The 66 Kicks
Cody Mayo Studios
May 9, 2025
Great news for those of us whose brains are close to ruined thanks to short-form online content: improv sketch comedy is booming in Tulsa.
Ensemble-based, audience-prompt-generated, and created on the spot, this kind of comedy is a fast-moving high-wire act, with potential to spark as much disaster as genius. Troupes like New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade and Chicago’s Second City made it a thing; alums of those programs (like Tina Fey, Keegan-Michael Key, Amy Poehler, Bill Murray, Steve Carell) made it famous. And it has a few advantages over regular stand-up, especially for the attention-deficient among us.
For one thing, it’s a group rather than a solo act, which means your whole evening doesn’t hang on whether or not one individual has written funny jokes. It’s also theatre, in a way, which ups the stakes from “are they funny?” to “are they convincing as a computer scientist from Broken Arrow / a woman experiencing spontaneous conception at a puzzle convention / a stoned caveman?”
It’s strategy, too. There’s a whole industry around comedy improv training, so there’s a grab bag of games and tools and techniques in the background of shows like this, and it’s fun to guess how the improvisers are making the decisions they make.
It’s audience-participatory, but in a way that even shy people can feel comfortable with. You get asked non-threatening things like “what do you do for work?” and “what’s your favorite conspiracy theory?” They’re literally just looking for words; you don’t have to be funny in your answers.
In general, bombs in this kind of comedy are easier for an audience to brush off because a) you know things are likely to head in a completely different direction in about 30 seconds, and b) the baseline expectation is “there’s no way they’re going to be able to do anything with this ridiculous set of prompts.” And if something’s not working, everyone onstage instantly rallies to redirect or reinvent what’s happening.
All that said—it’s really, really hard to do well. Directed by Ryan Archibald (a veteran of The Second City, iO, and other iconic troupes), The 66 Kicks are the newest of several improv comedy groups now active in Tulsa, and they’re really, really good at it. Archibald founded the group with actor Cody Mayo, who trained with the Upright Citizens Brigade and offers acting classes and coaching for folks in the film and TV industry at his space on Studio Row. Archibald and Mayo gathered half a dozen Tulsans with improv experience (including at, you guessed it, The Second City) and set their standards high. They now deliver a show every other Friday—a tight, fast, fun, professional 75 minutes that’s different every time.
The small space—set up like a black-box room within a room—feels lively and energized, which you might not expect from a place that’s not a club. Tickets aren’t cheap, but they come with a complementary drink from a little bar on the far side of the seats. With space for around 50 people, there’s really nowhere to hide from the prompt-gathering, but it’s extremely good-natured. Mayo, who acts as host, is a deft room-handler; he keeps the patter taut and the crowd both relaxed and on point.
“Good-natured, relaxed and on point” also describes the improvisers I saw: Mary Grace Moser, Jared Coulter, Amanda Stonebarger, Will Presley, Roger Conelly II, and Mayo himself. The “yes, and …” improv comedy principle was in full effect, and the whole cast did a great job keeping the pace up, keeping their cool, and keeping their voices audible over nearly continuous audience laughter. “Nowhere to hide” describes them too, I guess: I could not believe how much they did in 75 minutes, how nimbly they pivoted, how present they were through multiple different setups, each with at least four prompts and some with many scenes in quick succession.
The aforementioned puzzle convention that opened the show was a harbinger of bizarreness to come. Presley and Moser riffed a hilariously awkward date scene out of 12 audience suggestions. Conelly turned a prompt about the pope into an anxiety-reducing breathing exercise (”DA POOOOOOPE”) during an escape room scene that had cast members dinging each other in and out with an onstage bell. Mayo asked for something we associate with Oklahoma, and “ragweed” became the hook for three successive scenes about people acquiring the wrong drug (one took place during the Jurassic Period, another audience suggestion).
A game called “Shift Left” turned into the most unhinged adventure of the night. Each improviser got a prompt (sneakers, popsicle, stoplight, grenade, sugar), and the scenes they developed ranged from a pair of fourth-graders beefing in a Foot Locker (“I’m probably gonna grow six inches over the summer” / “you’re gonna grow IRRELEVANT over the summer!”) to a pair of twins (“we’re like two halves of a popsicle, except one of us isn’t a LIAR!”) getting hit by a car driven by a guy who couldn’t get his red light / green light timing right.
The evening ended with a long scene, set up by Mayo, about a group that meets regularly at Turkey Mountain with a commitment to "keeping Tulsa tenacious.” In full OSU-fan gear, Mayo lovingly and shrewdly lampooned a familiar motivational approach to life: “We send each other empowering text messages … we fellowship HARD up on that mountain.” A very game audience member from Muskogee got pulled into the mix as a potential new pledge for Tenacious Tulsa; as he and Mayo built up the situation, the rest of the cast slowly emerged onstage in outfits that referenced earlier scenes (including a pope). The biggest mystery of the night maybe wasn’t how they did all this, but what kind of costume closet Cody Mayo Studios has going on back there.
A 66 Kicks show makes for a very fun night out, an experience of highly-skilled communal insanity that feels just right for this historical moment. Like jazz improvisers, comedy improvisers who are working at this level blow my mind—but they also remind me that improvising is kind of what we’re all doing all the time, if we could just get a little more comfortable playing with what we don’t know. I like to think that if you could manage to peel a layer off of a typical everyday interaction, it might turn out to look like one of these scenes: just a bunch of people teetering on a tightrope, responding to whatever’s hitting them, committing to the present as they say “yes, and …” together.
