Last show

Ambrosia, the lovely and kind person she is, invited all the writers to the Divine Comedy rehearsal in the JSB auditorium on Thursday, the night before their year-end best of show. My initial reaction was to decline the invitation, because I have two major papers staring me in the face. But both the deadlines got pushed back a few days, and I asked myself, “When will you ever again have a chance to see how these funny people work their magic?” The depressing answer was “never again,” because I’ll be long gone before they ever do another show. It actually reminded me of the night before my last final my freshman year. I was studying for the exam and my friends said, “Come out and play!” I declined, and then they said, “But it’s our last time to do stuff together.” And they were pretty much correct; we were going home in the next few days. So I threw my biology notes down and stayed out until 4 a.m. with them instead. (I also slept through half of my final, but that’s another story for another day.)

So Kassidy and I went to the run-through and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. For years I’ve said that Divine Comedy isn’t as funny as it used to be. And maybe that’s true; I’ll never know if I was just easily amused or not. But what I do know is that the Divine Comedy cast is way funnier when they’re just being themselves. I’d seen most of the skits before, and they were mostly solid comedy, but I laughed the hardest when they ad-libbed or just plain made up stuff. Stuff like “biznatch” won’t ever make it into the real script, but it was priceless in the practice. I eventually started keeping a running tally of everyone who made me laugh out loud. (Joel deservedly edged out Dave in the end, but Alex got honorable mention for constant hilarity.) Perhaps the most rewarding part of all was to hear a few of my own jokes from the 100 Hour Board end up in the skits. Not that they plagiarized—their material is all original—but I was just pleased that I said something funny enough that it would independently end up in a DC skit.

So after the show we chatted a bit and talked about what additions we liked and what we thought could get cut. I was extremely flattered when Joel said he liked the stuff Kassidy and I write—he did, after all, win my laugh contest. But when all was said and done, I looked around and half of my freshman friends were there at the show too. They don’t even hate me yet, for the most part. I was just glad I could be there. I honestly can’t think of a better way to procrastinate my capstone paper.