One referee. Eight actors. One audience. For over 20 years, one Friday a month, ComedySportz has performed Fridays at 7 p.m. With laughs that fill the audience and blue and red jerseys that fill the stage, the eight improv actors have games that leave the audience excited for more.
ComedySportz is Oak Park High School’s improv team where students go head-to-head with creative and funny skits that are suggestions from students and viewers in the audience.
“My favorite part about comedy sports is how silly it is,” junior Assistant Manager Livi Gaeta said. “It is so goofy and you can always get a good laugh.”
The ComedySportz players not playing during that half sit in the left-hand wing to ensure that the suggestions for games are purely by the audience and not other players. Since there is no way to predict the suggestions, the team puts in a lot of time to prepare themselves.
They practice every Wednesday and have a warm-up before the games. Although they cannot practice exactly what they are going to do in the improv show, the team has similar games that they play beforehand.
“What we do is we have warmups that we do the day of which help get our energy up and get our minds thinking,” Gaeta said.
Along with the players on stage, there is a referee who makes the decisions on if either the blue team or the red team got the point.
“We have a ref who is a professional ref from ComedySportz Los Angeles” said Gaeta. “They also give us tips and will warm up with us, and then we go up on stage.”
ComedySportz will be expanding soon with tryouts coming up. This is a great chance for freshmen or others interested in the club to join.
“We have two days of tryouts, one is tryouts and one is a callback which is a selected group from tryouts,” Gaeta said. “For tryouts, we do workshops beforehand which help people come out and practice their improv skills, see if they have any and to see if they like it.”
The teams on stage vary each time. Everyone on the team has both the blue and the red jersey. The two managers make the lineups for the games a week before with what they think will go best for that day.
The ComedySportz team brings good entertainment to OPHS students, come to the next game on Oct. 4.
