Take my stand-up act...please!

There are some famous comedians who graduated from Yale University, among them Daily Show staple Louis Black, DRA '77. Being a misinformed individual, I just assumed that some class must exist to teach students the subtle skills of stand-up comedy. Yet, after exhaustive research, I can safely conclude that among its myriad courses and clubs and groups and societies and teams, Yale offers students no easy way to learn how to do stand-up comedy.

EUGENE WONG/YH

When I searched the online course catalog for "comedy," the closest thing I could find was English 231, "A study of popular and polite traditions in the international comic theater of the 16th and early 17th centuries...Some attention to...jest books, jigs, drolls, and clowning." So unless you plan on getting onstage with 10 minutes of material about the privy and cuckoldry, you'd best learn stand-up on your own, which is exactly what Ehren Park, CC '01, and his team of 12 student comedians have decided to do.

Yale's First Ever Stand-Up Comedy Thing will be crippling Yalies with laughter this weekend at the Calhoun Cabaret. All the acts last between five and 15 minutes, so the show will probably be around two hours long, including intermission. Tickets scost $2, and funk band Limited Appeal will be playing, along with special guest Phil Gor-man. Although ambit-ious first attempts often fail, I have a feeling that the First Ever Stand-Up Comedy Thing will deliver—in spades.

Park, the show's "not-really-director," as he describes himself, organized it hoping that he could add a new dimension to the comedy options that already exist on campus. Despite Yale's many improvisational humor groups, nothing exists to encourage individual, stand-up comedy. Park feels that this show provides a "forum for a lot of pent-up desire" on the part of many Yale students to do stand-up.

According to Park, when the comics began the process they immediately discovered things that they wanted to share in a stand-up format. Though many of them are involved in theater and comedy groups, none had ever done much comedy of this sort—Park once performed at a Koffee? open mic, and Josh Drimmer, DC '03, at a VFW bar in Salt Lake City, but that has pretty much been the extent of the group's stand-up experience. The comics began preparing for the Sudler-funded show at the beginning of December, and through individual effort and some collective editing, these 13 comedians have developed very professional stand-up routines. Each participant has a distinct stage presence and style, and they all seem comfortable and smooth with their acts.

I was lucky enough to attend an informal rehearsal of this show, where I experienced first-hand how well practiced these performers are. Before they began, they discussed "bomb lines" for jokes that fail, and were certainly prepared enough to simply add to or subtract from their bits as they saw fit—there were no memorized scripts. As one would run through a bit, others would laugh, jeer, or heckle, and the comic cleanly integrated audience response into the act. Though none of the comics have done stand-up in front of a large audience, if they can amuse this weekend's viewers half as much as they amused me, the show will be a success.

The bits span the comic spectrum from the standard themes of family, television, pornography, and relationships to Yale-centered topics like Theater Studies (the major of five of the performers), Broadway, Yale University Health Services, and Vanderbilt Hall. Some of the theater jokes are particularly memorable, especially Lauren Popper's, ES '01, hilarious story about her experiences as a summer acting intern on the particle-themed musical Quark Victory. Ehren Park, ES '01, starts his routine with a great rendition of the Yale theater fire speech and then smoothly segues into the rest of his act, including some of the more bizarre products sold by Origins. Greg Yolen, SY '04, has a funny segment where he compares never having been to New York to never having gone to the bathroom. In addition to those mentioned, the show features Reggie Austin, BK '01, Jonathan Bernstein, ES '01, Desiree Burch, TD '01, Mike Ellis, BK '01, Julia Hart, CC '03, Matt Matera, TC '02, Kayla Nelson, TC '03, Rich Silverstein, SM '02, and Sara Zausmer, DC '01.

The comics also perform in a wide variety of styles. Bernstein delivers his wacky routine in a lackadaisical, almost random sputter of words, throwing out transitions like, "speaking of vowels..." Comics Matera and Silverstein have comfortable, conversational styles, while Drimmer and Popper perform with loads of emotion. Some gesticulate wildly; others fidget with the microphone. Each show member has obviously developed a very deliberate stage presence.

Even professional stand-up comedy has the potential to go terribly awry, with comics soaked in flop sweat and audiences bored, angry, or simply unimpressed. At Yale, however, students are so used to sitting through boring lectures and ridiculous productions of "significant" postmodern drama that even a terrible stand-up show would be tolerable.

Regardless, Yale's First Ever will likely be a hit, particularly since several of the comics clearly have the potential to become nationally recognized comedians someday—in other words, they are damn funny. In fact, Silverstein actually won a stand-up contest put on at Yale by an outside producer who was hoping to find talent for a television special.

Although some of the comedians are funnier than others, the acts audience members find most memorable will change nightly with the lineup. Each evening, nine of the 13 comics will perform, and the sequence will vary accordingly. The comics who go earlier in the show will have the daunting task of warming up the audience, while the comics who go towards the end might have to deal with a restless crowd. The bottom line is that each act has the possibility of inciting a laugh riot. Park did not deny any of the people who volunteered the opportunity to participate in the show, rightly assuming that anyone with the courage to step into the stand-up spotlight deserves the chance. They definitely have guts to go along with their humor.

Park describes the show as "experimental," since nothing like it has been done at Yale in at least five years. I, though, would beg to differ. "Experimental" doesn't make you laugh or clap or shout. "Experimental" isn't funny (at least not deliberately so). "Experimental" is when, as Popper describes in her act, professional actors put on a play about descending into the subatomic world and expect it to be serious. "Experimental" is a play with no words, just a five-minute lighting fade as a solitary woman groans. "Experimental" is just an artsy euphemism that basically means, "weird, lame, and silly." On the merit of the cast, Yale's First Ever Stand-Up Comedy Thing isn't an experiment—it's a certainty. Graphic by Eugene Wong.

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