The Mutiny’s bounty

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, Nov. 8, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Here's the sound of men working on the brain gang: "Yo yo, ski watten datten, mm mm mm," eight voices singsong in nonsensical union backstage at Boulder Station's Railhead Saloon.

"Itsy bitsy ski watten datten, mm mm mm!" What might be a bit of scat-singing fun for the rest of us is, for members of The Mutiny comedy troupe, mental knuckle-cracking, mind calisthenics designed to flex their brains into readiness for the two hours of improvisational comedy to come. They've been throwing mindless phrases back and forth, imitating and elaborating on each one, limbering up whatever ganglia produce spontaneous human comedy.

"Like an infomercial host," barks Sam Tripoli, who will act as tonight's host. The others phrase their yo yo, ski watten dottens with the big-grin oiliness of your typical late-night TV huckster.

They ski watten dotten like Capt. Kirk, like a disc jockey, like Astro, the Jetson's dog.

"Like a pregnant woman," Sam yells, and as they yo yo, ski watten dotten, mm mm mm amid groans of mock labor, by God, you can almost feel the baby move. It's four minutes to show time, and they're as ready as they're going to be. The Mutiny is under way.

As it is every Wednesday night from 7-9 p.m. in the Railhead, where The Mutiny -- Tripoli, Lee Scott, Markus Kublin, Ron Mohl, Todd Agnello, Vaughn Pine, Jone Branch and, yes, even Peter Dubowsky -- have presented their show, "Laughter Shocks," for several months now.

"What is improv comedy?" Sam asks the audience as he opens the show, quickly answering his own question: "It's comedy made right here on stage, based on suggestions from the audience." The troupe provides the broad outlines of each scene -- say, a police interrogation -- while the audience provides the specifics on the crime, victim, weapon and location. The wackier the better. The actors have to create plot, dialogue, characterization and humor right there.

Improv has to be the hardest buck in comedy. Imagine it: On stage in front of a bunch of people demanding nothing more than that you make them laugh. Only you have no script, no "act" between you and dead silence. Sure, you probably have a little previously tested material squirreled away -- a killer Sean Connery imitation, for instance -- but it's only useful insofar as it fits the scene the audience has helped devise. Ready, set, be funny!

"It's about rising to the challenge," Markus had said after the previous week's show as the Mutineers tied on the post-show feedbag in Boulder Station's buffet room. They had just killed the Railhead crowd, which was almost full despite a road-slickening rain. Sam was singing, "Be all you can..." in the background.

"Pulling the humor out of thin air," Vaughn agreed.

"Or, in your case, fat air," said Peter, never afraid to careen down the low road.

"We've all had enough theater experience to know how difficult what we do is," Markus said. Ah, the few, the proud, the improv comedians.

"The reason we risk failure," said Vaughn, one of just eight comedy philosophers in the group, "is that we all want to be on TV."

It was up to Markus to go out of character for a moment and be serious: "Because of the great risk of failure," he'd said over the remains of his dinner, "when it works, it feels really good." The class clown's ultimate high.

You wouldn't want to live in the duplex unit abutting Markus Kublin's place, at least on Tuesday nights like this one -- unless, of course, you like the squawking of velociraptors and the wailing of mock opera just a thin wall away.

The Mutiny is rehearsing again.

How to rehearse an essentially unrehearsable activity? It's a process that, judging from this session, tends to involve eating many cookies until everyone's nice and hopped up on sugar, followed shortly by much shouting, the frequent pulling down of Ron's pants and a whole lotta ski watten datten.

They run through the next night's lineup of bits, using relatives, the stray feature reporter, or themselves to provide audience suggestions. Any scene that doesn't play funny, they try again, swapping pointers. The purpose is not to map out what will happen on stage; rather, the rehearsal is a whetstone against which they rub their minds to keep them sharp.

"We start off knowing the structure," Markus says, "and literally anything can happen within that structure."

Markus, Ron and Vaughn practice a game in which they improvise a scene set in a convenience store. At regular intervals, they have to continue the scene in another mood or dramatic genre.

"Slasher film!" Sam shouts, and immediately the players start hacking and chain-sawing each other.

"Hunchback of Notre Dame!" Sam shouts, and Vaughn bends over and contorts his face.

"X-rated film!" Sam shouts and -- well, picture it yourselves.

Some of the scenes are hilarious even in rehearsal. "Multiple option" has several Mutineers creating dialogue within a scenario suggested by the audience -- in this case, in-line skating. At Sam's command, the person speaking has to come up with alternatives for the last thing he said, and the word Sam chooses becomes the reality of the scene. In that fashion, the skater quickly becomes a pregnant woman giving birth to a baby (no!), monster (no!), hampster (yes!).

