Drawn like magnets to the Magnet Theatre

             As you walk into the dimly lit room covered in photographs and cartoons, you have trouble finding who was in charge. There are table all around and when you finally make your way over to the cashier, she has three tattoos and three piercings to match. The Magnet Theatre really scared me at first and I couldn’t believe that it was the second best improv comedy show in the city.  After paying for our tickets, we were offered a sheet of questions and told we could answer any of them anonymously and the comedians would use them up on stage. This I was familiar with so we wrote down something funny and we then asked to wait as the show wouldn’t start for another ten minutes.

            My friend and I decided we needed to use the restroom so we had to go into the auditorium where the cast was rehearsing. Standing in the line, all we heard the comedians doing was saying the name of male genitalia in different voices. My friend and I looked at each other and the couple in line next to us put it perfectly, “Thank goodness this only cost $10.” However, everything changed when we were allowed to go to our seats and the show began. The comedians had an outline of the show they had in mind, but also needed to include audience suggestions. So during an interview, when one of the male comedians looked at his piece of paper, he had to incorporate “fear of bomb falling on my head” into his parent teacher conference. This was the best part of the show. The comedians had such a connection that they could easily bounce ideas of each other and even fix a skit when something was going wrong.

One of my favorite parts of the show was when the comedians would make the skit harder for each other. One of the male comedians was sitting behind the wheel of a fake car and was fighting with his “wife”. He wanted to start an argument about the wife’s mother, but then another comedian came onto the stage and pretended to be a police officer. He pulled the couple over and asked why the steering wheel was so high. The look on the “husband’s” face was priceless as the comedian tried to rearrange his skit. It was refreshing to see how the comedians weren’t scared to try something new and step out of their comfort zones for a laugh.

The Magnet Theatre is located on 254 W29th St in Manhattan and is rather small compared to the hype it has received from audiences on the Internet. The auditorium is divided into three sections that face a small 7×7 stage. The comedians that aren’t on stage hide out behind the pillars, but certain sections of the audience can still see them and how they would try not to laugh at what was going on onstage. However, that would have been annoying, if it wasn’t for the hyenas in the audience who started laughing as soon as the comedians introduced themselves and didn’t stop until closing. And this would have even been okay if something funny happened, but how would you like to be sitting in the audience trying to hear the punch line when all of sudden a boom of high pitched laughter hits your ears and ruins the joke. After being shushed a few times, they lowered the volume of their laughter, but not the quantity.

The comedians succeeded in proving that this was really a comedy club and got some good jokes in that we original and creative. They didn’t use any clichés or old jokes reinterpreted in different ways, which I have noticed from other comedy shows and this has caused me to be cautious of improv comedy. I was really glad that I had listened to my friend’s pleas to go with her because this show revived my love of comedy and made me want to come back again and again. And they didn’t need to use foul language, which I feared after watching their warm up. One of the worst mistakes of many comedians is that they feel they need to be vulgar to get a laugh, which sometimes is true, but this isn’t a genuine laugh because something was funny. When an audience member laughs at a cuss, it’s usually because they do not hear it in their everyday lives so it becomes more of a shock laugh than a real laugh. These five comedians rarely used any bad words and still had us clinging our stomachs from laughing too much.

Overall, the Friday Night Improv show at the Magnet Theatre was a refreshing and fun experience. I was uneasy about going because I had been to many cheesy and overdone improv shows before and they had made me regret going so I was worried that this would have been the same thing. Boy was I wrong. I didn’t know just how wrong until the lights went on again and I realized that not a single thought of leaving or boredom came into my mind throughout the entire show. The personalities of the comedians themselves and the personas they embodied came together in an energizing mix of humor and innovation. A must see for lovers of comedy and anybody just looking for a good time on a Friday night.