Ben Grant
Staff Reporter
Beep Beep Broccoli, an improv group of McDaniel College, poses for a quick portrait. Photo By Sam Segal.
Beep Beep Broccoli: An odd name for a theatre improvisation group. Where could it have originated?
“I had a fairly boring math class that wasn’t for credit,” said sophomore Chase Busto. “So I would come up with odd word groupings and Rosie Edelston would draw them. I originally planned to write a children’s song called ‘Beep Beep Broccoli’ to confuse young children. Instead, it became our theatre group.”
The group came to life when Busto and junior Cat Black were sitting around talking about Danger Sauce, another group on campus. While the two friends enjoyed Danger Sauce’s work, they had their own ideas on how to use humor.
“Danger Sauce has a lot of pop culture and inside jokes as part of their humor, and we wanted to expand the humor in our group to be more all encompassing,” Black said. “Also, I do not like being on stage when I improv, even though I do act on stage. I thought we could do improv on video and post it on You Tube.”
Black and Busto were joined by Ryan Powell and Edelston to help form the group, which has ended up with eleven members: two freshmen (Paul Griffin and Kelsey Gondick), six sophomores (Busto, Edelston, Ryan Powell, Zach Wright, Noah Patten, Drew Strahosky), and three juniors (Black, Graham Cox, and Mae Alexander.)
They want to be funny, but obviously did not want to be Danger Sauce two point zero. The group had their first meeting on October 5th. The way they worked the group was by starting out with a single plot or idea, and then everyone sort of just built from there.
“It was very exciting to see everyone else so excited about shooting our first video,” said Busto, who was thoroughly pleased with the outcome.
Perhaps improvisational broccoli will be more pleasant to take in than the vegetable kind.
