Giggles, clicks, chortles, chuckles, hoots, cackles, sniggers and guffaws. Laughter in all its forms will be available this Friday and Saturday at the first ever IU College Comedy Festival. The spectrum of comedians performing ranges from IU students to professionals.\nThe Union Board-sponsored event is free and takes place 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Indiana Memorial Union.\nAll three of IU's student comedy groups (Full Frontal Comedy, Awkward Silence and All Sorts of Trouble for the Boy in the Bubble) will be performing along with visiting student comedy groups from other universities.\nOn Friday, Comedy Caravan will showcase two nationally-touring comedians, Spike Davis and Ray DeVito.\nThe headlining comedy act, Beatbox, will be performing Saturday night. Beatbox is a group from Chicago who refer to themselves as "the fusion of hip hop and improv comedy." The group acts out scenes that incorporate a human beatbox.\nGraduate student Alex Dodge, a FFC member who helped organize the festival, has seen Beatbox perform.\n"The human beatbox controls the scene like a DJ in hip hop might control the beat," Dodge said.\nIf two characters in an improv scene get into an argument, the human beatbox will initiate a live rap battle between the two, and they must stay in character while they rap.\n"You could have a scene with World War I soldiers in the trenches and a German Brigadier General with a thick accent will lay down rhymes," Dodge said.\nThe visiting student groups are coming from both in- and out-of-state school, such as Ball State University, Kalamazoo College and The University of Chicago.\nScott Carrico, the Union Board comedy director, said the visiting student groups are performing for free.\n"They want to perform and they want to travel," he said.\nAt the end of the performances on both nights "The Aristocrats" will be playing in Whittenburger Auditorium. The documentary takes the viewer inside the world of comedy with different comedians' views and versions of one joke, the joke that comics supposedly tell each other while trying to be as offensive as possible.\nCarrico said the main goal of the festival is to showcase student comedy and give IU's groups an opportunity to perform at the same event.\nAt the end of the night on Saturday, all of the student groups will perform together in "The Jam."\n"One of our MCs will lead a few games and the entire festival group will improv," Carrico said.\nCarrico said the Union Board wants to make the festival an annual event.
All Sorts of Trouble for the Boy in the Bubble\nAt 10 p.m. on a Monday night All Sorts of Trouble for the Boy in the Bubble, IU's only all-sketch comedy group, met to rehearse in the Theater Annex on Union St. Before rehearsal began, some members were strumming guitars while others flipped through comic books. Scripts were passed around the room.\nBoy in the Bubble's group members write their own skits then perform them for each other at rehearsals to see which ones get the laughs. The group votes to see which skits will be performed at shows.\nFreshman and member Evan Keever was standing against the wall when senior Adam Kornya approached with a script in hand and said, "I need a grizzled old sea captain."\n"Yarg, I need a drink," Keever said in a gruff captain impersonation.\n"You'll do," Kornya said.\nKeever decided to try out for Boy in the Bubble when he saw the group advertising their auditions live outside of Ballantine Hall by holding a protest of Spiderman.\n"I liked the nerd humor of protesting Spiderman," Keever said.\nDuring rehearsal freshman Hanna Dillon and senior David Sheehan performed a dramatic, murder mystery interpretation of the children's song, "Who Stole the Cookies From the Cookie Jar?"\n"I admit it," Dillon said, "I stole the cookies from the cookie jar and I killed my father to cover it up."\nGroup members performed skits for each other that involved anything from feeding M&M's to demons to trying to make oneself look like a giant piece of cheesecake.\nJunior Kasey Branam, who joined the group last semester said she wants to give audiences a good time.\n"I want people to laugh and to loosen up about the stresses that they are probably dealing with," Branam said.\nShe said being part of the group is like being in a family.\n"They say you need to laugh so many times a day to be healthy," Branam said. "I wasn't meeting my quota before Bubble, now I am." \n"And once I mooned the \naudience," she added.
