“Ok, so this right now is a jam session,” a friend of mine says to me in the dimly lit lecture-hall-turned-theater of the Forum Building. “Basically, it’s a bunch of people from different troupes who don’t know each other messing around for filler time.”

I’m at the RAWR Improv festival, an event hosted by Penn State’s Full Ammo Improv troupe as an opportunity to bring other improv comedy groups together at Penn State. This is the eighth year of RAWR, which pulls itself together from UPAC, SPA, and donation funds. The festival keeps itself free on principle: The point is to make people laugh.

There’s a skit on stage about something to do with linguistics experts and thesauruses. At 8:15 on a Friday night, the room that I’m guessing can seat upward of 300 people has about 40 or so. Laughter skitters unpredictably among the clusters of audience members, certain lines landing with some people and missing their mark with others. The result is a patchwork of acknowledgement, making it difficult for the uninitiated to tell what they’re supposed to laugh at.

“This is a linguistics emergency! We need an expert!” one improviser shouts, and one of the actors waiting in the wings for her opportunity lumbers onstage dopily with an affectedly thick good-ol‘-boy accent. “I hear y’all need an English expert!” she declares to more scattered laughter. I realize that my head is cocked at the I-don’t-get-it angle. “Jam sessions are pretty much the bane of improv’s existence,” my friend adds.

Improvised comedy (or “improv”) hardly needs an explanation — all you need to know is right there in the title. Groups of comedians come together on a stage and work from premises, usually one-word suggestions from audiences, that coalesce into sketches only by the grace of the performers’ mental agility and chemistry.

Troupes practice together to get a feel for rhythm (and, in the case of professional troupes, to develop a distinctive style of performance), but improvisers commit themselves to no prior preparation: everything must be made up on the fly. The universal rule is “yes, and,” which basically means that any suggestion made by an improv actor must be both affirmed and expanded upon by the others to continue the skit.

Teams run with good ideas and try to make them funnier, deploying all of the comedic tricks they’ve practiced — parody, impression, callback, overdramatization, and so on — for the sake of weaving the on-the-spot jokes into semi-coherent art. All of this is to say that there is a reason why improvisers practice as much as they do. It’s hard.

The jam session continues with a different mix of people, and it immediately becomes clear who knows whom in the group. Improvisers who haven’t worked together before have to work out social and artistic unfamiliarity on the stage in real time, leading to the patches of performative iciness that led my friend to tell me that jam sessions are really more social exercise than performance.

“WELCOME TO EVERYONE’S FAAAVORITE SURPRISE BATHROOM GAME SHOW,” one actor bellows, and the comedians run to form the scene. Some act as audience members, cheering and hissing as those remaining onstage answer toilet trivia. “SIT DOWN!” one of the fake audience members yells as the sketch’s straight man tries to leave the imaginary bathroom before he’s earned his freedom, and the sketch concludes with an ode to the art of defecation. The laughter isn’t patchworked this time: the scene ends with universal applause, the spectators in Forum having forgotten the awkward unfamiliarity at the beginning of the scene. It worked.

Comedy is by its very nature hit-or-miss. Fans of even the best sketch shows know that not everything can be funny, and the greats have all produced duds. Writers go with what works and cut what doesn’t, but in improv, this culling process happens at breakneck speed in real time, and when the professional troupes from NYC come on for the night, their skill in knowing what’s funny shows.

I only got to see the warm-up described above and the Upright Citizens Brigade (which was founded by Amy Poehler, by the way) troupes Friday night, which ran the gamut of improvisational technique. Ice Cold Bev, the first troupe, improvised a continuous sketch with many cutaway scenes and locations (almost like a sitcom episode written and performed on the spot) based entirely on the suggestion of “color.” Unfortunately, writing about something so uniquely you-had-to-be-there as improv comedy prevents me from giving you a scence-by-scene analysis, but suffice it to say that Ice Cold Bev told a tale of haircuts, an egotistical barber, military intelligence, and flirtatious wrestling… and amazingly, it worked.

Intimacy with the crowd, I learned Friday night as I watched about three hours of the show, acts as the binding glue that allows improv to function. It takes a good deal of restraint on my part to resist going on and on about the DeLillo-esque relationship between audience and performance and language, but there really is something quietly profound about improv. The audience wants to laugh. It begs the performers to succeed, and the crowd forgives when the odd line that doesn’t work is jettisoned for a better premise.

The comedians and spectators share the same fundamental space of watching and media familiarity. Comedy in the world of improv rests upon our knowledge and faith that everything we consume entertainment-wise can be boiled down to a trope and lampooned. Rumpleteaser, the group who followed Ice Cold Bev, improvised an entire musical (replete with live piano and earwormy songs) from the word “superhero,” and their creation demonstrated utter deftness with the audience’s expectations; I found myself cheering both at the sheer cleverness of the songs’ lyrics and the legitimately impressive musical numbers themselves.

Although I don’t know whether a musical that features Benito Mussolini as a pasta-slinging villain will make to Broadway (even though I do hope Rumpleteaser sits down and writes that out — it was just that damn funny), the beats the troupe hit aligned one-to-one with both superhero narratives and musicals’ structure: opening number, introduction of the characters and the conflict, songs describing motives, a love subplot with its own song, a dramatic fight, and finally a reprise of the opening number. ALL ON THE FLY. I could hardly believe they pulled it off.

In this way, improv acts as a sort of teamwork hallucination. Suspension of disbelief is necessary not only on the part of the audience but also of the performers. Questions cannot be asked — the only viable fodder for the act is what we all collectively know. Recreation and subversion form an unpredictable tango on the stage when improv is done well, and everyone in the theater joyously agrees to forget that it’s all made-up. Remember the feeling you had when you were five years old and played pretend based on the movie you just saw? Seeing good improv comedy reinvigorates that impulse, giving it form and depth without sacrificing the childish wonder.