In
Splitsider.com’s 2011 article “The Coolest Kids in School: The Surprising Influence of the National College Comedy Festival,” Chris Himes, a Recess trouper when he was at George Washington University, recalled that ComFest “was the Oscars.” He’s now a digital-media producer at Yahoo and also worked at SNL and oversaw NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Paul Briganti, of New York University’s Bleak comedy group, told Splitsider that “the future of com- edy” is at Skidmore. Briganti now writes and directs video at College Humor and performs at New York City’s Upright Citizens Brigade The- atre with sketch team Onassis. Perhaps the most famous ComFest alum is standup comic and rapper Donald Glover, who portrayed Troy Barnes on the NBC series Community.
ComFest 2014 “This year’s Friday night crowd was unbelievable,” says Jur- ney, president of the Ad-Libs and a self-determined major in dramatic writing (who was recently published in a New Yorker blog). Certainly the mood in Bernhard Theater was buoyant. Helen Edelman ’74 noticed happy, eccentrically dressed students “dancing in the aisles until the lights dimmed, when they immediately cheered—were they watching the show, or in it?” And she describes their reac- tions as “generous: giggles, guffaws, and other delighted noises in between, applause, a ‘woot!’ or two—not disrup- tive, but affirming and almost collaborative.” Fifteen student groups made the cut, from an applicant
THE UPRIGHT CITIZENS BRIGADE ALL-STARS OF IMPROV MODEL PROFES- SIONAL PERFORMANCE.
ACCORDING TO A NEW YORK TIMES PIECE, FOR SOME STUDENTS
COMFEST IS “A TURNING POINT, A HEADY CONFIRMATION THAT, YES, THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT TO DO WITH THEIR LIVES.”
pool of more than 40. With home-court advantage, Skid- more fielded the Ad-Libs, Skidomedy, and the Sketchies. Four schools brought two teams each—Out of Bounds and Starla and Sons from Brown, This is Pathetic and Chocolate Cake City from Emerson, Hammerkatz and Dangerbox from NYU, and The Purple Crayon and Red Hot Poker from Yale. Also in the house were Boston University’s Slow Children at Play, Vassar’s Happily Ever Laughter, Cornell’s Whistling Shrimp, and Stanford’s Robber Barons. Across all the troupes, themes ran from sex and death to digs at their parents’ generation, from exis- tential longing to juvenile clowning. Red Hot Poker served up a sweet- sounding children’s song about horses, whales, and dinosaurs that was soon being punctuated by references to the
size of their genitalia. But next came a surreal string-theory takeoff on wildlife observer David Attenborough in which he himself becomes the creature of his focus, who observes himself, who observes himself… The group’s closing skit in- volved a haunted-house vampire whom the lone black visi- tor accuses of racism, for leaving only him unbitten. “Oh, gee, you’re bla-a-ck?” the smarmy vampire replies. “Why, I just never notice those things.” Happily Ever Laughter kicked off with a Lion King parody
in which deadpan parents tell their son that they not only put down the family dog but ate it, just as Mustapha the lion would have done. Next, HEL made light of political correctness: “Your Spanish friend is coming over,” an Anglo guy says to his Anglo partner. “Technically, she’s Mexican,”
ERIC JENKS ’08
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56