Never Say Die

"There's a family here that just came from their mother's funeral," said a troupe member.

Apparently, the deceased woman had loved improv comedy, so her family thought attending our show would honor her memory.

We decided to approach the situation in a sensitive way. No playing Mumbling Murder Movie Mystery or Replay at Bernie's. No scenes that ended in death. No death, period. We wouldn't so much as make a the-world-would-be-better-if-Justin-Bieber-died joke.

In a rhyming game, one troupe member chose to get eliminated rather than rhyme "Fred" with the only thing he could think of: "dead."

And when I was assigned the character of Bambi in a guessing game, I quoted Thumper a lot instead of giving hints about the traumatic death of my mother by hunters.

And when we got the suggestion of a mortician, all the troupe members kind of skirted around it to focus on other material.

All in all, we were pretty careful. We would have been successful were it not for one thing.

The MC that night was one of those performers who really gets into his craft. Once he's onstage, he tends to block out everything--including pre-show warnings about censoring death from the performance.

"All right, everyone," he said to the audience, "this next game is an elimination game. When one of the players messes up and gets eliminated, I want you to point at them and yell, 'DIE!'"