"It's better to have loved and given birth to a hamster than never to have loved at all," Ron riffs, ending the scene.

Some of the scenes are weak, the improvised dialogue flat and uninspired. After a while, tempers simmer but don't flare. After all, up on their propless stage, each other is all they have.

"If a scene is going badly," Ron says, "I know there are five or six other guys up there with a great joke in their head."

"We'll do anything to save a scene," says Vaughn.

"We use comedy steroids," interjects Markus. "That's an example of how sharp we are."

Several hours and untold cookies later, they call it a night and get ready to head back to their real lives as waiters, performers at Caesars Magical Empire or the Treasure Island pirate show. Peter's a lawyer, Sam "a migrant farm worker."

"We were trying too hard to be funny," Ron says, sharing with the group. "Tomorrow night we have to not try so hard. Just do the characters."

Sam: "We always pull together for the show. The energy of the crowd..."

"The audience is very important," John says. "It gets everyone pumped up."

Scene switch! Cut back to last week's after-show chowdown at the Algonquin Buffet Table, where spirits are almost as high as the packet of coffee cream Vaughn just tossed across the table into Sam's drink.

Lee is going over how the group congealed amid a larger local improv workshop called Goof Theatre, the explanation interrupted only by Lee pointing out that all the keno numbers he usually plays -- the very ones he'd be playing right now if not for this darned interview -- are coming up. Every single number. "It's unbelievable," he murmurs.

Each of the future Mutineers had previous acting or standup experience and chafed at the restrictions of the workshop format. They wanted gigs!

"This is going to sound conceited," Lee says, "but we all knew we were better than our environment was allowing us to be."

A few years ago, their social gatherings started turning into rehearsals and they broke away from Goof, thus the name The Mutiny (although Sandbox Theater, Comedy Fu and Brainstorm Troopers were also considered, some more briefly than others).

"By the end of the month after we left, we had our first gig," Markus says. That was at the Java Hut, where they performed every other week. "We worked the whole coffeehouse circuit," Sam says.

Which is where Judy Alberti first saw them.

Alberti is entertainment director at Boulder Station, and she was looking to program some comedy into the Railhead Saloon. Boulder Station being a locals joint, she didn't want a standup comic recycling jokes every week.

"I knew if we were going to have comedy, it would have to be improv," she says. "That's the only way to keep it fresh."

About that time, Sam, fishing for bookings, happened to call Boulder Station and ask for the entertainment director. Supply met demand.

"They're just phenomenal," she says. "Every single night I see them I just laugh and laugh. They're meeting (her expectations) and going beyond them. They fill that room every Wednesday. There's just something right about them."

From the Railhead to ... who knows? Lee thinks they'd be a natural fit in New York-New York, sort of a "Saturday Night Live" thing. Sam's just happy to have the Boulder Station gig. Naturally, they all want to be on TV.

"Sam's happy here, Lee wants to be on TV," says Peter. "And I just want a role in gay porno." To which one can only offer a hearty yo yo, ski wadden datten!

A few minutes into Wednesday night's show, it's apparent that the Convinced They're Ready for Prime Time Players have worked out whatever bugs were in the works during rehearsal. They're hitting on most cylinders, which is pretty good for improv work. Good thing, too: They're taping the show.

They open with a lightning round of "Freeze Tag," in which two players assume positions suggested by the audience and create a scene until Sam yells "Freeze!" Another player replaces one of the two and an entirely new scene begins. It moves quickly from martial arts stances to various movie scenes to electronic hockey games to "It's a Small World." The audience roars; many are regulars, including a flying wing of Air Force personnel.

Then there's "ABC," which forces players to devise a scene in which every sentence begins with successive letters of the alphabet.

The troupe divides into two teams, each given a name suggested by the audience. Tonight, it's Team Psychedelic and Team Pantyhose. Every scene that follows must feature the phrase "psychedelic pantyhose" or the offending team must sing an apology in a musical style selected by the audience.

Here is a fraction of what took place during the two-hour show: Vaughn's dead-on imitation of Cliff from "Cheers" in several settings; Peter's funny take as an old Jewish woman repeatedly knocked over; Jesus behind the wheel; Ray Charles returning a corkscrew to a Pakistani store owner; Todd's supremely mobile face; a reference to Homer, of "Illiad" fame. You may be disappointed to learn that at no time did anyone pull Ron's pants down.

And when it's over, it's really over. No amount of careful reconstruction or rehearsal can bring back any of the moments that worked. Even tonight's tape, when it eventually lands on desks at other casinos or MTV or Comedy Central, can only convey part of the story.

"That's the magic of it," Markus says. "It only works once."

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