The Bastion has recruited two students who are lucky enough to be attending the Second City/Columbia College Comedy Studies Program this semester (and getting full college credit for their efforts, can you believe that?) to offer us a little running commentary on their experiences there. Benjamin Vigeant and Greg Guiliano enjoyed their first week of classes at clown college, and find that as unique and special a program as they're in, it still involves all the usual stuff of any first week of college. You know, hitting the bookstore for rubber chickens and cream pies, and then trying to establish their charm and hilarity among fellow students. Stay tuned for more updates as the semester goes by!
BEN: Comedy Studies is a college program run at the Second City Training Center through Columbia College. The net worth of the whole thing for the students is a whopping 16 credits. Enrolled this semester is a group of some more than twenty students, from all over the US, randomly split into two groups taking the same classes at the same time. I'm one of the students in the program, Benjamin Vigeant, and my primary comedy background comes from classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York City.
GREG: I'm Greg Guiliano and I attend Columbia College, the school through which Second City runs Comedy Studies. Outside students are, effectively, students of Columbia while they're enrolled in the program. We also count as Second City students for the duration of the semester, which has it's own bevy of benefits. My background is more so in conventional theater than it is in sketch or improv, but I do have a decent experience with comedy as I stage manage several shows in Chicago and am taking a Second City class outside of Comedy Studies itself.
BEN: Since this last week of classes was dedicated more towards orientation of the classes, this will be relatively short, and will instead be dedicated more towards impressions. The classes in the program are: "Creating Scenes Through Improvisation", "Acting III: Sketch and Theatrical Comedy", "History and Analysis of Modern Comedy", "Writing Comic Scenes", "Context for Comedy" ( i.e. news satire), and "Physical and Vocal Training For Comedy". Given my experience with NYC's comedy scene, the first difference that I can point out, is wow everyone is way older here . That would follow, since the underground comedy scene, at least the long form improvisational one, seems to be relatively new, whereas there's a massive amount of comedic history here in Chicago in places like the Second City and the iO. So, one of the more interesting classes being presented is "History and Analysis" which is probably one of the only places I've ever had access to where the teachers (Sheldon Patinkin and Ann Libera) would specifically talk about people I've only seen in movies (Fred Willard, Bill Murray, etc).
GREG: Ben's comment about people "only seen in movies," is right. Not only are we hearing little stories about these people, but they're just spoken of with such casualness that, if you disassociated the name from any sort of fame, you'd think our teachers were only telling stories about old friends and not top bill actors and actresses. One nice thing that I'm noticing that's different in the Comedy Studies program than in other classes or comedy circles I've moved in during my first year in Chicago, is that I don't feel like any of us are being treated as "just another student/improviser." Feels like we're actually getting much more personal attention. Of course, this is only my initial impression and we'll have to see how things go, but with how we've been received thus far I see that trend continuing.
BEN: One of the sort of intimidating things to me, and I think to everyone else, is being in a program which is meant for comedians. Which is to say, most of the people in the program are used to being the funniest person in the room, their group, class, whatever. Now, we're tossed in a group with people who all have had that status as well. Does it cause any friction? Absolutely not, everyone is remarkably friendly, but at least in my case (I can't speak for anyone else) I feel like I need to really prove myself as an absolutely hilarious person.
GREG: Not alone in that. All that sort of freshman-esque, pack status, jockeying for position stuff that happened when we were first and second years is kind of happening again. At least in my head. No one is doing it out of maliciousness, it's just the kind of thing that happens. An intense drive to prove to the others as well as yourself that you deserve to be there.. No one is being at all rude, and even the teachers are telling us not to worry about being funny right out of the gate. None the less that drive to beat our comedy chest and roar proudly is there.
- Elizabeth McQuern
Former Daily Show correspondent turned kickass stage performer and author Lauren Weedman is doing two shows at iO this week - she'll be playing with the kids at Armando Diaz (which we wrote about last week) tonight at 8:30, and doing a reading from her new book "A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body—Tales from a Life of Cringe" -- which the L.A. Times described as full of "Relentlessly candid introspection [and] ferocious wit." -- in a free show tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 8 pm. Check out iO's website for more details!
