I was originally going to write about pretension and elitism and how everyone has it, just we have defined some things (visual art, wine, cheese) as elitist elitism, while others (meats, guns, laundry detergent) as non-elitist elitism, and my elitism (food, laughter) was the only elitism that everyone needed and therefore I am the true every(wo)man, but that proved boring and quickly summed up in one half of a run-on sentence. So…

How Not to Pick Up Women IV

Grade: A+

The two most annoying questions that I get asked after sketch shows are: “How drunk were you?” and “How much of that is just made up on the spot?” In case you were wondering the answers to those questions, they are: Hannah was drunk and fuck you for assuming that my art is just shit that gets splurted out by accident.

This sketch was a hilarious look at the prototypical rom-com beginning plot of boy meets girl, boy does something silly, they get together anyway, except that the “silly” thing is taken to the extreme and is no longer silly but rather sadistic. The casting of two people who are desperately obsessed with their own archetypical representations in romantic comedies imbued within this sketch the perfect amount of awkwardness, sexual tension, and hand movements.

This is also one of very few sketches where a lot of it was improvised. Not really, just the actors were given a freedom to allow their awkwardness take over between the part where a movie is suggested and the scarf is returned. This is the beauty of comedy: it allows for the audience to become a part of the act – like a choose your own adventure game where laughter determines where the sketch will go next. This is also a sketch that a lot of people questioned my soberness for, and for that: you are stupid. Performing comedy while drunk is a waste of time. Just because you think you are funny, doesn’t mean you are. Yet, those questions mean that this sketch was an unparalleled success because people assumed that this was really happening at the time and also assumed that some magic chemical must have been a part of this magical experience otherwise it wouldn’t have been so magically hilarious. Ben better give this a high watchability rating because I’ve watched it at least 10 times myself.

Best Actor: The eye contact. Best Line: “Bears!” Only because after the show Lara apologized to me for stealing that line from me as I had said it in dress-rehearsal and gotten a big laugh and so she, in the heat of the moment, took that laugh from me. And she apologized so earnestly after I had already told myself that the fact that she had taken that line from me was not a reason to be annoyed and we got laughs so I couldn’t be unhappy, and if I had said it it wouldn’t have necessarily gotten bigger laughs.

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