Noise Some Makes
Season 8
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
A twist on the classic ‘Noise Boys’ episodes brings in additional players and makes for a nightmare scenario for one poor production assistant.
Photo: Kate Elliott
In the standard episode-opening patter for Make Some Noise, Dropout.tv’s improv-based Game Changer spin-off series, host and Dropout CEO Sam Reich describes the show as “the game so good, we spun it off unchanged.” That isn’t quite true, as Sam acknowledges by putting finger quotes around “unchanged.” The game’s template solidified over the course of four Game Changer installments, doled out once per season until Make Some Noise became a stand-alone show in 2022.
Given how gentle and gradual the series’ evolution has been, though, “Noise Some Makes” feels like jumping into a time machine and seeing what Make Some Noise might have become a century or so in the future. The “Noise Boys” — original episode contestants Josh, Zac, and Brennan — are back, and they’re still being handed comedy-bait prompts like “spider paparazzi” to play out for points. But this episode adds layer after layer of complication onto the now-familiar Make Some Noise mechanics, until even the players frequently seem overwhelmed — especially their unexpected guest star.
The contestants:
Yellow Team: Josh Ruben, Jess Ross, Kiana Mai
Blue Team: Zac Oyama, Lily Du, Lisa Hanawalt
Purple Team: Brennan Lee Mulligan, Jordan Myrick, Caldwell Tanner
Floater on all three teams: Kaylin Mahoney
The game: As usual, players are given improv prompts to play out. But this time, instead of trying to elicit performance points from Sam, they’re performing for teammates who have to guess what prompt they were given. Each round adds new complications.
The inspiration: Pictionary meets Charades meets an improv troupe meets Telephone meets a literal nightmare of mine. See below.
Generally with these recaps, I rate Game Changer episodes primarily based on how innovative, surprising, and exciting the game is, and whether it tells a good story that shows the players at their best. I can’t rate episodes just on humor value, because “funny” is so, so subjective. But if I did, I’d be trying to convince my editor to let me give this one a 7 out of 5. Game Changer is almost always a quippy, banter-y show, but “Noise Some Makes” is absolutely jam-packed-overstuffed with sharp-and-snappy one-liners and lively exchanges, almost always coming as a bonus, outside the actual game mechanics.
That starts early, with Lily accusing Sam of turning her and Zac into an all-Asian team to compete against the whites. When the other two teams score better in Round 1, their team faces a penalty, leading to this:
Sam: Yellow Team and Purple Team, as our winning two teams at the moment, you get to decide who gets the oven mitts.
Brennan, instantly: I decide we do!
Jordan: I agree!
Sam: This is a punishment.
Brennan, instantly, no change in inflection: I decide they do!
Sam: The question is, which player on the Blue Team?
Lily: First they bind our feet, then they bind our hands.
Brennan: Yeah, sort of a no-win scenario you’ve cooked up here, Sam. I agree that they should go on Lily, because–
Jordan: Wait, who do you agree with? Nobody said that.
Brennan: I agree with myself.
This is so many different kinds of humor piled together, from callback to callout to laugh-at-him-not-with-him arrogant mistake to conscious, hyperbolic comic echoing to edgy provocation. It’s a good example of what goes on in this episode, which is gleefully overloaded with all kinds of iterative comedy.
In particular, fans of the “Zac Oyama, Comedy Sniper” meme will get a ton of new fodder from this episode. Zac is incredibly on point in “Noise Some Makes,” constantly slipping quiet, straight-faced comedy asides into the background, with so little emphasis that it feels like he’s only joking to himself. The effect is devastatingly funny. He’s got plenty of competition for comedy MVP, though, as the game adds challenging new twists in every round, and the players keep misinterpreting each other, then compensating for their confusion with jokes.
The first round is simple Charades, with Josh, Zac, and Brennan performing “sexy banana,” “talking mime,” and “midnight snack,” respectively, and Jess, Lily, and Jordan trying to guess the prompts. For Round 2, Sam brings in artists Kiana, Lisa, and Caldwell, and sets them up with easels. The artists get the improv prompts and have 60 seconds to draw them. Sam then hands the drawings to the performers, who play them out for the guessers to the best of their abilities.
Round 3 starts with the “literal nightmare” moment. Back when I was watching Top Chef on a regular basis, I once dreamed I was a production assistant on the show, mostly running supplies out to the contestants. Then one of the competitors got sick on set, and I was ordered to fill in so the competition could continue, even though I’m not a chef. The rest of the dream was a lot of sweaty dread and embarrassment as I struggled to peel and dice a simple cucumber, while the other contestants were creating world-class souffles out of pocket lint or some such. And of course, I was surrounded by cameras capturing every flop-sweat-filled second.
When Sam suddenly dragoons production assistant Kaylin Mahoney into the game as a contestant, saying “I gave her no warning this was happening!”, Kaylin’s frozen deer-in-the-headlights look brought that dream rushing back like a tidal wave. I’m sure there are a lot of Dropout fans who dream of pulling a Scot Halpin and being abruptly dropped into Game Changer, then impressing the hell out of their favorite comedians. But for most of us, being thrust to the forefront of a TV set with no warning, then ordered to compete with the pros, is a recipe for instant performance anxiety. Kaylin has been on Game Changer before, most notably as Sam’s secret weapon in the all-time standout episode “Bingo” (season six, episode five), and she does her best throughout “Noise Some Makes.” But she spends a lot of time grimacing, cringing, and swearing, and she never looks like she’s enjoying herself.
