Spring Break
The Daily OrangeHumor me: Nights of comedy present regional troupes, laughs
By Eddie Beeby
Posted: 10/24/05, 1:07 AM EST Section: Pulp
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A mixed bag of scripted and improvised comedy brought laughs to the first two nights of the Empire Comedy Festival.
University Union Comedy organized the comedy fest, which drew large crowds to Panasci Lounge on Friday and Saturday nights. At the beginning of each performance both nights, University Union President Dennis Jacobs read a disclaimer because of the recent controversy surrounding HillTV's content. The disclaimer stated that University Union did not make any of the performers clear their material with University Union. This, of course, begged the question: How could University Union possibly make an improv troupe clear its material in advance?
There were no possibly offensive jokes to be found in any of the improv performances, but the same could not be said of a small number of the skits during Saturday's performances. The audience became noticeably quieter during a skit by Penguins Without Pants, where a man proposed an unseen swastika-shaped diagram to the Food and Drug Administration to replace the food pyramid.
"The skit was a little offensive; it shouldn't have been there," said Leah Berg, a freshman interior design major.
In reality, the poster with the supposed swastika diagram only had a picture of a puppy on it.
The first night of the comedy fest featured the performances of four different improvisational comedy troupes from Syracuse, Columbia and Cornell Universities and Ithaca College. Columbia's performance was the most theatrical, Cornell's performance the smartest, Ithaca's the funniest and Zamboni's the best overall.
All four teams had noticeably different performances and styles.
Klaritan, Columbia's improv team, was the first to perform. The team used long-form improv much like Zamboni Revolution, SU's improv comedy troupe. However, Klaritan focused on creating a single more-or-less cohesive story rather than Zamboni's multiple stories, which sometimes overlap. Both Zamboni and Klaritan succeeded at their respective styles of performance.
"I thought some of the long form comedy was a little esoteric," said Hallie Stiller, an undeclared freshman in The College of Arts and Sciences. "(It was) a little more theatrical than comedy ... I have a short attention span."
Cornell's team, Whistling Shrimp, and Ithaca's team both did short-form improv, which usually consists of party-game scenes, including a debate between Fraggles and Smurfs, including the fact that "Smurfs are so blue, they could be in an Emo band," which eventually extended to other shows that most current SU students grew up on.
