AND WE REALLY HATE EACH OTHER
As an example of YIF’s ingenuity, take their handling of an exercise in which a character is to be afflicted with a rare behavioral disease suggested by the audience. An unimaginative spectator saddled Michael Elyanow with Tourette syndrome, and the actor had to go with it–but he combined Tourette with narcolepsy to produce a disability not only original but funny. In another sketch three comedians who’ve made their reputations on homophobic caricatures find themselves unable to shed their cartoonish personas. “But everybody was doing “gay guy’ gags!” one of them protests. “Robin Williams, the In Living Color TV show, even Andrew Dice Clay, who is gay!” A truly sinister sketch involved a boy haunted by a nasty troublemaker whom no one else can see; he turns out to be a flesh-and-blood psychiatrist hired by the boy’s stepmother to harass him into accepting therapy for the unresolved oedipal tensions she believes she induces.
