"I applied to the Ivies. I scored well on my tests. Only to be at Penn. Only to be at Penn. I have fought, I have strived. Found the people I needed to bribe. Needed to bribe. Only to be at Penn. But we're still only ranked down at number four."
Think the tune from U2's hit "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Think the lyrics from Mask and Wig's fall show "Less Miserable."
There's a reason that this university has a reputation as the "fun Ivy."
Penn students know how to laugh.
And humor at the University spans across all boundaries. It ranges from the drunken jokes told your very first night in the Quadrangle, to an evening in Irvine auditorium with Ben Stein, to some of the most established comedy groups on campus -- namely Mask and Wig, Bloomers and Without a Net.
•
From gender divides to the use of music in shows to content to the very audiences they appeal to, every troupe has its own niche.
But there are some things that no one can deny are material for humor. Take University President Judith Rodin, for example.
"We do stuff that people can really relate to on a personal level," Bloomers co-director and College junior Gaby Arnay says. "Making fun of Penn, Greek Life, Judy Rodin."
Without a Net members Jacob Dickstein and Brian Gish couldn't agree more.
"The best laughs that I've ever seen are the ones that are off to the side," Gish says. "I think they like to think about what they're laughing at rather than just laugh. Maybe I'm giving them more credit than they deserve, maybe they're just laughing at my nose."
Or at Judy.
"The odd pop at Judy Rodin always tends to go pretty well," Dickstein adds. "It's hard to miss at J. Ro."
Perhaps Mask and Wig takes the whacks at Rodin to a higher level, often dressing a cast member in drag while parodying the president repeatedly.
"Judy Rodin," Mask and Wig director Tom Christensen says. "She's just this love-hate figure. Everyone realizes that she's this amazing asset to the University, but she's so successful it's gonna get this backlash. We imagine her just sitting up there in a trustees meeting and lighting a cigar in the middle of the meeting or as this corporate, hungered Whartonite, out to destroy a lot of everything."
So while the Judy Rodin jokes never seem to get old, along with cracks at the "Uber-JAP," the Ivy league, the constant construction on campus, the naivete of a college kid's parents, the Wharton money-mongers and more, each of the comedy groups has worked to bring its humor to a different level.
"You can put some guy in a black wig on stage and have him say 'Prada,' and everyone will burst out into laughter, it never fails," Christensen says.
"In general you want your humor to be more intelligent than just profanity, sex, gay jokes -- those are cheap, easy ways of making people laugh," fellow Mask and Wig member Cory Pierson says.
So this time, the Mask and Wiggers are trying to steer away from what's easy.
The women of Bloomers seem to be thinking on that higher comedic level as well.
"Certain things you know will always make a laugh," Arnay says. "You want to take that extra step and be a little more clever, a little more highbrow. Eight-year-olds love fart jokes, but that doesn't mean we'll do it."
And playing on that subtlety they strive for, Without a Net members say they also enjoy taking the hard line.
"With all the priest scandals, a religious figure can reoccur," Gish says. "There's always this underlying insinuation, that it will go there. And the more it doesn't, the better it is. Comedic blue-balls are great."
In order to get to those funny points, members of these groups say they go through a lot of not-so-funny bits first.
For Bloomers, it begins with a brainstorming meeting, where the members bring their ideas together to veto or approve. Then, they break off to begin the process of fine-tuning the humor.
"We sift through it," Arnay says. "We're the average college kid, if it makes us laugh it will make everyone laugh, and if you're rehearsing the same thing every day, and you're still laughing, it's a good sign. Rehearsals are fun, it's a lot of pee in your pants time."
So after months of rehearsing, planning, writing, choreographing and messing around with fellow cast members, the material that made the Bloomers laugh was finally showcased.
Their fall show, "My Small, Thin, WASP Wedding," was played to a crowd of equally mixed genders at the Harold Prince Auditorium in the Annenberg Center.
The hour-and-a-half-long show boasted numerous sketches and musical numbers. While playing on many clearly Penn-oriented themes, such as cell phones, Huntsman Hall and the flyers that are often shoved at students on Locust Walk, the women played on universal themes as well.
Parodying the drug tests that some companies require for new employees, one of the Bloomers belted out in a sing-songy voice, "If you want a job at Credit Suisse, buckle down and take a piss!"
The sorting process is often a long one for the members of Mask and Wig, beginning with a similar process lasting a few weeks of writing and then breaking into sections to sharpen the work.
"Comedy is in the editing, not the writing," Christensen says. "Usually the idea is really crappy to begin with, but when three other people stare at it for an hour and figure out the timing and rhythm, it becomes a wonderful thing."
Those "crappy" ideas evolved into a two-hour-long, envelope-pushing performance. Aside from an extended musical bit highlighting Penn's ranking in U.S. News and World Report and acting out a war on the rest of the Ivy League headed up by none other than Rodin, the group stuck to some more universally funny -- and bizarre -- ideas.
Dr. Seuss as an army eulogizer, a Special Olympics basketball team, synchronized walking and Abraham nearly sacrificing an obnoxious Isaac were just some of the uproaring displays of Penn humor that Mask and Wig performed to a capacity crowd at the Iron Gate Theatre.
And while Without a Net's more spontaneous style isn't as fitting for the editing process, there are still choices to be made.
