By Stephanie Peters
That’s the vibe NU ‘ Improv’d President Chad Cooper said the packed audience at Blackman Auditorium gave off Saturday night at the first annual Boston Beanpot of Comedy.
Over 1,000 people filled Blackman Auditorium for an improv festival that featured student groups from Boston College, Boston University, Tufts University and Northeastern. The four schools performed a mixture of sketch and improvisational comedy.
Although 600 tickets were pre-sold in the weeks leading up to the festival, members of NU ‘ Improv’d, the Northeastern improv group, were shocked and thrilled by the event’s success, Cooper said. The three-year-old group was responsible for initiating and planning the event.
“We turned away 275 people at the door,” said Stephen DeMonico, a member of NU ‘ Improv’d. “I think it went splendidly.”
The night began with Boston University’s Outtakes, who claim their brand of comedy “may be brash,” performing an arsenal of sketches spoofing everything from right-wing Fox News to a bogus history of the ban of Pogs, a child-aged craze of the early-’90s, in Nazi Germany.
Outtakes was followed by Tuft’s Cheap Sox, a high-energy group clad in their signature oversized pink bowling shirts. Showcasing a different style of comedy than Outtakes, Cheap Sox played short games improvised from suggestions from the audience. A highlight of their performance was a game called “Animated Authors,” in which the group invented and acted out a story in the genre of German techno porn, per an audience suggestion.
For Tufts freshman and Cheap Sox member Dan Erickson, Saturday night’s show was a unique experience.
“Our auditorium only seats 700 or 800 people so we never play shows this large,” Erickson said. “I just thought it was a really cool opportunity to have the different colleges come together and see how everybody operates, how people do things differently, how people do things similar.”
The third group to perform was Boston College’s Asinine, which combined both sketch and improv into its performance and received tons of laughs from the Blackman audience for their leading duo’s forray into cosmetics.
Performing last to their home audience, NU ‘ Improv’d took the stage with enthusiasm and performed a variety of improv games with the help of the audience.
In the final game of the night, NU ‘ Improv’d invited five members from each comedy group onstage to play “World’s Worst,” a game in which the host would read a category and anyone onstage could step forward to say or act out their suggestion for the world’s worst, including worst job, worst thing to say to a professor and worst presidential candidate.
Some students in attendance said it was the collaborative effort between colleges that gave the event its appeal.
“When you bring a little bit of variety, people enjoy it more. Different groups have different styles of making jokes — some are more political, some are more foolish — it brings a lot of diversity,” said Laida Aguirre, a middler international affairs major.
If everything goes as Cooper hopes, he said in the years to come the Beanpot of Comedy will become as much of a tradition as its hockey counterpart.
“Our anticipation, with the groups we invited, was a commitment to an annual Beanpot of Comedy,” Cooper said. “Wheth-er it’s at Blackman or one of [the other schools], we want this to happen every year right around the time the Beanpot of hockey happens.”
