THE THEATER WORLD thinks we’re the bastard children of stand-up comedy," says Schuerman. "The stand-up-comic world thinks we’re a bunch of theater geeks." Dave McLaughlin, a New York–based comic who started out on the Boston comedy circuit, verifies the existence of such stereotypes. "Stand-ups look at improv people and go, ‘You don’t have the balls to do it by yourself; you need your little group.’ " Former host of the WB Kids’ Club Paul Wagner, whose performance career began in Boston improv, alleges that it’s a matter of talent. "Improv doesn’t get respect because there aren’t a lot of people who do it real well."

Such attitudes are especially pronounced in Boston, where one local publication only recently stopped including improv listings in the same category as "magic." Unlike, say, Chicago, home of the Saturday Night Live–stepping–stone Second City troupe, the press in the Boston area doesn’t dispatch critics to cover improv, even though the area has two — soon to be three — improv theaters operating five nights a week.

"We’ve been around for four years, and we get a thousand people coming through our doors every week, and the press doesn’t cover it," remarks Chet Harding, Laviolette’s partner at Improv Asylum. "On a Saturday night we’ve got over 500 people seeing the show, and we’re turning a couple hundred away. I find it a bit weird that comedy and theater get covered, and we don’t."

Improv’s ambiguous relationship to comedy and theater is best exemplified by the two major types of improv: short-form and long-form. While the differences between the two aren’t entirely clear-cut, short-form tends to be aligned with comedy, while long-form leans more toward theater. Short-form is the kind of improvisational drama popularized by the television program Whose Line Is It Anyway? It’s neat and tidy, like a breathing Mad Lib, with audience laughter as its pointed objective.

Long-form improv is much more intricate. It starts with a set of ideas (sometimes selected from the audience), spins off into tangential sequences, and is then tied together in the closing. In long-form, laughter is generally considered just one of many of the composition’s effects, not its sole intention.

The distinctions between short-form and long-form improv are reflected, to some extent, in the stylistic differences between the money-making Improv Asylum and ImprovBoston, a cozier, 84-person-capacity nonprofit in Cambridge’s Inman Square. IB was established in 1982 by Ellen Holbrook, a former member of the Proposition, a Cambridge-based improv and sketch comedy troupe that once featured Jane Curtin and Zero Mostel’s son Josh.

"The only people who do long-form around here are us," says Mat Gagne, director of business development at ImprovBoston. "We mix short-form games and intersperse them with an overall theme for the show. We don’t even know what’s gonna happen until we get on stage, that’s how random it is. We have no idea. None. We just play off each other, play off the audience, and then the end happens."

IB’s performances frequently swerve into the fantastic, the absurd, and the silly. In one Saturday-evening performance, a tollbooth collector secretly fights crime as Squirrel Boy the animal superhero; a team of natural forces (Dr. Wind and Dr. Gale) plot to sabotage ocean currents; and Three Musketeer–like Scottish men rescue a child locked in a cage by an evil babysitter.

Occasionally, IB’s acute satire and cartoony caricature is too obscure for its audience. During the same Saturday performance, a club meeting of dorky audiophiles has ponytailed Don Schuerman, posing as a mullet-headed record geek with a slight lisp, waxing nonsensical about has-been pop musicians: "Fred Schneider rests in the musical hierarchy somewhere between Def Leppard’s one-armed drummer and Billy Joel’s later pre-compositional work." The sold-out audience, made up mostly of soused college women, doesn’t laugh. ("Who’s Fred Schneider?" one girl whispers.) Immediately, Schuerman, a master of scene salvaging, snipes, "Forget it, you don’t understand music." The girls giggle.

"There’s a beautiful thing about the joke that not everybody gets, because not everybody gets it," Schuerman says later, grinning. "For the people that don’t get it, it’s just like another moment in the show, until a joke they do get comes. But for those couple of people that got [the inside joke], you’re in their heads for that moment. That’s a really cool feeling."

"Our philosophy is we want to have fun," Schuerman adds. "We also want to take risks and have an audience that’s going to be like, ‘Okay, that didn’t work out, but we’ll forgive you for it and move on.’ That’s a less-businesslike model, and that’s something we’ve struggled with, how much we want to concentrate on making money and how much we want to concentrate on educating people and doing stuff we find cool."

