Last Friday, in the seats of Pigott auditorium, an eager audience chattered excitedly. When the hour struck 7 p.m., the D1 Improv team jolted up from seats in the auditorium where they had been hiding among the audience. Their grand entrance was met with roars of applause. The show had begun.

D1 Improv, Seattle University’s improv club, hosted its first show of winter quarter, inspired by Dropout TV’s  “Make Some Noise.” Dropout is a comedy group that uploads content on its own streaming service and YouTube. Normally, on the “Make Some Noise” series, there are three contestants. D1 improv has nine members who formed sub-teams within the group: “Fin nights at Fionas,” “Aubrey and Gigi of the Babes” and “Tag We’re It (cool velociraptors).” 

“You’re always jumping into the abyss, and you have no idea what’s about to happen, but sometimes you’re doing a scene, and you just know exactly what narrative beat needs to hit next, and it’s a euphoric feeling,” Fin Donovan, president of D1 Improv and a fourth-year philosophy and English major said. 

The show was structured by teams rotating through one, two and three person scenes sprinkled with mini-games in between.

Many unforgettable bits were born that night, and the audience’s laughter echoing through the building could disrupt any nearby class. During the singles portion of the night, Fourth-year Theatre major Aubrey Thompson delivered a rendition of the biblical Moses with a New York accent running out of plague ideas. A plague that received unbelievable amounts of laughter during the bit was “it’s all goop.”

Tessa Shanen, second-year philosophy major, shared some of the team’s strengths and weaknesses during shows.

“I think I’m really good at what we call pimping, which is just setting up jokes for other people, or sometimes we call it ‘glue versus glitter.’ I’m good at setting up environments and punch lines for other people to jump off of,” Shanen said.

The duo rounds for the teams, in which the groups of three took turns switching partners, involved creating real-life fantasies from pre-written prompts tailored to their strengths. One skit had two members acting out how the Riddler, a Batman supervillain who layers riddles into his crimes to trick Batman, would contribute to a Seattle U class. In the imaginary 9 a.m. UCOR ethics class, the Riddler answers every question with a question, bringing the class to a snail crawl, all the while students beg the Riddler to stop with the riddles.

Between duos and trios, members played the mini-game “Vent It Out,” which is exactly what it sounds like. D1 Improv acted out scenarios based on examples provided by audience members, which included when the Bottom Line in Pigott runs out of bagels before it closes, dogs wearing sweaters and being stalked, which put the audience on the edge of their seats.

Ginger Schreiber, a third-year photography major, was excited for the format of this performance because it was something they hadn’t tried since being a part of the club. 

“I haven’t played around with the format as much, so it was really fun to see how that came together and how people enjoyed it. It was fun to try that new thing, especially in Pigott, which we don’t usually get to perform in,” Schreiber said.

Before the curtain fell, D1 Improv graced the audience with trio performances from the entire team, creating longer-formed scenes. The trio that would take the cake for their scene would be “Tag We’re It (cool velociraptors)’s” depiction of mobsters running a PBS show. Originally, the three mafiosos are chatting on a side street, smoking imaginary cigars and arguing over who is doing whose mother, in Italian accents. Suddenly, two of them turn into children, keeping up the Italian accents and imaginary cigars, but now in a baby voice and on the stage floor, all while the other mobster explains what the birds and the bees are. One raises their hand with so much passion to let everyone know their favorite bird is a parakeet; silly mobster child, that’s not what they were talking about.

At the end of the show, the winning team of the night was crowned with the Golden Ear, the prize given to the winner of “Make Some Noise” at the end of each episode. This was awarded to the team with the highest audience applause, but in a final twist, D1 Improv announced that the Golden Ear was under an audience member’s seat all along. Once it was found by an audience member, it was revealed that they could personally decide who wins it all, which ended up being the enthralling performance from “Tag We’re It (cool velociraptors).”

For anyone who finished reading and realized that they desperately need more of this improv in their lives, D1 Improv has its annual Valentine’s-themed show Feb. 6 at 7 p.m. in Wyckoff Auditorium.