In Round 4, Sam puts Kaylin in a vintage phone booth onstage. Now, each artist has to read a prompt, sketch it, and surrender the sketch to Kaylin, who has 10 seconds to describe it to the performer, via what seems like a terrible, hard-to-hear phone connection. Then the performer has to play out their interpretation of Kaylin’s interpretation of the artists’ interpretations for the guessers. At this point, we’re in a full-on kids’ game of Telephone, or something like the classic party game Telestrations was based on. The signal degrades at every step along this journey, and the guessers have to do their best with some pretty warped data.
The big twist hits in Round 5: The players all get rotated, with the Noise Boys crowding into the phone booth together, the artists becoming the performers, the guessers moving to the easels, and Kaylin now in charge of all the guessing. Everyone’s out of their element, which leads to the game’s most botched (and hysterical) round. Jess draws a prompt, but when Josh sees her sketch, he spends his entire 10 seconds in the phone booth laughing convulsively at it. He’s supposed to describe it to Kiana, but he gets as far as “Hey, a nerd with–” before he loses it, and Kiana is left trying to perform “a nerd.” (The prompt was “Manic Pixie Dream Grannie.” I sure am glad I’m not a Game Changer PA who was ordered to draw that.)
As the teams rotate through all the stations, Kaylin is under a lot of pressure as first the only guesser, then the only artist, then the only performer. There are extra complications for other players, too: Each round comes with a “punishment” like the oven mitts, assigned to whoever the team(s) in the lead want to disadvantage. Kiana loses her pad of drawing paper, and it’s replaced with a 2-inch canvas. Brennan is forced to wear uncomfortable-looking clamp-on nose plugs. Josh is saddled with googly-eye glasses. Then, when he moves to the art station, his art supplies are replaced with a giant novelty pencil. Finally, Zac winds up wearing a set of noise-canceling headphones endlessly playing Santana’s “Smooth.” Checking in on where he is in the song becomes a running gag for the rest of the game.
Mostly, though, the players provide their own disadvantages. The prompts escalate from simple, straightforward ideas like “Santacon” to intimidatingly convoluted ones like “Finally getting to the point with your significant other where you can pop their pimples.” The guessers realize they get partial credit for a guess that touches on any aspect of the prompt, so they start throwing out word-salad guesses, often ignoring the key words the performers are loudly announcing.
It seems like most of the rounds should go like the one where Kaylin tries to draw the prompt “Exterminator is 1,000 cockroaches in disguise.” Lisa interprets her drawing as “blowing ants out of a jacket with a leafblower.” Lily performs that while narrating herself: “There are fricking ants in my jacket! You know what I’m getting out? The leafblower! And blowing these ants out of the jacket!” Zac guesses the prompt is “Leafblowing ants out of a jacket.” That guess isn’t right, exactly, and it only earns a couple points, but you can at least see how each player worked with the information they had.
In most cases, though, the performance only seems tangentially related to what the phone interpreter actually said, and the guesser seems to be fumbling around big, abstract concepts with elements added at random, hoping to accidentally stumble across something helpful. Why does Jordan interpret Caldwell saying “Someone ordered a hot dog as their final meal” as “Someone choking to death on a giant pile of free hot dogs”? Why does Brennan decide Jordan is performing as Paul Giamatti? There are a lot of weird interpretations like this in the final rounds.
But the players take it all as an opportunity for comedy one-upsmanship. The pileup of gags as players argue why “Paul Giamatti” should be considered a points-worthy, acceptable substitution for “Joey Chestnut” in that prompt is terrific, and makes me wonder what a Game Changer episode that’s just about points-grubbing would look like.
There are odd little transcendent moments as well. When Josh draws “Three Spider-Mans pointing away from each other,” Jess, in the phone booth, is so sure she knows exactly what she’s seeing that she spends three seconds describing it to performer Kaylin, then brightly adds some small talk.
Jess: “We’re not cut off yet! How are you doing?”
Kaylin: “I’m pretty good, how are you doing?”
Jess: “I’m doing good!”
Kaylin, mournfully: “I was lying earlier when I said I was doing pretty good.”
By the final round, everyone’s back at their original stations, and Sam proclaims he’s going to “dial this up to extra-hard mode,” which just means even more complicated, specific prompts. But then Lily somehow intuits the core evolutionary idea behind a man competing at naked limbo with a group of monkeys, even though neither Kaylin as explainer nor Zac as performer got what Lisa’s drawing was conveying. The sheer glee on Sam’s face when Lily announces her guess, and the wild team celebration afterward, is a capper of joy on top of an episode that sneaks a lot of its joy in around the edges, even when the players seem bowled over by the seeming impossibility of what they’re being asked to do.
The winner: Blue team: Zac, Lily, Lisa, and (inevitably, since she’s on all three teams) Kaylin
The prize: “The Cursed Golden Ears,” a melded-together monstrosity version of the usual Make Some Noise prize.
Prize rating: 4/5. Given that Game Changer stopped handing out Michelin-star-restaurant meals and Nintendo Switches years ago, a weird, unique, rad-looking trophy is about as good as it gets.
• Remember in the last episode when there weren’t any cute player intros, probably because introducing seven contestants at once felt like too much? This week there are ten contestants, and I’m not going to devote a thousand words to unpacking all the references in their intros, especially since they’re mostly just callbacks to the contestants’ previous Game Changer episodes. Except for Josh’s intro, which references him directing Heart Eyes. (He’s lying! It isn’t exclusively available on Netflix!)
• I can’t imagine what this episode would look like to someone who hasn’t watched a ton of Make Some Noise, but to everyone who has, this episode is a pileup of allusions and callbacks. The revised chaotic animation bumpers are particularly wild. (Dig those geometric shapes barfing into each other’s mouths!) But my favorite thing is Sam introing this episode as “the game’s so good, we spun it on, changed.”
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