CHiPs Comedy Club performs Thanksgiving-themed show

As the lights came on in Coker Hall on Thursday night, audience members cheered, anticipating the laughs that were sure to unfold because of the Chapel Hill Players “CHiPs” Improv Club. 

CHiPs is a improv and sketch comedy club that has existed at UNC since 1995. Members of the club join, first entering on the “JV” team, INCs, before honing in on their skills to move up to the main group.

The team practices twice a week for two hours, practicing their “games” or rehearsing their sketches, to ultimately prepare for the 2 shows they perform each semester.

For their second show of this semester, the members of the club titled the performance “Chips Go Back in Time to the First Thanksgiving to Get Turkey OFF the Menu. That’s Right. Chips Go Back in Time to the First Thanksgiving to Get Turkey OFF the Menu” — inspired by the 2013 film "Free Birds".

The theme, which might sound a little odd, is a perfect representation of the club as a whole: funny, witty and just a little bit confusing.

Brooke Elliott, a senior media and journalism major who has been in the club since her first semester at UNC, said she put down the theme as a joke because it randomly popped in her mind. After that, she said the rest of the members decided it was the perfect headline for the performance which took place one week before Thanksgiving. 

“Our show themes, I will say, are more like guidelines,” she said. “So I don’t want anyone to be disappointed if they do come to the show and we don’t go back in time to the first Thanksgiving to get turkey off the menu, that’s right, go back in time to the first Thanksgiving to get turkey off the menu.”

When it ultimately came time to perform, the six members of the club were introduced by number and ran out in front of the audience who filled the seats of the room normally used for BIOL 101 classes. 

They immediately began the show by taking a suggestion from the audience, which appropriately happened to be about "Ramsgiving,” the UNC tradition of Thanksgiving foods at Chase Dining Hall. 

Without missing a beat, each “Chip” fell into character and entertained the audience with hilarious remarks, awkward movements and quick-witted responses.

This pattern followed for the next hour and 15 minutes as the players performed in more "games" with suggestions from the audience and acted out three pre-written sketches, which are sometimes difficult to tell apart from normal improv because of the sheer talent of the members of the team.

“That means you did good,” Maeve Carroll, sophomore public policy major who is in her third semester in CHiPs, said.

Each member of the team has some experience with improv from their past, with most having participated in theater or music when they were younger.

Leah Jarrell, a senior transfer-student majoring in public policy in business, had a theater teacher during her junior year of high school who told her that she had to do improv because she was so talented and mentioned that one of their other students auditioned for CHiPs at UNC. Even though Jarrell was planning on attending UNC-Wilmington at the time, when she ultimately arrived at UNC-Chapel Hill, she recognized the CHiPs club, prompting her to audition.

Jarrell has now been in the club for five semesters and credits improv with enhancing a lot of her life skills.

“Confidence 100 percent,” she said about what the club gives to her. “Confidence in yourself because this is such weirdly a bit of an egotistical thing where it’s like, 'I’m gonna stand up and be funny right now and not even know what I’m gonna do, and you’re gonna love it.'” 

Gaining confidence from performing improv is a feeling across the board for members of the club, especially when growing up not always fitting in, Juliana Robertson, a sophomore human and organizational leadership development major, said she resonated with.

“If you kind of deviate from the norm sometimes, it’s very easy to get self-conscious, but improv is really nice because it’s okay to be weird,” she said.

No matter the avenue the members of the club took to join CHiPs, each one gets something similar out of the experience, which was evident at their final show of the semester ending with roaring applause from everyone in the room.

“Life is an improv show,” Robertson said. “That’s our tagline.” 

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