Since many of the games and sketches the group performs play off of the suggestions of audience members, the comedians say they rehearse in order to figure out ways to creatively reject stale suggestions or to be inventive even when the suggestion is far from fresh.
Without a Net took on this challenge in their Sunday show in a dim high rise basement before a raucous crowd.
Taking their cues from the audience, five of the members sat in a row of chairs, playing a game of "crossed telephone wires." A performer called Marilyn Manson to inquire about producing a puppet after his likeness, while a downtrodden waitress stalked Kermit the Frog to her left and an auctioneer at the end of the row tried to convince Bob Sagat to sell off "those Olsen Twins" for a nice sum.
•
The established pockets of comedy within the Penn community have not always existed as such.
In 1888, an enigma was born that would change humor at Penn forever. A small group of undergraduates came together in an effort to create comedy.
And in doing so, they created history -- Mask and Wig.
The all-male cast began performing spoofs, musical comedy, sketches and dance numbers to local audiences more than a century ago. Their rampant success was highlighted by their purchase of a private clubhouse in Philadelphia and by their sponsorship of a dormitory in the Quadrangle, which still bears the name "Mask and Wig."
"It's been around," Pierson says. "Everyone definitely does think of that. As you go through it and become more involved in it you realize that everyone in the past hundred years was as involved as you're becoming. It has that bond."
And while the club remains perhaps the most well-known and respected comedy group at Penn, there's at least one thing that the men of Mask and Wig can't do as well as another group on campus, although it's not for lack of trying -- play women.
In comes Bloomers.
In 1978, nearly a century after Mask and Wig was founded, the proponents of the feminist movement voiced a desire for a change to be made to the all-male set-up of Penn's comedy scene.
In response, Harvard University integrated its once all-male comedy group. Mask and Wig instead supported the initiative to create an all-female counterpart.
Four freshmen women rose to the challenge that year and began Bloomers --the first all-female all-original comedy troupe in the country.
"Women wanted to be in a group like Mask and Wig. There really wasn't any outlet at Penn that could facilitate it," Bloomers member Melissa Kaufman says. "Next year will be the 25th anniversary. I think it's awesome.... Females have been so unrepresented in comedy."
Since its beginning, the group has put on over 30 student-written-and-performed shows, boasting such titles as "Fruit of the Bloomers," "Lunachicks" and "Where's your sense of Bloomers?"
But there was still a gap in Penn's ever-growing humor scene. For some comedy-lovers, the weeks of planning that these groups invested in their performances were not true to the off-the-cuff comedic talents of many students.
Without a Net filled this void. The co-ed group was created in the early 1980s by students -- some of whom have gone on to perform on Broadway -- to entertain audiences and have fun themselves.
As an improv comedy troupe, although they rehearse numerous times a week, the jokes and games they perform on stage every Sunday night in the basement of Harnwell College House are made up entirely on the spot.
•
"Juice bar is a-flowing, with brand new steroid drugs. And you learn martial arts to destroy those Princeton thugs. At the Pottruck. Learn the death punch. After your power lunch!" the Mask and Wig members belt out in the tune of another U2 hit.
"It takes a drunk Penn kid to make a drunk Penn kid laugh," Christensen says.
And centuries later, they're still laughing.
Going solo for a laugh Forget centuries, or even decades, of history and tradition. There's a new comedy group on campus. Simply Chaos is Penn's first and only stand-up comedy club. It began last year as the brain-child of Engineering junior Avi Gilbert. "Basically, fall semester of last year a lot of times I would have good ideas late at night," Gilbert says. "I like goofing around, being funny, so I wrote on the bottom of my tissue-box `start stand-up comedy club.' The next morning I went to my friend and told him the idea." Once the ball began rolling, the founding members, Gilbert and College junior Paul Braff, had only one major obstacle - what to name the group. After discarding the options Comedians R US and Jedi Days, the two finally landed on Simply Chaos.= And started recruiting additional members. "For tryouts we made it look really professional," Gilbert says. "I brought in a bunch of my friends, about six or eight people, to judge." The shenanigans paid off - the group now boasts 11 members. And each of these members has an individual comedic style. "Nimish Verma, he's Indian, kinda small, squeaky voice," Gilbert says. "He has a very angered, ranting thing, people love it. Paul Braff has a very Seinfeld, `What's the deal with that' style." But not every style flies with Simply Chaos. "We don't want to present a trashy style," Gilbert says. "If people are profane and cursing, we don't want any unnecessary stuff in there. You want to keep it on a certain level." That level may or may not involve Penn-specific humor. "We definitely do a lot of universal humor in the group," member Jocelyn D'Ambrosio says. "There are only sporadically thrown in Penn jokes. We'll give different reasons for why different people would work at Wawa, part of it could be because their parole officer thought it would be a good idea, or that they just graduated from Penn with a Comm[unications] major." Gilbert says one must be aware of one's audience. "If you go into the Laugh House in Center City Philadelphia and say, `What's the deal with Stat. 111?'." Gilbert says to make his point. And while all comedy groups are sensitive to their audiences, there are some things that set Simply Chaos apart. "The thing about stand-up comedy. you're all alone up there." Gilbert says. But for this group, being alone on stage just might pay off. "We're trying to get groupies," Gilbert says. "We want girls screaming in the audience." The members of Simply Chaos will get their chance at their fall show in the ARCH auditorium at 8 p.m. on Nov. 21.
-KR
