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Heffron has a soft spot for the local guys, often giving them shots as MCs. He says with confidence that in terms of opportunity for new comics, there is no better place in the world to try and make it than Charlotte. Zimmerman already has gotten MC work, a rarity for a comic not even a year into the game.

One of the places Heffron scouts talent is the SK Netcafe's open-mic night on Wednesdays. With the exception of experienced amateurs, such as Zimmerman, and professionals working on new material, the most common acts are the "train wreck" types Heffron spoke of. On a recent Wednesday, one woman delivered some raunchy comic carnage devoid of punch lines: "I had sex with a guy older than my father, and he was on Viagra. His penis was up, he got it up OK. Have you ever felt a man's penis on Viagra? You do have it in your vagina, it just feels really weird. So I'd rather go for the hardness over the size of the penis."

Staying away from the cheap dirty laugh is a problem Keli Semelsberger has battled with among her improv troupe, the Charlotte Comedy Theater. Semelsberger started the group five years ago, which now performs on weekends in a small stage attached to Joe's Raw Bar in Plaza Midwood.

At first, Semelsberger required her players to stay away from the ribald. But audiences, she says, didn't want squeaky clean. Like Heffron, Semelsberger says there is an intelligent way to do dirty, but more often than not, that's not how it's done.

Shannan Brice, founder of the sketch comedy group the Perch, says there was a time four years ago when all the content got too filthy. The shock value wore off and the group started to lose its audience. It got so bad, the landlord of the Perch's building told Brice the show made him uncomfortable, and he would no longer attend. Since then, Brice has tried to maintain a variety of humor in the show.

At an improv show I attended last month, the Charlotte Comedy Theater cast displayed its potential for higher brow humor in one game in which Ave Wilson read real lines from a play he randomly selected out of a book of plays, and another player, Nikki Frank, had to improvise around him.

Wilson selected a character from the play Amadeus -- not Mozart, though -- and Frank chose to use a Southern persona.

Wilson: "Let your voice enter me."

Frank: "Uncle Roberto, like I tell you every Sunday when you come over for Mommy's tamales, no."

Wilson: "Let me conduct you. Let me!

Frank: "You're disgusting."

Wilson: "As for Mozart, I avoided meeting him."

Frank: "Maybe you should talk to him. You guys both seem like really cool guys. Just be like, 'What's up?'"

But most of the show's suggestions from the audience forced the cast into the gutter. In another game, two players alternate retelling separate accounts of an unfortunate incident. The unfortunate incident suggested by the audience was defecating in one's pants.

• Daniel Coston
• Charlotte Comedy Theater improv troupe performs, from left to right: Ave Wilson, James Walker, Keli Semelsberger, Austen DiPaulma and Colby Davis

Afterward, I asked Semelsberger about the show.

"Yeah, it was funny. But to me it was trite. There was no meat to it. We said nothing political. We didn't say anything of any value. I don't want to do dick jokes. It was like, occupation: hooker. Can I get something else: OBGYN. Can I get something else: Abortion clinic person. Oh fuck it, let's just go dirty because we're not going to get anything else. But we should be able to take that suggestion and make it clean. Just because they give us massage parlor, doesn't mean we have to do the happy ending scene. We can have a real scene in a massage parlor and do it intelligently."

For the first time this weekend, Semelsberger will start implementing long-form improv. Scenes in long-form build on top of other scenes. The focus is on humorous relationships among characters, instead of troupe members talking over each other to get one-liners out, which can be the result of bad short-form improv.

To Semelsberger, the funny is in realistic characters, in "how awkward and quirky people are. Something that is based on reality and truth -- that's funny to me. Like in The Sopranos ­-- that's funny. You know the characters. You know how they respond to things. To have these characters that are multi-dimensional. They bring out things we relate to, that we see in our own character."

Semelsberger learned comedic acting in Chicago, the improv capital of the world. There, she started the equivalent of an open-mic night for improv players at Comedy Sports. It only took a couple of months to consistently sell out the 100-seat theater on what had traditionally been an off night for improv.