Looking for an interactive, exciting, and completely unexpected night?  That’s what you get in a night of ComedySportz.  Westside’s team competed on November 23rd, against formidable opponents from Tompkins High School and Spring Woods High School, and came out victorious by a score of 32 points to 27 points, respectively.

Westside was behind the entire game until the very end. In this exciting night the final game was “Waiter There’s a blank in My Soup”. In this interactive game an audience member is called up on stage to be the restaurant goer and they will fill in the blank from the title of the game while players run up to make a witty pun about what is in the person’s soup.

What is ComedySportz?  Founded in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 1984, by Dick Chudnow, ComedySportz is improv entertainment for the whole family.  CSz’s Interscholastic League is the largest, most successful improve training ground for high school students in the country. From their website,

“We play improvisation as a team sport, with two teams “competing” for audience laughs. The stage is covered in turf, there’s a referee and the players are in uniform. It’s not comedy about sports; it’s comedy played as a sport. Because everyone knows what a sport is, there is immediate buy-in from the audience. People who have never been to the theatre before walk through the door because they’re not intimidated. Because it’s improvisational, it’s always different, and you will have fans that come to every performance.”

Audiences love it, as they get to be part of the action, throwing our suggestions, and crazy directions for competitors to follow.  But it’s the students that benefit most, it seems.  Morgan Sultemeier, a team member from Tompkins High School said “It’s like a family. I love it and I love meeting kids from other schools. I also like learning all of the games and it can be hard, but I like to make people laugh .”

To make the team, students audition, and then follow guidelines and rules, like any sport.  They wear specific uniforms that are black pants with a CSz shirt that is either red, black or, blue .  Last week our Westside team was “the Blue Team”,  and even though they clearly had home field advantage in our Black Box Theatre, they were the stronger team.  Winning the hilarious “Try that on for size” round.  Spring Woods was good, and their Alligator skit was laugh out loud funny.  Westside proved too consistent, and on their game.

Enjoying her first CSz performance, Westside junior Vivian Romero said, “It was funny and it wasn’t what I expected.”

History on Comedy Sportz from: http://www.comedysportzhouston.com/pages/history.jsp