Music and comedy collide in Sheer Idiocy’s Music Show

I’ve never really been one for comedy shows. In fact, I’ve never attended one before Sheer Idiocy’s Musical Show last Friday night. To be honest, the idea of a show with both music and comedy seemed odd to me—one is an improvisational set of jokes and laughter, the other is a presentation of the art of sound. However, this show pleasantly surprised me, carefully combining singing and instruments into the collection of improv sets Sheer Idiocy traditionally performs at their monthly shows.

Sheer Idiocy has always included a variety of improv activities throughout their shows which include audience involvement to enhance the show and turn it into an interactive experience. The first of their comedic elements included a rhyming game where they picked a name from the audience to create a musical rhyme. Using a stomping pattern and preset lines, the performers would take turns finding a phrase which matched the rhyme without repeating a past member’s contribution. If a person failed to come up with a line or repeated someone else’s, the entire audience yelled “DIE” and they were eliminated amidst a round of laughter, until one person was left standing.

Next, Sheer Idiocy asked for two random words from the audience. Starting with the first word, the performers would create a scene based on that word. Each scene would last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, until another member of the group would find another word within the scene their castmates created to use as a basis for the next scene. From scene to scene, from word to word, the group continued the process until they finally reached the second word the audience gave them. I especially appreciated how the members seemed to set up the context for their scene without any props, simply communicating their vision through speech, motions, and humorous personas.

Their first musical game used a two-syllable word from the audience. Inserting the word “tadpole” into preset lyrics, Sheer Idiocy sang a tune which included both a chorus and an improvised solo section for each of its members, with the music brought to life by guitar players from the Rensselaer Music Association. Following this semi-unscripted musical set, RMA’s Not Quite Bluegrass performed a set of (predictably) bluegrass country music.

After performing a hilarious advertisement for mentos, which was a suggestion from the audience, one of the improv members walked up on stage and slammed a chair on the ground. After many suggestions from the audience, the troupe proposed that one of their members out in the hallway had committed a heinous crime: showering with socks on in a library. When the defendant was brought in, uninformed of the crime he was being detained for, he had to guess what he had done as two members improvised a script as the police officers who arrested him. In the end, after much laughter and confused guesses, the defendant pieced together his crime in front of an imaginary camera.

The next scene was a long form game to contrast the short form games Sheer Idiocy had been performing so far. Starting with the suggestion of “mountain goat” from the audience, the troupe managed to create a series of scenes where Bessie the goat was sent to school. From scaring her classmates to overtaking the GOAT student in the school, the troupe cut between different parts of the story, including where Bessie ate their group project and where Bessie performed on a fake game show broadcasted by the TV club of their school. (Bessie challenged the GOAT student and won.) From there, they somehow brought their story to a scene where half a goat brain was implanted in the GOAT student (helping them beat Bessie in another round of the game show), and eventually, the GOAT student melted because apparently implanting half a mountain goat brain in a human is not an exact science. One of the parts of their scenes that I found most interesting was with the TV game show, because every once in a while they would do an instant replay, forcing the members to replay the lines they had just performed in slow motion, which made the show even more humorous.

Following this performance, the improv members performed a series of shorter games such as one where two audience members were brought on stage to act as the improv members’ arms (standing behind them and reaching around to do the motions that the scene required) and one where they sang about an audience-suggested topic—cheese—while RMA played in the background. Next, another one of RMA’s small music groups, Ceili band, performed a set of country style music. They even had an accordion player in their midst which helped them stand out and helped immerse the audience in their music.

The next section of the show featured Sheer Idiocy performing another selection of smaller sets. The first scene included four members making up a story called “Two Trolls, One Bridge,” hopping from person to person as each of them told it from their own perspective. After this, they performed a scene where the moderator could clap her hands at any time, and the improvisers would have to break out into freestyle rap. Similarly, they did a scene where when the moderator clapped her hands, the performers would have to perform the scene backwards. This one was especially entertaining as the moderator would vary her claps, sometimes making a scene go backwards and forwards, repeating one set of dialogue over and over, or otherwise making the scene go backwards for a long stretch of time. One of their last scenes was about two prisoners in one jail cell who had to sing about why they deserved to be free and the other should remain in the jail cell. With RMA’s soft guitar music in the background, the scene was brought to life through the improv troupe’s amazing acting.

One of the final pieces of the show featured four members arguing about a non-controversial topic recommended by the audience. Through the hilarity of their own improvisation, the troupe managed to get increasingly off topic, from arguing about how numbers were better than numbers, to just standing and listing off the digits of pi, to having someone else interrupt to loudly assert that cake is objectively better than pie.

I never expected to end up at an improv show of all things on a random Friday night, but I have to admit that this performance really brightened my day, and I’d highly encourage others to check it out! Sheer Idiocy holds monthly shows like this one, with their next show on Friday, March 24 at 8 pm in Mother’s.