A Scoutmaster's Blog

The Mad Scientist Skit was a favorite of the Boy Scouts of Melrose Troop 68 for several years. It became a recurring skit in the troop’s yearly Laughs For Lunch Show. The Scouts had a lot of fun with it and tried to change it a little bit each year.

This is a story about a mad scientist who has plans to take over the world! Of course, he has created a monster (like the Frankenstein monster) who will assist in his plans of world conquest. As he is finishing his plans, people begin knocking on his door. The scientist does not want to be disturbed so he uses his monster to take care of the unwanted visitors. Of course, by the end of the skit we discover that things do not go according to the mad scientist’s plans.

The troop changes the visitors who come knocking at the door from year to year. Of course, there is the Girl Scout selling cookies, or the Boy Scout selling popcorn. We usually do three visitors during the skit. In this video, the skit does not end when you think it does. The Scouts added one little feature that carried over into the next act during the show.

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Boy Scout Troop 68′s Laughs For Lunch Show has become a yearly tradition in Melrose. The Scouts, parents, and community have a great time during every performance. I have had every show video taped and played on our community access television station. Now, with current technology, I can post the best of the these shows on the internet for people outside of our community to watch and enjoy. The troop’s website and the Melrose Scouting Productions Podcast (MSPP), in addition to YouTube, has been a great way to get these videos out to the public.

This week’s post to the MSPP is one of my favorite skits, Ice Fishing. When it is done well. And the guys did this skit well during the 2005 show. Nathan and Josh had a great time and made up the “Fisherman 2000″ while on stage. They knew each other very well through their years of school and Scouting, and could play off each with ease. Jeff did a good job playing the young fisherman.

The skit features two older gentlemen who go ice fishing but do not have any luck catching the fish. A young boy arrives on the scene, starts fishing nearby, and begins catches a lot of fish. Of course, this drives the older guys crazy and they begin to hassle the young boy. Watch it, I am sure you will enjoy it.

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Watch Video on the troop’s website.
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For eleven years the Boy Scouts of Troop 68 have done a community stage show they have named “Laughs For Lunch”. This nearly two hour campfire-style show features the Scouts performing skits and songs for the audience. The public is invited and asked to bring an item of food as their admission to the show. All the food donated goes to the local food shelf. We provide the laughs, the audience provides the food, thus the name of the show. Clever, huh?

Each year there are songs or skits that stand out as being audience favorites. During the 2006 show the troop performed the “Furniture Store” skit for the first time. Sergio and Josh, the Scouts chosen to perform the skit, only had time during the meetings to practice it twice. I was not very worried about how they would do though. Both of them had done several shows by this time and they were comfortable at improvising during skits. Little did I or the rest of the troop know how well they would do during the show.

The skit is about a person opening a new furniture store. He choses people from the audience to act as furniture. Each “piece of furniture” has its own characteristics. The person choosing as the “oak table” becomes the punch line of the skit. Before Sergio went out on stage to begin the skit I asked him to choose our district executive, who happened to be in the audience, to be the oak table.

You could not have asked for the skit to go any better then it did. Sergio seemed to choose all the right people to play the pieces of furniture, and the furniture volunteers did a great job living up to their roles. The audience really enjoyed themselves.

This is the first of several videos from the yearly Laughs For Lunch Shows that will be a part of the Melrose Scouting Productions Podcast (MSPP). I hope you enjoy them as well as the audiences did when they watched the Scouts do them live.

Download Podcast
Watch Video on the troop’s website.
Subscribe through iTunes.

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