Harold Night Wordz: "Chuncle"
Harold Nighters use some weird words sometimes - it's a natural consequence of tangling your brains up with the same group of people for a while. "Harold Night Wordz" is going to go into some of these terms for the sake of information, amusement, as a form of therapy, and mostly so you knowz 'em if you seez 'em.
(Our friends in Respectable Gentlemen assure us that any boring or mundane thing is made hilariouz by adding a "z" to it. We're wouldn't dare to question them, of courz. Comedy goldz!!!)
Now that Harold Team Rich Uncle has played for more than half a year, you may have heard the term "Chuncle" from time to time. If you haven't, you should hear it anyway; it's a good term. Really speaks to the universal human condition, and, you know, not to our individual pseudo-cliquey improv team. I may be lying, but hey, you're in this deep, might as well see it through, right? Sink that cost!!
"Chuncle" comes from founding and sadly no longer active Rich Uncle player Andy Mendillo, who rehearsed and performed with Rich Uncle for our first six months, and, among other excellent contributions, signed us up for the thrilling and heavily trafficked website: http://boston.improvteams.com.
Andy was one of two Rich Uncle team members who trekked in every week from Rhode Island to play with us (the other shall remain nameless, but if you go to Live Alive any time of day or night, there's even money you'll find her there), so he jokingly submitted the group's name - using the abbreviation of his homeland - as"RI Chuncle."
It was a declaration of territory. Andy peed on us like a wolf - which of course was fine, because it was done with affection.
Upon discovering this choice of Andy's in rehearsal, the members of the mischristened "RI Chuncle" were immediately struck by how creepy "Chuncle" sounds.
Roll it around a bit. "Chuncle." Grunt it. "Chuncle." See what I mean?
Upon further discovery of our playstyle and senses of humor - and despite being generally nice upstanding people in our civilian lives - RI Chuncle also found we can be creepy too.
So, through that connection, "Chuncle" came to refer informally to the group, "Chuncles" came to refer collectively to the members of the group, and "very Chuncle" or "Chuncly" or similar came to refer to the sorts of scenes we perform from time to time that hit the very distinct creepy side of our playstyle.
You may hear us chant it during warmups. We do that sometimes.
Also, if anybody knows how to edit a profile on http://boston.improvteams.com without having the password for it, let us know. We haven't been able to fix it.
-Pete, RI Chuncle
