What would truly be a tragedy would be if Dudley Riggs Brave New Workshop closed.
The Brave New Workshop Comedy Theater (
BNW), is a sketch and
improvisational comedy theater based in
Minneapolis,
Minnesota. The artists of the BNW have been writing, performing and producing live
sketch comedy and improvisation performances for 61 years – longer than any other theater in the nation.
When I was in high school, in the late 1960s, BNW had an open (i.e., free) completely improvised session on Saturday nights, beginning about 11 pm after the regularly scheduled Saturday night show. One standing feature of the show was Dudley obtaining a copy of the Saturday night early edition of the Sunday morning Minneapolis Tribune. He would sit on a stool, and go through the paper, offering pithy and hilarious commentary. Very much like they used to say you could give Johnathan Winters a copy of the Yellow Pages, and he would leave you in stitches.
One that I still chuckle over happened when President Lyndon Johnson dispatched VP Hubert Humphrey on some foreign trip to represent the US. Riggs read the headline and the first sentence of the story, lowered the newspaper, and pushed his reading glasses down on his nose. Then peering over the top of this glasses at us he said, "OK - so President Johnson is sending Hubert Humphrey a broad."
It must have been five minutes before the laughter subsided enough for him to carry on.
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