop you from reaching out and making your community better,” even in seemingly small ways.

When Zarling performs, she doesn’t talk much about being trans. “When you’re a performer, there are things you want to talk about…[and] being trans is sometimes the least interesting thing about me,” she says. She has a vibrant social life and loves to travel (so far this year, she’s visited Dublin and Belfast, Ireland, and driven across the continental U.S. twice); she teaches improv for business; every summer, she runs the comedy unit at a weeklong leadership camp in Alabama for kids ages 10 to 18.

But, she’s aware that in many cases, she’s the first trans person some of her audience members will get to know, and when they leave, this little piece of her will leave with them. At the very least, “they’ll be like, ‘Okay, maybe trans people just want to go pee?’” she says with a laugh.

At the show, Charlottesville fans can expect a bunch of characters, created with help from the audience. There will likely be a blind taste test (of…something), definitely a sing-along to the Violent Femme’s “Blister in the Sun” (“Wisconsin’s most famous band,” says Zarling), and a bit formed around a character created from a prop that Zarling will find in a local thrift store the day of the performance.

The thrifted prop bit has proven to Zarling that with comedy, she’s accomplishing exactly what she hopes.

While performing the show in California, she found a luchador mask and created a character called the Luchador Life Coach. “Who hates their job?!” she yelled out to the audience. A woman raised her hand—she was a paralegal dreaming of being a costume designer. “Who needs a costume designer?!” the Luchador Life Coach yelled. Four or five people raised their hands—one of them, a burlesque dancer, gave the paralegal her card. Zarling returned to that same comedy group about a year later, hoping to see the paralegal—but the woman couldn’t make it; she was working on a costume for one of her design clients.

Now Zarling doesn’t just say she changes lives through comedy—she knows she actually does it. “I have tangible evidence!” she cries, throwing her arms to the sides, sending a small cloud of powdered sugar onto her black sweater. But she doesn’t even notice—she’s just going with it.