Teens have quickly found witty new pastime

Teenagers normally spend their Friday and Saturday nights with their friends at their favorite hangout spots. State Street, Gateway Mall and Jordan Landing are just a few of the common places you can find Salt Lake City teenagers on weekends.

However, many students from Cottonwood, Olympus and Skyline are now spending their Friday and/or Saturday nights at the new favorite spot: Quick Wits.

Quick Wits has been around for almost 10 years, but with its recent move to the Cottonwood Mall, it has become popular with the high school audience. Bob Bedore founded Quick Wits because he thought there was a need for more improvisational comedy in the valley.

At Quick Wits, there are seven people on the stage -- two teams of three and a host. Different styles of games are played throughout the two-hour show. There are audience-participation games, where an audience member joins the actors onstage. There are rounds called "head-to-head," where the two teams compete against each other for the audiences' laughter. Team games give each team a chance to entertain and gain points from judges who are randomly chosen from the audience before the game.

Each game gets a different reaction. The more popular games seem to be the ones that involve pain, water or are messy. The actors at Quick Wits are willing to take chances and do whatever it takes to please the audience.

"The mouse trap game was the funniest part," said Brandon Goers, a Cottonwood High School junior, "and then Troy (one of the actors) took the mouse trap to the face. That was pretty funny."

"Mousetrap" is a game where a team of actors are blindfolded and barefoot and do a scene on the stage filled with mousetraps. The other team gathers around and not only watches to make sure that the blindfolded actors don't fall off the stage, but also to make sure that each actor gets snapped by the mouse traps.

Actor Drew Keddington joked, "My favorite game to not play is mousetrap, so that I can throw the mousetraps on the other players."

"Drew is rude with the mousetraps," Troy Taylor said with a grin." He'll snap 'em at you! We're getting a penalty game where we can snap him and he can't do anything about it."

The teams play games that they believe will get the most laughter from the audience. However, sometimes a game may offend an audience member, and if this happens, you're allowed to call a penalty. The actor must apologize to you in any way you see fit.

The actors usually try to get a feel for the audience and what style of jokes won't be offensive. "When I play, I actually set standards at the very beginning," said actor Andrew Jensen. "I like to test the crowd to see what they're going to like and what they're not going to like. Either I'm going to be the really in-your-face actor, the loud actor, the one that points out people in the audience and makes fun of them. Or I'm not going to be that way. I'm going to be the cute guy, the one that's innocent. That's what I love about the Quick Wits style, is that we have a lot of antics in between the games so we can test the audience."

"The guys aren't like really old," said Goers of the actors, "and so we can relate to their humor and their lingo."

Bedore said that "the high school crowd probably makes up 70 percent or more of our audience."

Admission to Quick Wits is $5 per person, and since teenagers are on a tight budget, the price might be one reason the place has become a hangout. There is also time before Quick Wits starts, since the shows are at 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, for teenagers to do other activities with friends.

Location is important to Olympus senior Natalie Deesing. "It's something fun to do on the weekends, and it's not too far away."

After attending shows, if you find yourself wishing you could be onstage yourself, some of the actors, including Bedore, Taylor, Jensen and Jon Hamilton, teach classes on Saturday afternoons (577- 8323).

Brooke Niemeyer and Angie Mabey are both seniors at Cottonwood High School.

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