In a classroom deep inside the Art-Sociology Building on Thursday, a gaggle of men in long, flowing beards and screaming women with walkers gathered to screech at each other long into the night. They flailed around the room wearing chef hats and clubbing another with stuffed animals, making references to “ancient Chinese daughter-pleasers” and calling loudly for a mysterious man named “Shacocken.”
The gaggle was Sketchup, an on-campus sketch comedy group, and the gathering was the final dress rehearsal for their end-of-semester performance, which takes subjects as unrelated as dragon eggs and Christmas carols and showcases them in a series of 25 sketches, in both live-action and video form.
The group, in its 12th year on the campus, is serious business for its 14 members. Junior government and politics major Josh Gillerman said the group meets three times a week for two-hour rehearsals, honing sketches and exploring new ideas.
“Our shows are as good as they are because we rehearse as much as we do,” said Gillerman, who is also the group’s business manager.
The show, held in Hoff Theater at the Stamp Student Union tonight at 9 p.m., will clock in at just more than an hour of material, all written by the group and lampooning everything from plaid shorts and the Jonas Brothers to children’s choirs.
Communication and sociology major Joe Welkie stands out in the crowd. Though it’s his first semester in Sketchup, the bearded, unassuming sophomore wrote five of the sketches in the show, more than any other member, a fact Gillerman attributes to an influx of talent this semester.
Junior theater major Jayme Bell, who spent the opening minutes of rehearsal flailing and yelling about nothing in particular, contrasts starkly with Welkie but still personifies the energy of the group and the eagerness of the new recruits to make an impact.
“We actually started the year with seven people, well below our average of 10 or 12,” Gillerman said. Tryouts at the beginning of the semester went so well, however, that the group was beefed up to 14 strong, the largest the group has ever been.
Gillerman said the bigger group makes for more unwieldy discussions, but the extra ideas ultimately improve the quality of the sketches. He also said having more cast members tends to yield larger audience turnout, if only because there are more people connected with the show bringing friends.
Attendance is also boosted, Gillerman said, by the fact that the other on-campus groups do other styles of comedy: Off The Wall does standup, Erasable Inc. does improvisation and the Bureau does “a little of everything.” He said that Sketchup supports these groups, and he had personally gone to all of their shows.
But are there any rivalries between the groups?
“You can never have too much comedy,” Gillerman said.
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