The Bastion's Second City/Columbia College Comedy Studies Program cub reporters are back with another update on their exploits at clown college. Benjamin Vigeant and Greg Guiliano are settling nicely into their academic routine, learning a lot, and getting to know their classmates better, in a "Jets and Sharks" sort of way.

Benjamin Vigeant: We are now in the third week of Comedy Studies, and we're past the sort of awkward "sitting around and talking about what we're going to do while strangers from across the country look at each other phase," and we're down to the nuts and bolts. To begin, I will share a fun anecdote that will make Greg mad, because I'm getting to it first. For our writing class, our group had to write scenes based on of a combination of a character that we created and one that someone else did. In order to inform the scene and give it some sort of structure, we had to give the characters an objective. The most common objective in group 1's writing class? Someone who is trying very hard to make a friend.

Greg Guiliano: Whether that says a lot about us as people or just about the situation is hard to say, and yes, I am mad at Ben. Aside from the classes, a few of the students have already tried to organize routine events, such as Thai Tuesday or Taco Newsday, though the two don't compete. There is a slight schism between the two sections of students. We're getting the same lessons and classes, just that we don't really see the other section that much, so we're not becoming an ensemble with them. Not to say that we dislike them, we just don't have as much class time with them. Except for the outside rehearsals some of us have thrown together so we can practice what improv we've each learned from our various outside influences in addition to what we're learning in class. Seeing the different rules/names applied to games is kind of interesting as we'll have the same game just known by a different name...sort of an East Coast/West Coast thing, but less rap.

Benjamin Vigeant: Last year, (to my enlightened understanding) Comedy Studies operated as one big jolly group of twenty or so people. The problem that arose from this is that each person got less time to have as their own. The problem with this method, though it's probably better, is that now there are two groups who are friendly and social with each other, but definitely aren't an ensemble with each other. I don't even think there's a sense of competition between the two as much as it's, "well, people in group 1 spend more time with people in group 1." The positives are that this does lead to much tighter ensemble within the groups, and more equal time, or at least equal opportunities for everyone to prove themselves.

Greg Guiliano: On to what we've actually been being taught in classes...well, we've got 6 classes. A Context for Comedy class, which is kind of like Current Events but with an emphasis on "how do we make fun of it?" Then we have Comedy Writing, History of Modern Comedy, Improvisation, and an Acting Through Improvisation class. History of Modern Comedy has, so far, consisted of us talking about old comedians and how they developed and performed what they did. Currently, we're on Vaudeville and the classes just put up our own Vaudeville shows. We had a pretty wide variety, everything from a mentalist to a juggler. Sadly, due to the Section split, we didn't get a chance to see section 2's.

Benjamin Vigeant: One of the more fun things we've done, and Greg mentioned it, was doing the vaudeville acts for the comedy history class. One of the best parts about this vaudeville project was that none of the acts were similar. Where one would assume that we'd lazily just take the stereotypical lousy pun patter and call it a day, every act was uniquely different. Greg and I did a juggling act, another group did clog dancing, another did a "magic" show (most of the magic tricks failed), and so on and so forth. The group of us at Comedy Studies, I'm sure the other group included, don't lack anything of variety.

- Elizabeth McQuern