Because Improv Asylum goes for mainstream laughs about universal sources of embarrassment and human excess (e.g., sex, poop, sports, and drunkenness), it casts a wider net. Where members of IB claim they make an effort not to use foul language on stage, Asylum seizes on the randy: the punch line to one of Asylum’s pre-written sketches includes the term "big-titted twat." Interwoven throughout Asylum’s performances one night is a pep-rally soundtrack straight out of ESPN Presents: Jock Jams — Naughty by Nature’s "Hip-Hop Hooray," SNAP’s "The Power," and the Village People’s "Y.M.C.A." And where ImprovBoston’s high-concept pop-culture acts play out fantasy/superhero/comic-book scenarios, Asylum’s action typically revolves around ordinary people. In one show, an airport security guard detains a young lady because the underwire in her bra doesn’t pass inspection; two pahtying Massholes get so wasted at the Fourth of July Boston Pops concert that they don’t sober up till September; and a grandparent’s racial slur causes his family to deliver a musical lecture with lyrics like, "Not every Italian is a gangster/Not every Hungarian wants to fight/Not every German is a Nazi/And the French don’t always think they are right."

Behind closed doors, Improv Asylum’s critics suggest that the troupe’s broader appeal isn’t so much one of the company’s artistic statements, but its business plan. "We are a for-profit theater located in the North End," says Leah Gotcsik, director of the new Asylum N.E.T. cast. "So we have a responsibility to our audience to present a commercially acceptable product. It needs to be something that’s not going to be too weird for them."

Among those in the local improv community, Asylum is quietly referred to as "the Corporation" — and given the age-old struggle between art and commerce, that’s not a compliment. "Some of [the criticism] is that we are very successful," says Harding, Asylum’s co-owner. "We do have a level of professionalism, so that comes off as ‘the Corporation of Improvisation.’ But I would say we strive just as hard to try to be creative and to push boundaries." Harding, a former stand-up comedian and Boston Comedy Riot finalist, reminds critics of Improv Asylum’s humble beginnings. "We started in the basement of the Hard Rock CafŽ, where our dressing room was the freight elevator. Three of us [Laviolette, Harding, and Paul D’Amato, who is no longer with the company] founded this and took out a small-business loan. So yeah, we’ve grown into this, but there’s also a misconception that we’re bankrolled by some big entity. We weren’t."

Nevertheless, Improv Asylum is slick. It has uniformed ushers, bartenders, paid actors, lights demarcating steps in the aisles, assigned seating, Red Bull, and even a singer-songwriter crooning cover tunes during intermission. ImprovBoston, on the other hand, has, well, seats.

"What the Improv Asylum did was they definitely made a theater that had more of a commercial feel," points out cast member Kristen D’Amato. "It was located in a place that got huge amounts of foot traffic, and then, on top of that, there’s a bar and the feeling of a night out, and not a night at the theater. I think it just gave improv a different face."

But "a different face" could also be construed literally, since Improv Asylum’s cast is collectively attractive — a rarity for comedy. "We’re the beautiful people of improv," chuckles Harding when the physical appearance of his performers is mentioned. "We don’t cast that way, but I’m aware of that." He thinks for a moment. "We’re all dressed pretty nicely, too."

ImprovBoston’s artistic director Will Luera harbors no ill will toward his counterparts. "I think one of the best things that happened for improv in this city was Improv Asylum — them taking improv to the higher point that they did. Up until three years ago, improv was a novelty here."

Likewise, Don Schuerman hopes the Asylum’s expansion will help breed respect for improv within the Boston arts community. "In a place like Chicago, the theater community respects improv as a form of alternative theater — which is nowhere near what happens here," he says. "Maybe the Asylum moving downtown is a good way to fix that."

But Matt Chapuran, who knows both troupes well, best sums up the Boston improv scene: "Before Improv Asylum, ImprovBoston was the place to go see improv, but no one sort of knew what it was about. Improv Asylum is a business; ImprovBoston is a theater dedicated to exploring improvisation. They’re both better for the existence of the other."

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com