X-Files Improv with Dean Haglund

I've always liked him....I wish he was in the new movie....

X-Files Improv with Dean Haglund - Times Online

The Canadian comedian Dean Haglund is the nerd’s nerd: a man who makes other nerds look like fresh-air-loving fraudsters. Playing a computer wizard called Langley, he helped agents Mulder and Scully to battle alien and government conspiracies in The X-Files. He even took his Wayne’s World dress sense to his own spin-off series, The Lone Gunmen. After The X-Files, he went on to invent – and I’m not making this up – the Chill Pak, a freezable cooler unit that keeps your laptop working in hot conditions. And, oh yes, he performs hour-long improvised comedy shows, creating imaginary episodes of X-Files from audience suggestions.

Thankfully, the end result is a happy, inclusive affair that is not just for those who know their Smoking Man from their, er – can anyone actually remember anything else about The X-Files other than the Smoking Man? Anyway, the point is that Haglund’s show is improv first, parody second. You’ll recognise more games from Whose Line is it Anyway? than you will characters from The X-Files.

Short-haired and Viking-featured, Haglund fleshes out each of his four scenes with a volunteer from the crowd. He gets an IT man to provide some hilariously hesitant sound effects as Haglund acts out his morning routine – which ends, as an X-Files opening scene must, in his mysterious death. A lippy geoscience student provides Haglund’s hand gestures while he plays a government scientist trying to poo-poo press concerns over the death. Moment by moment, this is quick-witted, gregarious improvising. He’s so relaxed on stage that he gets big laughs from rolling with whatever comes his way. But this also means that his humour tends to come from debunking his own scenarios rather than letting them build. A scene between Langley and Mulder (played by another volunteer) goes on way too long when there’s no narrative function to underpin it.

We’ve been set up for a mock alien-fighting adventure, so it’s disappointing when the pastiche plot turns out to be quite so beside the point. There are no in-jokes that will lose anyone, but there’s no real story that anyone will get lost in either. I’m a nerd, I admit it. But I long for a bit more babbled pseudoscience and a bit more pouting scepticism to make X-Files Improv do exactly what it says on the tin.

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