Laughing at a Wallaby Song

             Laughter is a curious thing. Even more curious is the ability to make a person laugh. Somehow, saying the right words in the correct order is refreshing, new, and funny to the ears it falls upon. I sometimes make people laugh, because I am a member of Senseless Acts of Comedy (that is the improv comedy troupe at Texas Christian University), and we have performances every Thursday and people often laugh. It is a weird feeling when someone laughs at your joke. You feel a sense of pride because you thought of something that could be funny and then nervously sent out into the world and hope that people like it. You are either met with laughter or silence and there are few things in this world as incredible as hearing the laughs, and few things as discouraging as the response of silence. One such time that I cause the audience to howl with uncontrollable laughter is while playing an improv game called “poems”. The premise of the game is simple: you create a character, get a topic from the audience, and then create a poem based on that topic. The topic given at the show was wallaby and the character that I decided to play a small child. Then I improvised the poem:

Wallaby, Wallaby your so cool

You’re my favorite marsupial

I am unsure why, but these first two lines resulted in an audience uproar of laughter. I had to pause the poem for over a minute in order to allow the hysterics to stop. People were laughing and I was surprised at how easy it was to obtain the laugh but more importantly over a hundred people were happy for a moment.