Awkward Silence\nAt 8:30 p.m. on a Thursday night Awkward Silence, one of IU's two student improv groups, prepared for a show in the Georgian Room of the IMU. Group members scrambled to set up their own lights. They debated whether or not to perform on risers, and ultimately decided to use the risers as a makeshift refreshment table for the show's complimentary fruit punch.\nAwkward Silence performs improvisational games with audience suggestions, much like the television show "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"\nThe group was started in Spring of 2005 by sophomore Brian Frange.\n"It's what I want to do for a living," Frange said.\nAt every show the group observes "a moment of awkward silence," where they perform a different sketch that somehow incorporates an awkward silence.\nFrange said he wants the audience to be involved in the shows as much as possible.\n"It's a conversation with the audience the whole time," Frange said. "We want them to feel like a part of the show."\nAs the group was warming up before the show, junior Annie Kerkian did a hand stand.\n"I haven't done gymnastics in like 15 years," she said.\nKerkian said being a part of the group has strengthened her ability to observe and listen to other people.\n"We've learned to trust each other," Kerkian said.\nSophomore Mike Raunick was the only member of the group wearing a tuxedo. He plays piano during the shows to set the mood.\n"I accent whatever they're doing," Raunick said. "If anything I shouldn't be noticed at all."\nBefore the show the members practice some of the games they will be performing. They start to play a game where two members act out a scene and can only speak in the form of a question. Kerkian has never played it before.\n"This is proof that this is improv," Frange said. "Annie's never even played this game before."\nIn another scene sophomore Andy Blastick has to play dead while Kerkian is an angel that flies in from heaven. The group uses suggestions from the audience for the location or theme of each game so the show is different every time.\n"Something weird will likely happen during this show," Frange said.\nAs for the perks of being in an improv comedy group, Blastick said, "Awkward Silence equals first dibs on the fruit punch." \nFull Frontal Comedy\nAround 10 p.m. on a Wednesday night the members of FFC, IU's first imrov comedy troupe, gathered in a basement to rehearse because the Union was overbooked. The rehearsal was much like one of their shows; no costumes, props, sets or scripts, just scenes created from nothing.\nFFC specializes in long form, Chicago-style improv. Their philosophy is that there is truth in comedy.\nGroup member and IU alumna Anisa Dema describes watching improve as a chance to see art being created.\n"We don't focus on jokes or punch lines," Dema said.\nThe group was founded in 1994 by three theater majors, according to www.fullfrontalcomedy.com. They have shows almost every Friday and can be hired to perform.\nIn the basement, after warming up with a round of "Zip, zap, zoom," the group began practicing their improv. Someone picked a location for the scene to start and then two people stepped into character and brought the scene to life.\nJunior Jessica Ferri said she's learned to embrace being scared that anything can happen on stage.\n"There's an energy about improv that's not present in scripted theater," Ferri said. "You walk on stage with nothing and you walk off stage having created a world and a scene."\nSenior Joe Rogan said that even mistakes and the unexpected can work to make a scene.\n"We once had a stage collapse and we just acted like it was an earthquake," Rogan said.\nGraduate student Alex Dodge was once crouched on the floor in a scene pretending to be a chair for a fellow cast member, but no one sat on him. He didn't have a reason to be on the floor until junior Chas Culp asked if he was a dog, and he became someone's pet for the rest of the scene.\n"He started licking me," Culp said.\nJunior Zach Pollakoff said a lot of the humor in the shows comes from letting the audience figure out what's coming next.\n"We have 'group mind' as a troupe and the audience is in on the group mind," Pollakoff said, "They instinctively know what the next joke will be."\nThe group stressed the importance of the lighting and sound that goes along with their performance. A FFC show is tied together by junior Jason Ayers who does the lighting and sophomore Whitacker Blackall who plays piano.\n"Without them we'd just be a bunch of bums on stage," Culp said.
