Two theater students are co-founding a new comedy club on campus.
Anastasia Pellar, theater and performance sophomore, and Lisi Levy, acting sophomore, said they want to create an all-inclusive club for people to discuss, practice, write, and perform comedy.
“We’re going to study it. We’re going to look at it and discuss things—what made this video funny, what made this one not funny, what made this skit good, what made this skit bad,” Pellar said. “Then we are going to practice it with exercises.”
There will be three main focuses in the group: stand-up comedy, sketch comedy and improv comedy, Pellar said.
“We’ll do one or two days throughout the year that is kind of like masterclass,” she said. “It just focuses on musical comedy or digital shorts and things like that.”
The club differentiates from the rest of the comedy-oriented clubs on campus because of the educational aspect, Levy said.
“I think you can never get better if you don’t know what you’re doing onstage and why it has the effect that it has,” Levy said. “So if you do this really hilarious scene and the crowd loved it, and then you go on a week later doing sketch comedy and it is not as funny, and the audience isn’t loving it, and there is a low energy and nobody is really responding to it, why is that happening?”
Pellar and Levy said the meeting times will be based on where they can book space, but an average meeting would last 60-90 minutes.
“We would have some sort of an introduction, where we talk about what we will talk about that day,” Pellar said. “And then we will go over, not really a lesson, but just kind of something we want to focus on for that day. So, for example, if we’re focusing on sketch, then something we’d focus on is maybe comedic timing.”
One of Pellar and Levy’s main goals is for the club to be all-inclusive and open for everyone to join.
“I just think there are a lot of people out there that have a lot of thoughts and a lot of good ideas that maybe don’t have a place to be heard, or they’ve maybe have always wanted to try it but never gotten the chance,” Pellar said. “We do have two or three comedy groups on campus, but they’re very small, which I understand because sometimes it is harder to focus on performance in such a big group. But I think if someone wants to try something or if they need a place where they can shoot out ideas and try different things, this is the space.”
Pellar and Levy said they want to create a safe space for people to be able to perform, practice and hone their comedic skills to create more love for comedy performance and writing.
“I love sketch comedy, and I love improv,” Levy said. “My mom was always like, ‘You have such great comic timing,’ and I was like, ‘Mom go away.’”
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