Rural communities often face geographic isolation and crave exposure to performing arts. Lickety-Split Comedy, founded by veteran performers Karisa Bruin and Scott Morehead, is a comedy and improv group based in Pagosa Springs. Locals have the opportunity to engage in unscripted theater through a range of classes and workshops, or as an audience member at monthly shows. It is Lickety-Split’s mission to bring fun, laughter and joy to their audiences and students. Bruin and Morehead believe that anyone can learn to improvise if they are willing to give it a shot.
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Oh, I heard you’re pretty upset. *Laughter* We’re providing a space for communal laughter and joy. All these people together laughing. What could be better than that? You’re watching the Local News Network brought to you by RMW Tafoya Barrett and Associates and Dunkin’ Donuts. Hi, I am Karisa Bruin. I’m Scott Morehead. And we founded Lickety-Split Comedy. Seamless. Perfect. Actually, We were in Chicago for many years and then lived in Los Angeles for a couple years and working as improvisers and actors and writers and kind of making a career and then Performing like six nights a week. Okay. Hi Here. Many, many years later and many children later. Could I use the real bow and arrow? And the real arrow? How about no bow and arrow while mom and dad are busy? We moved to Pagosa and sort of the deal was that we were slowing things down on purpose in our entertainment career so that we could focus on raising a family. And then one day Karisa came in and she goes, we should see if we can like work with the local theater to do an improv show. And I said, that sounds like a lot of work and I do not want to do that. And I said, too bad. And so we taught a class, without ever having done a show in Pagosa. Like our first class signups were through Thingamajig Theater and Pagosa Springs Center for the Arts, where we perform and like 19 people sign up for a class. I was like, these people are very brave. I routinely thank them for jumping off the cliff, so to speak, and trusting us to do it because it was really the start of what we’ve been doing One to two times a year. We offer like an eight week introductory class. We call it improv basics. We also do drop-in workshops where it’s just like a one-off. We bring teachers in from all over. We offer all kinds of stuff because we want people to be exposed to things that they’ve never been exposed to and to try it out. Watching local Pagosans who would never otherwise be introduced to this, trying out clowning workshops, trying out like mask work workshops, watching them go, yeah, I’ll give it a try, is like the purest joy to just sit in a room and be like, these people are witnessing and experiencing this for the first time, and look at what’s happening in this room. It’s so incredible. How can we help you unlock who you are? It’s not about us. It’s not about you being like some idea of funny. It’s not about you coming up with the right witty lines. It’s not about cleverness. It’s about finding your true expression and allowing it to come through in this kind of uncertain format, which is improv. There is no amount of class taking, in my opinion, that you can take, that will get you to understand what this process is until you do it in front of an audience. Because they’re part of the conversation. The audience responds to the bravery of the performers, I think. Agreed. That’s like what is the value for the audience is like I get to laugh and I get to be awed by the bravery of people that I see at the grocery store. One of the things that we’ve discovered in doing the work is that it’s already on the map. There are all kinds of local groups. We’ve interfaced with the folks that are at Creede Rep in Durango, and we’re starting to like make this little network of artists. And what you find, especially in improv, is that everybody wants to work with everybody. It’s a super collaborative art form. It seems like we’re kind of nowhere rurally, but really the community that’s working on this is quite large For the rest of the summer. We’ve got our monthly shows. Those are on the third Mondays in July and August at Pagosa Springs Center for the Arts. And then we’ve got classes coming up. We’ll have an improv basics class in Durango and in Pagosa. We’re offering a free class for the high schoolers locally, so homeschool students. I mean, if anybody wants to drive from Bayfield or up from Ignacio or whatever, it’s eight weeks. It’s on our website. All that and more at licketysplitcomedy.com Stupid. That was beautiful. And for more stories like this, visit LNN.news.
