Unscripted Hilarity
Reflections on a decade of giggles with Idaho’s own Laff Staff member
Terror and exhilaration filled my gut. I was standing behind the curtain waiting to perform in my first Laff Staff improv show. After an audition process that began with more than twenty actors, John Morgan and I had made the cut. My mind raced with doubts. “What if I can’t think of anything?” “What if I do think of something and it’s stupid?”
I’ve loved improv since my high school theater days. We played classic improvisation games like ‘Freeze,’ where two actors begin an improvised scene only to be interrupted by another player yelling “Freeze!” That player takes one actor’s exact body position and creates a new scene inspired by the position. Those high school scenes were filled with terrible accents and rarely made sense, but they were thrilling. At night, I’d pop on the television to watch Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles of Whose Line Is It Anyway? create rich characters and scenes that had plots and creative conflicts. I thought they were comedic gods.
Improv, an art form in which actors create scenes, songs, and sometimes entire plays inspired by audience suggestions, has been around since the dawn of storytelling. As early as 300 BC, Romans were improvising stock characters for audiences. The form was reinvented in the Renaissance with Commedia dell’arte and again in the early twentieth century with vaudeville. Modern improv is found on TV shows like the aforementioned Whose Line Is It Anyway? and on stages across the globe. Actors study it to improve their craft, and corporate groups use it to build teams and encourage innovation.
The Laff Staff, Jackson Hole’s resident improv troupe, began performing in 2008. Today, the troupe consists of original members Brian Lenz and Nick Staron, Chris Staron and Kjera Griffith (2009), myself and John Morgan (2011), Josh Griffith (2012), Jackie Hart (2014) and newest members Roan Eastman and Joe Waller (2020).
Until 2011, improv to me was goofiness at summer camp, being weird with the drama kids in high school, drinking games in college, and, in the months before I auditioned, teaching kids how to “act.” A friend saw an advertisement for auditions in the Jackson Hole Daily and told me I had to go. The idea seemed ridiculous, but I was ready for a new adventure.
“What I love about our group is that we all ended up here on a whim,” says Kjera Griffith. “I started out selling beer for the shows. Eventually, they let me on stage.”
“I remember walking in there for the first time and feeling like I was auditioning for Saturday Night Live,” Nick Staron says. “The first scene I performed in [I] was sitting on a nude beach. I played a character who was really self-conscious, while my scene partner was as comfortable as can be. Thank goodness for pantomiming nudity.”
“Back then we played a lot of short simple games,” says Brian Lenz, who prior to Laff Staff performed with Out of Thin Air, Jackson’s first improv troupe. “There wasn’t a lot of character development. Now we have a bit more depth.” Brian describes today’s scenes as being more diverse with mid-form improv, which refers to creating multiple scenes based on one suggestion. They also involve better characters.
“But let’s not kid ourselves, it’s still a lot of the same jokes,” he says. A strength of Laff Staff is knowing what works with a Jackson or Idaho crowd and what doesn’t. Hilarious: mocking ski bums and the lack of affordable housing. Misses the mark: National politics. Audiences enjoy coming to the twice-monthly Jackson shows at the Center for the Arts and the annual Teton Valley show at Victor’s Wildwood Room in part as a way of escaping what’s happening in the national news.
“Before our Wildwood Room show, we always have to ask Mel [that’s me, the lone Idaho resident] what is going on in Teton Valley,” says member Jackie Hart.
Despite what the group comes up with, old jokes or not, the crowd keeps coming year after year. Dale Sharkey, a regular Wildwood Room attendee, says she enjoys the deep belly laughs. “I like laughing with my community about things we share,” she says.
“The Laff Staff’s success was never rooted in how many jokes we could come up with, but rather the recipe of the cast,” says Andrew Munz, former member (who sometimes comes back to play with the troupe). In most improv troupes, the group dynamic changes often, with members leaving after a few months. In contrast, The Laff Staff’s core group of players have been improvising together for years. Roan Eastman and Joe Waller, who joined early in the winter of 2020, were the group’s first new team members in six years.
“Holding auditions is stressful for us,” says Chris Staron, who has been with the Laff Staff since 2009. “We are like a family. In fact, many of us are family.” Chris’ twin brother is Nick Staron, and member Kjera met her future husband Josh through the group.
“But we knew that with jobs, kids, and schedules, if we wanted to survive we needed new blood,” Chris says.
“The chemistry of the group shows,” says Jackson resident and regular audience member Robin Miller.
“It amazes me how they all basically read each other’s mind to play their games,” says Daria, who goes by one name, a member of a group of Teton Valley regulars who travel Teton Pass each month to catch a show.
It’s true. We are all so close that we do read each other’s minds and truly embody the improv mantra of “got your back.” That terror I felt during my first improv shows has dissipated. Now, I go along with any crazy idea no matter how silly, and I know that my troupe family will follow along with my absurd schemes. Do the scenes always make sense? No. Have my accents gotten any better? Not really. But when it works, which it does more often than not, it is like magic.