Fearless ShenANYgans Live Tweet Overview

- February 11, 2018

Cast of Fearless ShenANYgans

Saturday, Feb.10 at 8 p.m., was the most recent show put on by Fearless ShenANYgans, the Ohio Northern University (ONU) Improvisation Team. This was an event I had to live tweet for my social media principles class. In preparation for the event I had to promote the fact I was going to be live tweeting from the account I was going to be tweeting from. I decided I didn't want to flood my personal Twitter with tweets about a comedy show so I created a second account and called it @ImprovLiveTweet. I used the most recent picture of the team as my header, and used the ONU logo as the profile picture. As a part of this assignment, all of the live tweets had to have "#aggiesm18" at the end.

The goal of live tweeting is to make the reader feel as if they were actually at the event. The best way to do this is to use the tweets to set the stage for readers and then tweet relevant and engaging highlights of the event. This was extremely hard to do for an improvisation show because players, situations, relationships, settings, stakes and many other aspects of scenes can change so fast. In fact, the whole point of improvisation shows is for the audience to actively throw out random suggestions (when asked) to keep the players on their feet.

In the same way the audience kept the players on their feet, the players also kept the audience on their feet by entering and exiting scenes as they please and changing parts of the games so that there is always something new happening. The fast-paced nature of improvisation made trying to provide updates very difficult, but I am proud of the work I did. To view my feed and the tweets I reference when talking about the event just scroll to the bottom of this blog post and read from the bottom going up.

The show itself started off with the players entering the stage from the aisles in their "what not to wear on a first date" themed outfits. Once onstage they quickly began their game of "I like my humans like I like my..." The players were then given a suggestion from the audience of different nouns (the ones given at the show were pineapple, chicken and butter). I provided my readers with my favorite quote from each of the categories in the tweets below.

The next game was called "Acro(nym)phobia," which is a game where three players create the circumstances of their scene by using acronyms in conversation with the other players. It is then the job of one of the two players who did not say the acronym to create a meaning for it and then the whole group has to go off of what they said. They each take turns casually introducing acronyms in the game and they all try and remember the different acronyms. It gets confusing very fast and was a blast to watch.

Based on an audience member's suggestion, the "Improv Olympics," followed the last game and gave the audience a look into the wonderful sport of underwater basket weaving. Darby Beckwith and Michael Swain-Smith were the announcers in this game, and you can view their high jinks and find out what basket won in the live tweets down below.

"Freeze," was the next game. In this game there are two people in a scene and when an observing player (not in the scene) claps their hands, the players in the scene freeze and the observing player taps one of the people in the scene out, takes on the person's pose and creates a new scene based on the pose they are in. The observing players were clapping and changing the scene so many time I couldn't keep up with it enough to tweet about too much.

Next up was the game "Four Corners." This is a game in which four players stand in a square shape and when the person running the game said left or right the players would switch in the given direction. Each set of two people had different suggestions for scenes given by the audience. Suggestions ranged from staples and peaches to Beyoncé and stilettos, which made for some very interesting scenes.

The next game centered around the funeral of a superhero. The game called for an audience participant, and Devin Sugerik was the lucky one chosen to join the players onstage. The audience gave the suggestion of the hero to be based on toothpaste. After a lovely introduction by Bridget Mahoney, we found out the lost hero was named Brushy McToothBrusherTeeth. Other guests at the funeral included arch-nemesis Gingivitis, sidekick Pearly White, Brushy's neighbor and the Tooth Fairy. Needless to say, this was not your average funeral.

The final game was a rant game. This started with the players spreading out to cover the stage and surround the audience. One person would start ranting and then in a clockwise manner the next player would cut off the person before them and then rant about whatever they wanted to. This kept happening until they went around the circle three times. On the second time around the circle people picked up right where they left off in their rants. On the third round, everyone started overlapping each other so the audience felt engulfed in rants. It grew to a climactic end, to which Darby, who was ranting about how bad Tigger is from "Winnie the Pooh," said, "[Tigger is] a complete and utter prick!" And on that note, the show was done.

Overall, this show was a great time and an event which put a huge smile on my face. The day after the show a lot of the people who were in the show visited my Twitter and retweeted, quote tweeted and liked their favorite parts of the show. It made me feel proud that someone was enjoying my live tweets. Congratulations to the Fearless ShenANYgans cast on a brilliant performance!