Halloween night was full of on-campus events, and one of the most popular was the Fooligans show in the Adler Theater. Students donned their Halloween costumes and crowded into the Adler last Thursday to enjoy a night of improv.
The Fooligans are Ramapo's on-campus improv group, comprised of six students. Their performances are made up of a number of skits where each Fooligan must use their improvisational talents to entertain the crowd. Each show relies heavily on audience participation, and in nearly every skit the audience has some part in the hilarity.
The first skit the Fooligans put on was called "Customer Service." The skit, during which a Fooligan is working at Walmart's return desk, is a guessing game. Each person is returning an object only using the indirect clues given. After the Fooligan playing the Walmart employee left the room, the audience yelled out different items for the "customers" to return, including a pregnancy test, a fairy costume and a trident.
The second skit was a dating game where three Fooligans posed as contestants with different problems. The audience chose these afflictions. For example, one Fooligan posed as a person with kleptomania. The fooligan playing the bachelorette then entered the room and had to guess each person's issue.
The next skit involved three Fooligans in the audience-chosen setting of Gotham. The catch? Two of the members could only say two phrases. Following was an act called "Half Life" where two performers had to put on the same scene four times, using only half the time they previously used to act it out.
The next skit was a crowd favorite called "Whose Line?" Before the show started the audience had the opportunity to write down a phrase and put it in a hat. In "Whose Line," two Fooligans had to pull out a written line at certain points in the scene and incorporate the phrase, no matter how out of context it was. This proved a favorite for the audience.
"I liked the one with the two guys where they had to draw the words out of a hat. I liked how they built it up really well… It fit really well. They read the lines with different emotions so it worked," sophomore Greg Mulroy said.
The second to last act was the longest of the show. Each Fooligan made up a different character and explained who they were and what they were doing in a monologue at the beginning of the skit. Then, a series of improvised scenes weaved a plot through the interactions of these different characters. This act was the longest, and one of the most popular of the night.
"I loved the second to last skit. They all had really different characters but they managed to intertwine their characters together," sophomore Krizia Roldan said.
The Fooligans closed the show with "Sound Machine," a skit where each Fooligan made up a phrase or sound and repeated it over and over in orchestral style, creating a kind of song.
The Fooligans did not disappoint with their Halloween show. The packed crowd laughed, clapped and was more than willing to participate when asked. According to Mulroy, the group worked well together because of their familiarity with each other's comedy.
"I enjoyed that they had really good chemistry," Mulroy said. "They all clearly worked a lot with each other and kind of knew their tendencies and would jump in at good times."
Look for more Fooligans shows throughout the semester to see this well-oiled machine in action.
rking2@ramapo.edu
