Two guys in jeans and untucked shirts shuffle onto the bare stage and begin flexing and preening.

"French!" Bedore barks into his microphone. The actors adopt a snooty nasal tone and pretend to smoke cigarettes. "Scottish!" Bedore says, and the actors switch to brogues and make kilt jokes. After leading the pair through German and Italian accents, Bedore goes for the kill. "Utah!" he says.

"Fetchin' A!" one male "dancer" says to the other in mock horror. "They saw your special underwear!"

The youthful audience cracks up. Score another hit for Quick Wits, Utah's longest-running improv comedy troupe. Here, as at most improv shows, audiences get some 90 minutes of oddball characters, bizarre situations, unscripted puns, mangled accents, awkward ad-libs and inspired jokes - all for about the price of a movie.

Such is the allure of improv comedy, which has taken Utah by storm since Quick Wits debuted in Salt Lake City 11 years ago. As recently as the late 1990s, there was one established improv troupe in the Salt Lake Valley. Today, there are half a dozen, plus entrenched groups in Provo, Park City and Ogden.

"It seems like every other month there's a new improv troupe," says Tonia Freeman, owner of two ComedySportz franchises in Salt Lake City and Provo. "They're popping up everywhere."

Observers say Salt Lake City's improv scene is larger than that of many bigger cities.

"For some reason, improv has really caught on here," says Bedore, one of the founders of Quick Wits. "If you were to look at it per capita, we blow away every other city."

Improv, Utah style: American improv comedy traces its roots to the 1920s, when a camp director named Viola Spolin invented unscripted acting games to introduce theater to children in inner-city Chicago. Spolin's sons later brought their mother's improvisational methods to a Chicago theater company that became the fabled Second City troupe - launching pad for the careers of such comics as Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Mike Myers.

Improv arrived in Utah in 1994, when Quick Wits began staging comedy shows at the 250-seat Off-Broadway Theatre on Salt Lake City's Main Street. The troupe originally mounted theatrical spoofs, then added late-night improv shows almost as an afterthought. Before long, the improv became more popular than the scripted shows. The genre was a novelty in Utah, and Quick Wits was the only game in town.

"We were turning away close to 300 to 400 people each weekend night," says Quick Wits co-founder Ben Porter. The troupe celebrated more than 200 consecutive sold-out shows in the mid-to-late 1990s and even offered classes to spread the improv gospel.

Then ABC debuted a TV comedy show, "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", which gave viewers access to top-notch improv each week for free. Meanwhile, graduates of Quick Wits' classes found no room in the troupe for new players, so they formed their own groups. Improv is remarkably cheap to produce because it requires no sets or costumes - all you need is a venue, some clever people and a microphone. Audiences for Quick Wits began to shrink.

Under pressure to adapt, Quick Wits split in two in 2000. Bedore retained the Quick Wits name and moved his shows to an empty theater in Clearfield, while colleague Eric Jensen bought the Off-Broadway Theatre, kept several of the Quick Wits players, including Porter, and relaunched the troupe as Laughing Stock. Confused audiences stayed away for a while, but both troupes appear to be rebounding.

Improv veterans say the art form exploded in Utah because it's an affordable night out - most tickets run $5 to $10 - for the state's hordes of teens and young adults. Freeman of ComedySportz believes improv is popular here because its generally wholesome shows appeal to Utah's strait-laced audiences.

"People here want clean comedy," she says. Most of Utah's improv troupes have a "family-friendly" policy and even publicly reprimand performers who swear or make crude gestures onstage.

"Some people think there's no place for censorship in improv," says Porter. "But I've seen an uncensored improv show that became an excuse to drop the F-bomb every few seconds. Why take the chance of offending someone when you can be equally funny without that?"

'Real life is funny': Nobody's getting rich doing improv comedy. Because they earn only $10 to $20 per show, all improv performers must hold other jobs. Some are aspiring actors or comics; others are accountants, sales reps, real-estate agents and even ski instructors. Many are veterans of defunct troupes. Most are in their 20s and 30s. All are fearless.

Less than a third are women. Improv, at least in Utah, has historically been a boys club.

"A lot of improv can be really physical. And women aren't as physical," explains Lisa Anderson, a player with a Sugar House-based troupe called 3.2 Improv. "There also are a lot of people out there who don't think women are funny. So you have to prove them wrong."

After years of explosive growth, the Utah improv scene appears to be at a crossroads. Veterans fear the Salt Lake City market has become oversaturated with new troupes. Some long-running troupes are stagnating while upstart groups are thriving.

At the same time, some troupes are abandoning traditional short-form improv for the more challenging long form. Others are expanding their repertoires to include stand-up, sketch comedy and musical parodies.

Although they compete for laughs and market share, troupes hesitate to criticize each other, believing that good improv benefits everyone by expanding the audience base. On its best nights, improv has the creative kick of spontaneous art. At its worst, it resorts to juvenile pratfalls or sexual innuendo for cheap laughs.

What makes improv succeed, players say, is inspiration and teamwork. Actors who hog the spotlight or force bad jokes can sabotage a show.

"Don't be onstage trying to be funny. Let the humor come from the truth of the character," says Nate Sears, artistic director of the Off the Top troupe in Park City. "I've got an arsenal of wacky accents and characters that I pull out. But you must play the truth of a scene. Because real life is funny."

griggs@sltrib.com