Not in a theater, but I got to do a late-night event at a comic store a few years ago where we were riffing on Hard Ticket To Hawaii
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When I was a kid, my cousin and his friend took me to see Jaws III, I think it was.
Anyway, Hall & Oates’ “Maneater” was big at the time, and at some point in the beginning of the movie I sang out “Whoa oh, here she comes”, in my best Daryl Hall voice; people started laughing, and my cousin and his friend were looking over at me like “What did you just sing?”
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I’ve never done this in public unless I’ve rented the theater or were somehow the reason why people bought a ticket…and this has happened for me. When I debuted as Movie Scrapple at Philadelphia Fringe, we wrote a riff for the movie, but when I brought the show back, we did improvised riffs to things like Zardoz, The Magic Sword, The Little Shop of Horrors, and that Captain America film starring JD Salinger’s son. It’s a slightly different mindset doing improvised riffs and I think improvisers work better than stand-ups for the task. Like you can have standups working on a written riff, but improvisers instantly understand the idea of taking and giving focus more with your fellow riffers and the film itself.
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Not my riffs, but notable because they got laughs from the entire audience:
Aliens: Ripley has just agreed to go on the mission to the colony planet. She’s holding Jonesy the cat up and says “And you, you little sh*t-head… you’re staying here.” Someone in the audience yelled out “No. Problem. Sigourney.”
Attack of the Clones: Audience wasn’t really vibing with the movie. Yoda says during a close-up, “Pain, suffering, death I feel…” Dude somewhere up front says loudly, “No, I don’t think anyone out here has died yet.”
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