Members of campus improv troupe Midnight Snack Comedy stood in a circle and sang to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell.”
“The system is corrupt, the system is corrupt!”
“‘Sesame Street’ is on HBO!”
“The system is corrupt!”
As they went around the circle, each member added a line.
“Every human dies alone!” freshman Amy Reader said.
“The system is corrupt!”
Midnight Snack rehearsed and planned Monday night for the upcoming IU Campus Comedy Festival, starting with the warm up. The members invented it to get themselves listening to each other and thinking on their toes, Reader said.
The group will perform on both days of the Festival but being on stage is just one part of the experience.
Through IU’s comedy community, Reader said she’s met strong, funny and powerful women who have become her mentors.
“Not only do we have a great comedy community, but we have a great comedy community for women,” Reader said.
Emily Wertlieb has been a member of Backdoor Comedy, another improv troupe, for three years.
She didn’t know a lot about improv when she joined, but she said she fell in love with it.
Wertlieb said there were more boys than girls at the auditions, which made her feel a competitiveness she didn’t like.
“I think when you’re a woman in comedy, a lot of times you have the mindset that there’s less opportunity,” she said. “You have to make yourself even more of a presence.”
There’s more of a pressure to prove yourself as a woman in comedy, Wertlieb said.
And there’s sometimes the temptation to default to stereotypes, she said — to be the mom or the valley girl.
But with improv, there’s also the freedom to break out of that.
On stage, comedians can establish characters outside of their genders because the audience doesn’t know what to expect, Wertlieb said. So well into a scene, they can reveal the gruff, weird character is actually the older sister.
“People think it’s funny when you take a familiar thing, and they think they know what’s going to happen, and you just make it completely weird and screw with their brain,” she said.
Disparity in experience between men and women in the comedy world inspired the creation of Ladies’ Night Comedy. The group, comprised of all women, performs sketches and stand-up.
Member Zoe Doebbler said she joined after auditioning unsuccessfully for other groups on campus.
“I think it is definitely harder as a female performer to get your voice heard or for people to think you’re actually funny,” she said.
Ladies’ Night aims to promote women’s voices in a national comedy scene that’s dominated by men, Doebbler said.
Sometimes women are still the punchline, she said, and Ladies’ Night wants to offer a different brand of comedy.
“I think because we are coming from that place where we’re the butt of jokes a lot of times, we’re more understanding when it comes to other groups who may be butts of jokes,” Doebbler said.
Doebbler said she disagrees with the argument comedy is becoming too politically correct, and instead argues making derogatory jokes alienates people.
“And what’s funny about that?” she said. “It’s important to diversify what you hear. If you’re just hearing the same thing all the time, then you’re going to be stuck in your own little bubble, never expanding what you know.”
Though Ladies’ Night isn’t performing as a group at IUCCF this year, Doebbler said she’ll be doing stand-up.
In addition to offering a community, comedy is cathartic.
Doebbler describes her comedy as self-deprecating, about things like juice cleanses, one-night stands and coming out in college. She said if she’s had a bad day or something oddly terrible happened, she can write a sketch about it and laugh at it.
You can’t hold on to onto mistakes in improv, Reader said. She’s taken that into her everyday life, she said, and it’s an easier way to live.
“Improv’s all about new days, but the new days are happening right after you tanked a scene,” she said.
Reader said she’s learned she has to commit, to have faith in her castmates and not to give up on a scene.
“Improv is so real life, it’s not even funny,” she said.
