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Don’t let the name fool you: The People’s Liberation Improv Troupe is apolitical, unless a love of laughter classifies them as left wing. The group, which takes the stage at the TakeOut Comedy Club on the first Friday of every month, is the only regularly performing improvisational troupe in Hong Kong. Their July 3 show, Independence Day: A Very Special Comedy Improv Show About Freedom, Alien Invasion, and Really Bad Movies, features brand new improv games with names like Shatner and Transformers designed to riff on summer blockbusters. PLI members Nick Milnes, Joanna Sio, Chris and Sean Coleman, Kay Ross, Pete Grella, and Chris Carmen chatted with bc about everything from Ice Spiders to the trouble with Tourette’s.

On Hong Kong’s comedy scene:
Chris Coleman: Um…
Kay: Growing.
[laughter]
Chris Coleman: Yes. Young but growing. This [TakeOut Comedy Club] is the only club that is dedicated to comedy. There’s another place that brings in comedians from abroad once a month, but every weekend there are shows here.
Sean: With homegrown comics.
Chris Coleman: And everything else seems relatively ephemeral, I think. Nick, would you say?
Nick: Remind me what ‘ephemeral’ means.
Chris Coleman: Diaphanous.
Nick: Right. Thanks for clarifying. Of course, we’re talking about English language. There’s a very well-established Cantonese stand-up culture.

On their audience:
Chris Coleman: We hope everybody who likes comedy will give us a chance. The great thing about improv is that it’s very easy for us to play to the audience, if the audience is participating. It’s not somebody coming and doing something they’ve prepared that doesn’t have anything to do with you. This has much more give and take. But we don’t embarrass the audience, so nobody has to feel afraid to come see us.

On jokes getting lost in translation:
Nick: Yeah, sure. Sometimes the jokes would be lost in translation for an English speaker who wasn’t familiar with the particular culture of the person making the joke. But I think the thing about our work – our ‘oeuvre’ – is that the jokes come so thick and fast it’s like buses – if you don’t get that joke, there’ll be another one along any minute.
Kay: And equally, it’s not just the audience that sometimes misses the joke. We’re such a multicultural group – Australians, British, Americans, Canadians, all sorts – that sometimes we don’t even get each other’s jokes. And that’s funny.

On their favorite bad movies:
Chris Coleman: I think Independence Day was just awful. I was so upset when Will Smith got in to kill the alien and took over his ship without knowing a bit of alien technology.
Pete: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. It wasn’t even a B-movie, it was like C or D.
Kay: The Da Vinci Code. Not that that’s an alien movie.
Sean: I have a love for the really terrible CGI monster movies. There was one, Ice Spiders. These guys are at a Colorado ski lodge in and there’s a base where the military is experimenting with spiders. And then they are defeated with skiing, and explosions.
Nick: I hate The Green Mile. Maybe doesn’t qualify as a bad movie – it was a bad movie.

On bad suggestions from the audience:
Nick: You get ‘gay porn’ a lot.
Kay: And ‘Tourette’s.’
Sean: Tourette’s is all right.
Sean: A crowd of reasonably drunk people were here, we asked for a general sort of topic, and one guy yells out ‘Herpetology!’
Chris Coleman: That was an excellent one.
Sean: I loved that one. ‘Ah, you mean the study of snakes and lizards.’

On that group’s name:
Sean: I think we just thought it was funny.
Chris Coleman: I think we were playing on the idea of liberation, really meaning it. Free to do improv.
Kay: Without censorship.
Chris Coleman: We’re not particularly political. But we can be, if you want us to be. If we get those suggestions from the audience, by God, we will be.

Independence Day - 9:30pm, July 3 at the TakeOut Comedy Club
(34 Elgin Street, SoHo, 6220-4436). Tickets are $150.

What is Improv?
Improvisation, or improv, is a form of comedy in which a group of performers act out unscripted scenes, using only their own quick wits and, usually, a suggestion from an audience member to get them started. In ‘long form improv’, performers act out lengthy scenes without any limitations, and in ‘short form improv’ the comedians create scenes while playing games that force them to obey certain rules. In the game Questions, for example, improvisers may only ask each other questions – nobody is allowed to make a statement. Although this style of comedy has been around for decades, the British television show Whose Line Is It Anyway? (1988-98) brought improv into the mainstream.