I went to a live improv comedy show for my Friday entertainment. It was hosted by the same organization with whom I took an introduction to improv class last fall, so it wasn’t my first time in the endearing little black box theater with its hodgepodge of mismatched chairs making up its stadium seating. It was, though, the first time I’d returned since I performed in front of a very small audience at the conclusion of that class.

The event was billed as a game show. The competitive dynamics weren’t as de minimus as on Who’s Line Is It Anyway (e.g. points were tallied throughout the event and there was a winner), but it wasn’t exactly Jeopardy! either. The host was British, so that added an extra dimension to some of the humor on display. It also meant that during one of the games while the contestants were drawing a scene of an audience member’s day based on very incomplete information, there was some audience Q&A in a segment titled Ask a Brit. Topics there included the royal family, what to call fried potatoes, and the upcoming premier league season.

My favorite bit was a game of PowerPoint karaoke. PowerPoint karaoke is something I’d heard about before but had never actually seen. There are websites that are repositories of PowerPoint presentations. Those presentations can be about anything (and sometimes it’s impossible to even discern the topic of the presentation). In PowerPoint karaoke a presenter gives the presentation blind, that is without seeing the slides beforehand, and so completely off-the-cuff. In this version, the participants were given a fixed subject beforehand, but there are versions of the activity without that constraint. This may sound awful, but it was a lot of fun to watch as each new slide brought a new challenge to make some new random image fit into a story about either painting or computer modeling (the two assigned topics).

I opted not to participate in any of the events as an audience member as I didn’t want to judge the competitors in any official capacity and didn’t have any funny suggestions come immediately to my mind when the host asked for ideas for a few of the games. Oh well. I don’t think I’ll attend that event when they host it again in the coming months, but I’m glad I went to this one. If nothing else, it helped get me back in the mode of doing and trying new activities after a bit of a rut during early summer.