In case you missed it, this past weekend was the thirteenth RAWR Comedy Festival, presented by Full Ammo Improv, a student club.

The festival, which ran from March 20 and March 21 in the HUB, blessed its audience with two days of non-stop laughs from improv groups and comedians across the country. All those laughs were separated across the two nights, neatly organized into “Improv Night” and “Standup Night,” both of which were completely free for all.

The festival keeps itself free on principle: The point is to make people laugh.

Improv Night

The festival began with “Improv Night” in the Flex Theater of the HUB. The room was packed to the brim, with a few of the comedy fans even sitting on the stairs. The first night of RAWR brought us five improv-comedy groups during the three-hour show, including RAWR’s founders themselves: Full Ammo Improv.

The rest of the groups traveled to the festival from all across the country: Ohio State, UConn, UVA, and Los Angeles (not from a college, just an improv group). Each one brought their own style and techniques to the broad medium of improv, giving us a show few are likely to forget.

8th Floor Improv, hailing from Ohio State, kicked off the festival with a series of sketches covering ridiculous topics from the merging of two clashing vision boards to ghost sexuality. It was difficult to keep up with each new idea, and the trio moved from one to another at breakneck speed.

Then came the University of Virginia’s Whethermen. This troupe was much larger than the openers and used the deep cast to its fullest extent, performing a long-form improvised “play” based on the audience’s suggestion of a “non-geographical location”, whatever that means.

The suggestion given was “Party City,” which devolved quickly into a morality play between partying and evil, with the mayor of “Evil City” being slowly convinced that being evil might not be all it’s cracked up to be. As each new scene began, you could see the cast members trying (and failing) to predict where the hell this was going, until the saga ended with triumphant kazooing from the mayor of Evil City and his trusty Imp, as they entered the once-hated Party City. Tears.

UConn’s Reckless Comedy came next, with a handful of improv-centric games. First, two of the comedians improvised a scene (from an audience member’s suggestion of Atlantis) about a human visiting the underwater city and arguing with the mermaid about xenophobia.

A third member of the group stood by, calling for the players to “switch” their previous line to a different, also fully off-the-cuff, line. Then, four of them stood in a square (as if playing four-square), and took suggestions of the scene locations from the audience (they were: space, the wild west, Chili’s, and war).

The two comedians in the front would begin their scene, before cutting it off at a random moment. Then, all four would rotate, and the next scene would begin (with one new cast member and one from the last scene). This repeated a few times, with each scene spiraling away from whatever it had begun with, including connections to other ones and interjections from other members of the group.

Again, it was a complete whirlwind of impromptu laughs. Reckless Comedy ended its set with another two-person scene, this time about the disaster at Chornobyl. Despite the inspiration, these two comedians turned their bleak setting into an insane battle to save the world from the invasion of some mysterious bug parasite creatures, which setting off Chornobyl would prevent. Reckless Comedy’s final two performers sacrificed themselves to save us all in the end. There was not one dry eye in the room.

After Reckless Comedy, Penn State’s very own Full Ammo Improv graced the stage. Beginning with a conversation segment, where two people would sit and chat about whatever insane ideas popped into their heads. At random moments, another member of Full Ammo would drop in, kick one of them out, and start a brand new conversation, equally insane but not necessarily related.

From there, Full Ammo proved they were just as inventive as the rest of these improvisers, jumping from skit to skit without stopping. There was a man who installed a haunted house in his home (a callback, of course), a pregnant woman rollercoaster club (acted out by three guys, of course), and the act of killing 10-15 birds with a single stone. A lot went on.

To end the day, the GUNK comedy trio gave their performance. The group, hailing from Los Angeles, jumped from scene to scene in a stream of consciousness that I could barely keep up with — all the laughing I was doing didn’t help. There was a prison, where one of the characters was imprisoned there by his father (the warden) “for his own good”, a landlord who decided to destroy his building “in memory of New Year’s Eve,” and a scene from Master Chef where the second-best dish involved a blown-out tire, and the best was made entirely of poo.

Somehow, despite the broad range of subjects tackled, each scene bled directly into the next, even when we somehow arrived at the deathbed of the warden’s cook’s landlord’s father, where two brothers battled with such powers as the Force and Avada Kedavra, just to name a few. The battle was something out of a Kindergarten playground.

Standup Night

Night two of the RAWR festival, “Standup Night,” was held in the Freeman Auditorium of the HUB. A much larger space than the night before, the crowd still nearly filled the place. Standup Night consisted of nine comedians over the same timeframe as Improv Night, with four of them being Penn State students.

Nathan Ra kicked off the night for the student comedians, followed by Rhett Pomeroy, Grace Holmgren, and Zane Lightner. Each brought their own flair to the stage, with Pomeroy performing entirely with his pants down (while wearing America-themed underwear) and Holmgren detailing the flaws of health education in religious rural towns.

Afterwards, the touring comedians came to the stage, beginning with Aaron Westberry, giving deep insights into stone-age comedians and his thoughts on the TPUSA halftime show. Allie Lawrence came next, and then Jonas Gindin (a Philly native who is a part of a group with Aaron Westberry). Josh Mandl hit us with some crowd work, asking about half the room about their majors.

Closing the night was Ray Lau, who had the entire room laughing with his stories about belly-dancing classes and being his own boss, before running through some jokes he had written in preparation for a future gig, a roast of Kevin Hart. Without the restrictions of censorship from a network (or, let’s be honest, Kevin himself), Lau went for the jugular on the Ride Along 2 star, and I’m just glad I got to see it.

Walking home after the two nights of RAWR, my stomach ached from all the laughing I had done. I’ve seen improv and standup before, but the festival setting brought something completely new to me. Each improv troupe was wildly different from the next, even when they had similar setups on paper.

The random nature of improv is what makes it so entertaining, and while it may scare the hell out of me, each and every person was put under bright lights in a hot room and came up with something ridiculous, bringing the riot of the crowd back up to maximum levels.

The standup was just as fun as you’d expect. I was a fan of two of the comedians going in, and had heard two of the standups before (see this article), but seeing the entire setlist back to back showed me how broad and creative the form can be. Whether it’s crowd work, failing to juggle, or good old jokes, comedy comes in many forms, and all make people laugh.