Students who braved the nasty weather last Saturday to attend a Hurricane Katrina relief fundraiser featuring Wesleyan’s four comedy groups laughed and cheered through two hours of improvised and scripted sketches. The groups that performed at the event, held at Psi U, demonstrated the range of freaky yet intelligent humor at Wesleyan. They also succeeded in raising over $700 for hurricane relief.
Up first was New Teen Force, a six-member improv sketch comedy group. Their sketches explored situations rife with comedic potential, such as gay sex in the workplace, or a date with an overweight woman who bellows “YES I DO” after being asked if she wants more butter. The most bizarre sketch revolved around a rich, quasi-British couple meditating upon the following:
“Darling… these pillows are lumpy. I thought human hair was what we needed for them… but it wasn’t. We need unblemished human hair. We need a baby’s first hair.”
The sketch grew even more bizarre as another character was introduced, a 15-year-old girl terrified of barbers and who consequently had never had a haircut. This led to an extremely amusing exchange between Jack Reilly ’07’s rich Brit and his “manservant” responsible for stuffing his hair-filled pillows. After describing the unblemished state of the girl’s hair, the manservant said solemnly, “We’re talking about mattress size here.” Reilly’s character paused, and with perfect delivery, said in a meditative voice, “I haven’t made love for a year.”
Desperate Measures followed with a reality game show format, which drew big laughs. Dubbed “Scrubs,” the show went “searching for the three biggest scrubs in the Baltimore area.” The show’s host, who was wearing gaudy bling jewelry and a hideously large basketball jersey, explained the premise with a lot of fist pumping and crotch grabbing.
Desperate Measures demonstrated its creative genius in the inventiveness of the game-show contestants. There was a Dr. Strangelove-esque dentist (Anthony Nikolchev ’08) who had a strange accent and an equally strange desire to clean everyone’s teeth. Then there was Marcus, or “Damien” the Lord of Something-or-other as he preferred to be called (Kieran Kredell ’08) who seemed to have wandered out of the eleventh century. The final contestant, played by Michael Gottwald ’06, was a baby, and ultimately, the show’s winner.
Meanwhile, the “commercials” in between the show were improvised based on suggestions from the audience. Products advertised included a chain saw that was “perfect for every occasion,” even suicide. Another sketch invented a mock trailer for a movie called “The Day My Dad Died.”
Lunchbox kept up the furiously funny pace with a bout of written sketch comedy. Members included recent WesCeleb Chris White ’06, Willie Gould ’06, Owen Albin ’07, Eric Wdowiak ’06 and several others. Members entered the stage dressed in black, banging on a drum and riffing on disaster movies ranging from “Armageddon” to “Gigli.” Elsewhere in the world of Lunchbox, a gynecologist referred to vaginas as “beaver cleavers.”
Gag Reflex entered by energetically chanting the Wesleyan Fight Song. An opening monologue by one member provided the others with material from which to riff. One sketch presented a child who takes years to graduate from kindergarten, only to be confronted by a first grade teacher who has skeletal remains of children in her classroom.
The sketch most enthusiastically greeted by the audience involved a honeymooning couple that, after losing their flight to Europe, is booked a flight to Wyoming. Perhaps few Wyoming natives hooted at lines like, “Wyoming is the France of the United States. However, unlike the actual France, in Wyoming you cannot make babies. It’s our first state law.”
All in all, it was sick, it was weird, it was artsy, it was a lot of sex and bathroom jokes, it was Wesleyan humor at its finest.
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