For years, the College has been home to a variety of bands, acapella groups, chamber music ensembles, improvisational comedy troupes and more. Wide-ranging as the performance venues are on campus, however, there still remains much to be explored. This semester, the newly formed group Middlebury Discount Comedy, also known as MDC, is working to fill a niche that has yet to take hold in the College’s arts scene: sketch comedy.
As opposed to improv comedy, in which nearly all of the material is conjured at the spur of the moment during the performance, a sketch comedy show is made up of a series of short, pre-rehearsed scenes. Of the 20 people who attended the open informational meeting for MDC at the beginning of the semester, twelve students returned with audition sketches, and have been official members of the group since then: Faraz Ahmad ’19, Isabella Alonzo ’18, Liana Barron ’18, Dan Fulham ’18, Shannon Gibbs ’18, Alexander Herdman ’17, Marney Kline ’17.5, Sebastian LaPointe ’18, Peter Lindholm ’17.5, Jack Ralph ’18, Greg Swartz ’17.5 and Joseph Haggerty ’19.
Founded by Shannon Gibbs ’18, MDC is devoted to the creation and interpretation of completely original sketches. In putting together the group, Gibbs explained that she was mainly looking for “a team of writers who could act and actors who could write.”
Six members are theatre majors, five serve as main writers and one works as the technical director. Associate Professor of Theatre Alex Draper acts as the group’s faculty advisor. Providing guidance in the production aspect of the show, he has helped set the stage for high-quality props, costumes and technical work.
Members of MDC view their work as a unique forum for humor on campus.
“This is a necessary outlet for comedy that I think has been missing from Middlebury and that we are more than happy to supply,” Swartz said. “We’ve become accustomed to certain formats, but there’s so much more out there that Middlebury as a school has not really embraced.”
“With sketch comedy, you can meticulously craft what you want your product to be,” Dan Fulham explained. “Improv is awesome, but if there is some sort of point, you can focus what you’re doing a little more.”
For some artists, the pre-written and pre-rehearsed nature of sketch comedy not only provides a mechanism for more nuanced messaging, but also allows for more comfortable expression onstage. Most members of MDC have experimented with improv before, but found it to be incongruent with their natural performance style.
“Improv is hard and scary, because you have a lot of pressure to be funny,” Alonzo explained. “So it’s impressive to watch the other groups do what they do, but at the same time, I’m very comfortable with scripted things, because I get to read it over and over and interpret it how I want.”
Besides starring in a few commercials as a child, Ahmad ’19 had not taken part in any performance venues prior to joining MDC, but described his experience thus far as a “blast.” His integration into the group speaks to the accessibility that the sketch comedy format provides.
That is not to say that the organization has not encountered its fair share of challenges, however. In the crafting of completely original sketches, members have inevitably struggled with writer’s block.
As Kline explained, “It’s hard to get people over the edge to believe that they really can contribute something worthwhile. Coach Shannon has been really good at drawing this out from individuals.”
The subject matter behind MDC’s original sketches ranges from Atwater to the weirdly sexual nature of how humans pet bunnies to an existential candidate in the 2016 presidential campaign who makes his fear of death all too known to the public. Supplemented by brief one-hit jokes in between sketches, MDC’s first show will premiere at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 10 in the Hepburn Zoo.
Through a healthy dose of “random absurdity,” as Fulham put it, the group plans to deliver politically-charged sketches that address on-campus and global issues in a manner that is both silly and thought-provoking.
“I think that there’s not enough satire about Middlebury because we’re all so busy, so we don’t really put our efforts into articulating our thoughts about school in ways more effective than whining in op-eds or to each other,” Kline said. “We think that humor is such a powerful tool for getting real, sometimes controversial, opinions out into the public in ways that might enact change.”
“Although it’s a variety show, we all seem to have come together under this weird amorphous group statement,” Gibbs added. “Very post-modern, very Freudian, very odd. But it’s going to be really fun.”
Middlebury Discount Comedy to Launch
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