When venerable comedy institutions in Chicago get shout-outs, ComedySportz tends not to top the list, not with Second City and the now-gone iO hogging so many of the famous alums. As Reader critic Jack Helbig wrote back in 2003, “Improv purists tend to put ComedySportz at the bottom of the food chain”—probably because of their crowd-pleasing emphasis on fast-paced competitive games, à la Whose Line Is It Anyway.
But as artistic director Jason Geis and executive director and producer Renee Ross make clear, this isn’t the end of the road for the company by a long shot. And digital streaming will be a big part of that evolution.
“What we’ve laid out for the whole year is a digital-first plan, where pretty much everything is going to be fostered online, whether it’s performance, corporate, training. And we are doing all those things—we’re creating our virtual training center where people can train. We’re rewriting curriculum to make it conducive to being in a Zoom room and activating what you can do in that capacity,” says Geis. He also notes that going digital has expanded their reach for corporate opportunities. “There are plenty of corporations who have multiple offices in multiple cities, or they work remote, and this is the perfect way to pull people together for corporate training, and by the way, we’ve been doing it and learning how to do it. We’re the experts in it.”
