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For UCLA RUIN, a new sketch comedy group on campus, nothing is off-limits. The group performs Fri

On the morning of Sept. 25, a clown carrying a bottle of Jack Daniels ran through campus, screaming that he was being chased by the Burger King. Later that afternoon, two clowns carried a coffin from North Campus to South Campus in what appeared to be a procession for Ronald McDonald on its way to Bruin Bash.

Hilarious antics like these are par for the course for UCLA RUIN, the campus’s new sketch comedy troupe, which is performing at Macgowan Hall on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.

“To publicize the show, I ran through campus saying, ‘The Burger King is chasing me!’ and handed fliers to people on the run,” said Alex Rogals, one of RUIN’s initial members and a graduate theater student. “I told them to come to our show, and if they didn’t, the Burger King would kill me.”

With a cast of theater students, RUIN writes its own scripts without fear of being sanctioned for any of it.

“It’s all about dropping the B.S. to bring you RUIN,” said Jim Cathcart, a RUIN comedian and fourth-year theater student. “We’re like a big, dirty, vulgar family.”

But as the new kid on the block, RUIN’s school of sketch is not the only comedy game in town.

RUIN’s unscripted analog is BUICK, an improv group that has more seniority and has already gained recognition on campus through its regular performances last year.

“I don’t think we’re in competition with them, but if they have a show this weekend, then maybe we are?” Cathcart said.

There are more than a few differences between the groups: RUIN may have the penchant for toppling boundaries and reaching for the outrageous, but BUICK tries not to make any wrong turns, steering away from the vulgar.

“BUICK shows are events that you can go to with your friends on Friday nights and have a good, fun and clean time,” said Jack De Sena, a second-year theater student and BUICK member. “We don’t push beyond too hard – we’re not vulgar, and there’s no heavy bad language.”

BUICK, an acronym for Bruins United Improv Comedy Kraze, performs improv, as opposed to RUIN’s sketch comedy.

Improv, short for improvisation, is a type of comedy that is spur-of-the-moment; there are no scripts and little structure. But that is exactly its novelty. There is more elbow room, and performers have nothing but opportunity to add fresh ideas and new jokes into the performance as they go.

“Improv comedy is on-the-spot, and it is based on the audience’s suggestions,” De Sena said.

According to Rogals, ideas for RUIN sketches come from daily life.

“We come up with ideas for scripts from everyday conversations,” Rogals said. “Some of it comes from what somebody would say, and we’d start doing a script on that, and if it goes long enough, we’d make it into a play.”

Since its inception two years ago, RUIN has performed at Kerckhoff Coffeehouse and at the Bruin Bash. The group has also performed at Theatre Fest, an annual festival sponsored by Theatre Underground, and some of its members have frequented Hollywood comedy clubs.

RUIN members’ shared love for comedy allows for inventive scripts, original lines and eccentric situations.

“We write our sketches ourselves. We have something that we’re rehearsing and we develop it through workshops and rehearsals, adding more to the sketch as we go,” said Sara Ann Buccolo, a fourth-year theater student.

RUIN is known for bringing its characteristic frenzy, but its members take the business of comedy seriously as they continuously challenge themselves through varied experiences, including improv.

“We hope to do improv on weekends so we can put ourselves out there and develop sketches that way,” said Shelly Geiszler, a fourth-year theater student. “(That way), when we have our shows, we have a lot of material.”

But RUIN members are not the only sketch artists. While still in high school, De Sena, who was part of the popular Nickelodeon show, “All That,” also did sketch comedy.

“Sketch and improv are comedies in different scales, but both are working for the same goal: to make people laugh,” De Sena said. “Sketch comedy has more of an opportunity to make a statement, since you have more control of what you would say, as opposed to improv, when you do things on the spot. I love them both – they’re a ton of fun.”

Fellow BUICK member Andy Gardner has also done both types of comedy. He did sketch comedy in the Playground Festival in San Francisco, a playwright workshop program where aspiring actors and writers perform their own scripts and receive advice from directors.

Sketch comedy appealed to Gardner because of the chance to step into a new character’s shoes.

“I love sketch comedy; it’s incredibly fun to be able to create someone who you’re not and make people laugh,” he said. “You become a chameleon and you learn how to be something other than yourself at a given time.”

According to Gardner, sketch and improv are similar, but he likes improv’s flexibility.

“Sketch and improv are closely related; they create characters that are wild, loud and funny,” he said. “In sketch, you can’t add more elements as you go because there’s a script to be loyal to. I love the energy and freedom of improv – it changes the momentum of the scene and the show as a whole.”

Though both members have previous experiences in sketch comedy, currently they spend more time doing improv in BUICK and have not done a lot of sketch in the past few years.

Although BUICK members have no material to practice with beforehand, they still have meetings and practices where they mentor each other on methods and techniques.

Gabe Cardenas, a 2005 Bruin alumnus who participated in BUICK as an undergraduate, said that despite improv’s free form, practice makes perfect.

“It is true that there is no script, but there is structure that goes along with a good improv performance,” Cardenas said. “We practice all our games by giving each other suggestions.”

So while RUIN practices sketch comedy and BUICK practices improv, in every performance the final verdict is up to the audience.

“The nice thing about improv is that it’s very fluid. If something’s not working, you can change it,” Cardenas said. “I have a lot of respect for sketch comedy because that is something that has been predetermined to be funny already. If the audience doesn’t like it, it hurts a lot more than something you made up on the spot.”