Three decades ago, a group of Capital students wanted to be funny but didn’t know how. They had seen improvisational comedy on “Saturday Night Live” and “Whose Line Is It Anyway” and were witnessing the rise of great improv comics like Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell. How could they develop this amazing ability to think quickly on their feet and make people laugh?
As college students do, they turned to their professors for help.
Dr. Dan Heaton, professor of Communication, was part of the genesis of the project and still advises the group today. He had a little improv training from his undergrad years, but none of his department colleagues had ever run an improv group before.
“We decided, okay, well, let’s figure it out,” Heaton said. “How can we help them achieve that goal?”
Heaton and the other original advisers, Dr. Bill Kennedy and Dr. Sharon Croft, did lots of investigating to find out what activities help build improvisation skills. They realized that their theater experience was relevant to the project, even if it wasn’t specific to improv. The professors combined those exercises with ideas from the students to create a template for practice they still use today.
“A lot of the games come from training Bill, and I had done in our undergrad and graduate programs where you learn how to create a story, how to create a character, how to advance the plot,” Heaton said. “How do you create a scene that has a beginning, a middle, and an end in short amount of time? There are all sorts of structures you have to learn.”
Next, they decided to pit their newly developed comedy skills against those of nearby universities and high schools, creating a Mardi Gras event called “The Fat Tuesday Improv Contest and Debutante Cotillion.”
“(It) was just a chance for other schools, other improv groups to come together and play improv games together,” Heaton said. “It wasn’t really a competition. It was just billed that way because ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway’ offered points for games, which didn’t mean anything. No one won anything. It was live fun.”
The event also gave them their unusual name.
“We had an art student who did a little cartoon drawing of a character that we named Fat Tuesday,” Heaton said. “We didn’t really have a name for our group, so we’re like, well, let’s just call ourselves the Fat Tuesday Debutantes. It kind of stuck.”
The group exists now as a pre-professional activity offered through the Department of Communication, Art, and Theater. It is open to the whole student body, regardless of major, and there is no audition process. The Debutantes, currently about 15 students, meet once a week for an hour to play games and practice improvisational comedy with each other. Students can earn credit for their efforts, or they can choose no credit if they just want to participate.
“It’s not like a regular class,” Heaton said. “We don’t really have assignments that you do, and there are no tests. But we learn the games and the structures and practice those, and then we do three public performances each semester.”
The games they currently use have been collected from both other college improv troupes and professional troupes like Second City. The games offer frameworks in which the students can play and experiment, lessening the stress of trying something new.
“It’s not just, you know, the Wild West up there,” Heaton said.
As students cycle through the project, the group adapts to new interests and strengths.
“There’s one particular game that students used to be really good at called Superheroes,” Heaton said. “They had to be superheroes that solve some problem. Over the years, people got worse and worse at being able to figure out how to incorporate their superpower to solve the problem, so we eventually stopped doing that one.”
In 2020, they also had to adapt to the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the troupe onto Zoom.
“The worst year was the year where all of our classes were online and we still did improv,” Heaton said. “We would meet every week on Zoom, and then we did our three performances that semester on Zoom. But we could not hear any response from the audience. They were in the chat for the Zoom room, and they were typing to each other, and that was good. But timing is so impossible on Zoom, and it's so important in comedy, like, oh, that's brutal. That was really our worst, worst year.”
The benefits of practicing improvisation go far beyond performances on the stage. Meg Garcia, exercise science pre-athletic training, and the Debutantes’ second-in-command has noticed changes that affect many key areas of her life.
“I have become more able to think on my feet and more sure of my choices in spur-of-the-moment decisions,” Garcia said. “Improv is a part of everybody's life, no matter if you're involved in theater or not. Every conversation you have is thought of on the spot unless you script all your conversations. The only difference with Fat Tuesday Debutantes is we take those interactions and use them to try to make people laugh.”
Heaton also emphasized the art form’s ability to help people learn to interact and connect with each other.
“The main things you can get from improv are thinking quickly on your feet, adapting to situations, interacting with other people,” Heaton said. “It's not a lone wolf type of thing. When you're up there, you’re there with other people, and you have to learn how to adapt to their performance style, their humor style, which may be different from yours.”
A few students involved in the improv troupe have gone on to pursue training at Second City in Chicago, have created their own improv groups elsewhere, or have transitioned their experience into the world of stand-up comedy.
“Some of them really love having an audience,” Heaton said. “They do fine in class every week, but once they have a live audience, some of them I've seen are like, oh, this is what it's like to have an audience that's not just our class. They get more into it once they get a response from people.”
Heaton keeps the interests and needs of the students at the forefront of the group’s direction. He describes the group as “student run, student directed, student focused.”
“It’s mainly what the students want,” Heaton said. “It’s not what I want. If they say, look, I just want to come here and laugh for an hour and then go about the rest of my life, that is fine with me. …What do they want to get out of it? One of my students is in the Conservatory, and she said that the hour that she comes to improv is her favorite hour of the week because it is low stress. She's able to de-stress a bit and laugh and have a good time with people.”
Garcia encouraged anyone interested to set their anxieties aside and see what the group is about.
“I think that if someone was looking to join Fat Tuesday Debutantes that they totally should,” Garcia said. “It’s very beginner friendly. We have done situations where we have gone through divorce hearings, a car breaking down, and even delivering livestock. Each person comes in with their own experiences and we're all able to learn from each other.”