On the morning of Sept. 25, a clown carrying a bottle of Jack
Daniels ran through campus, screaming that he was being chased by
the Burger King. Later that afternoon, two clowns carried a coffin
from North Campus to South Campus in what appeared to be a
procession for Ronald McDonald on its way to Bruin Bash.
Hilarious antics like these are par for the course for UCLA
RUIN, the campus’s new sketch comedy troupe, which is
performing at Macgowan Hall on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.
“To publicize the show, I ran through campus saying,
“˜The Burger King is chasing me!’ and handed fliers to
people on the run,” said Alex Rogals, one of RUIN’s
initial members and a graduate theater student. “I told them
to come to our show, and if they didn’t, the Burger King
would kill me.”
With a cast of theater students, RUIN writes its own scripts
without fear of being sanctioned for any of it.
“It’s all about dropping the B.S. to bring you
RUIN,” said Jim Cathcart, a RUIN comedian and fourth-year
theater student. “We’re like a big, dirty, vulgar
family.”
But as the new kid on the block, RUIN’s school of sketch
is not the only comedy game in town.
RUIN’s unscripted analog is BUICK, an improv group that
has more seniority and has already gained recognition on campus
through its regular performances last year.
“I don’t think we’re in competition with them,
but if they have a show this weekend, then maybe we are?”
Cathcart said.
There are more than a few differences between the groups: RUIN
may have the penchant for toppling boundaries and reaching for the
outrageous, but BUICK tries not to make any wrong turns, steering
away from the vulgar.
“BUICK shows are events that you can go to with your
friends on Friday nights and have a good, fun and clean
time,” said Jack De Sena, a second-year theater student and
BUICK member. “We don’t push beyond too hard ““
we’re not vulgar, and there’s no heavy bad
language.”
BUICK, an acronym for Bruins United Improv Comedy Kraze,
performs improv, as opposed to RUIN’s sketch comedy.
Improv, short for improvisation, is a type of comedy that is
spur-of-the-moment; there are no scripts and little structure. But
that is exactly its novelty. There is more elbow room, and
performers have nothing but opportunity to add fresh ideas and new
jokes into the performance as they go.
“Improv comedy is on-the-spot, and it is based on the
audience’s suggestions,” De Sena said.
According to Rogals, ideas for RUIN sketches come from daily
life.
“We come up with ideas for scripts from everyday
conversations,” Rogals said. “Some of it comes from
what somebody would say, and we’d start doing a script on
that, and if it goes long enough, we’d make it into a
play.”
Since its inception two years ago, RUIN has performed at
Kerckhoff Coffeehouse and at the Bruin Bash. The group has also
performed at Theatre Fest, an annual festival sponsored by Theatre
Underground, and some of its members have frequented Hollywood
comedy clubs.
RUIN members’ shared love for comedy allows for inventive
scripts, original lines and eccentric situations.
“We write our sketches ourselves. We have something that
we’re rehearsing and we develop it through workshops and
rehearsals, adding more to the sketch as we go,” said Sara
Ann Buccolo, a fourth-year theater student.
RUIN is known for bringing its characteristic frenzy, but its
members take the business of comedy seriously as they continuously
challenge themselves through varied experiences, including
improv.
“We hope to do improv on weekends so we can put ourselves
out there and develop sketches that way,” said Shelly
Geiszler, a fourth-year theater student. “(That way), when we
have our shows, we have a lot of material.”
But RUIN members are not the only sketch artists. While still in
high school, De Sena, who was part of the popular Nickelodeon show,
“All That,” also did sketch comedy.
“Sketch and improv are comedies in different scales, but
both are working for the same goal: to make people laugh,” De
Sena said. “Sketch comedy has more of an opportunity to make
a statement, since you have more control of what you would say, as
opposed to improv, when you do things on the spot. I love them both
““ they’re a ton of fun.”
Fellow BUICK member Andy Gardner has also done both types of
comedy. He did sketch comedy in the Playground Festival in San
Francisco, a playwright workshop program where aspiring actors and
writers perform their own scripts and receive advice from
directors.
Sketch comedy appealed to Gardner because of the chance to step
into a new character’s shoes.
“I love sketch comedy; it’s incredibly fun to be
able to create someone who you’re not and make people
laugh,” he said. “You become a chameleon and you learn
how to be something other than yourself at a given time.”
According to Gardner, sketch and improv are similar, but he
likes improv’s flexibility.
“Sketch and improv are closely related; they create
characters that are wild, loud and funny,” he said. “In
sketch, you can’t add more elements as you go because
there’s a script to be loyal to. I love the energy and
freedom of improv ““ it changes the momentum of the scene and
the show as a whole.”
Though both members have previous experiences in sketch comedy,
currently they spend more time doing improv in BUICK and have not
done a lot of sketch in the past few years.
Although BUICK members have no material to practice with
beforehand, they still have meetings and practices where they
mentor each other on methods and techniques.
Gabe Cardenas, a 2005 Bruin alumnus who participated in BUICK as
an undergraduate, said that despite improv’s free form,
practice makes perfect.
“It is true that there is no script, but there is
structure that goes along with a good improv performance,”
Cardenas said. “We practice all our games by giving each
other suggestions.”
So while RUIN practices sketch comedy and BUICK practices
improv, in every performance the final verdict is up to the
audience.
“The nice thing about improv is that it’s very
fluid. If something’s not working, you can change it,”
Cardenas said. “I have a lot of respect for sketch comedy
because that is something that has been predetermined to be funny
already. If the audience doesn’t like it, it hurts a lot more
than something you made up on the spot.”