I walked into the Village Black Box for the Kids On Campus show and was hit by a wave of energy that would last throughout the night. As the crowd found their seats, the six musicians of the house band played loud, funky music. A poster hung on the curtain, reading “School.” Otherwise, the stage was bare.

Kids On Campus is a sketch comedy group that performs once a semester. The show is fully written, produced and acted by students. Throughout the semester, sketches are submitted to the group, whose members pick ones for the show based on a popular vote. Then, actors are auditioned and casted, a crew is formed and a show is put on in the Village Black Box. 

Sami Klein | Student Life

Kids on Campus opens their show with an original musical number. The group’s fall show ran this weekend in the Village Blackbox and featured a cast of nineteen performers and writers.

As the crowd kept filing in, some audience members had to sit on the floor in front of the first row of seats. Senior Danny Marshall, Kids On Campus president and executive producer, tried to explain the popularity of the club he founded two years ago.

“We have a really wide variety of people involved—people involved in theater, people involved in improv, people not involved in any of those, who just want to do it, and they invite their friends,” Marshall said.

No doubt, the club attracts all types of students with its clever, original content. The first half contained everything from two people who couldn’t stop finishing each other’s sentences to wimpy frat boys trying to haze their pledges. That particular sketch, called “Pledging,” was not fully formed until close to opening night.

“The ending was not originally like that, but [junior] Zach [Kobrin, actor and writer] improv’ed that line about ‘Chopped Junior,’” head writer and junior Cait Schwartz, explained as an example.

Kelly Minster, the second head writer and a sophomore, noted that Kobrin added the line on Wednesday, as in two days before opening night. Despite 11th hour changes like that, the show was very well-rehearsed and put together. Marshall was pleased with the outcome.

“I think it went great; I’m really proud of everyone. We put in a lot of hard work the last week, over break,” Marshall said. “I’m incredibly happy; I’m really proud. It’s an exhausting process, and we did a great job.”

Asked what one challenge was, Marshall commented on the nature of the people in the group.

“The biggest problem is we are all very funny people, and we’re all the funniest people in the room, so trying to get people to quiet down is probably the hardest part. So sometimes we’re here until 1 a.m. just because we always end up getting sidetracked, because we just start riffing off each other. It’s fun, but it’s tiresome,” he said.

Schwartz noted that the group has always tried to involve the underclassmen.

“I joined improv in the fall [of] my freshmen year, so then I met Danny and all of the other senior members that created the group and so they were just trying to get freshmen involved,” Schwartz said.

Freshman Abby Rubin, who says she would like to participate again next semester, said that she has “a bunch of friends who want to try it too after seeing the show.”

It was hard not to feel the contagious energy from the performers onstage. Toward the end of the first half, the show started to get a little silly, with underwhelming video sketches that were then followed by too many bad puns in the Semester in Review section. However, Provost Holden Thorp surprised the crowd when he joined the anchors on stage, and the show found its rhythm once again. Thorp got some big laughs when he joked about Chancellor Mark Wrighton’s pickiness and when he gave free hug coupons to one of the anchors.

More big laughs would come in the second half. There was everything from a sad Bingo spinner to a supernatural-influenced bullying Public Service Announcement for a woman who loses her mind in the supermarket express lane. Alex Felder, senior, actor and cowriter of “Express Lane,” talked about his sketch.

“The way that we wrote the sketch…we had the general premise and then we just improvised stuff and wrote it down. That’s how I write a lot of stuff,” Felder said. “I like to ad lib a lot. I’m always thinking of something funny on stage. I just really enjoy it, and I feel really comfortable up there.”

Asked if a lot of lines are improvised, Felder said, “There were a few moments that were just ad libbed lines that played really well that we thought were really funny. But the majority of it is already written. It’s just sometimes somebody says something and we’re like, ‘Oh my god, that’s really funny.’ Reading it on the page is a lot different from when we stage it because it comes to life when the actors infuse it with their own kind-of uniqueness.”

Overall, the sketch show was a masterful mix of different varieties of comedy presented through different types of media.

“After this show, I’m feeling super confident about the direction [Kids On Campus] is going,” Felder said. “I’m feeling like we got some strong newbies, and they impressed me, and it’s always great to work with new people.”

It was entertaining to see the zany ideas that resulted in the sketches brought to life on a stage. At Washington University, comedy comes in many forms: improv to Performing Arts Department shows to everyday moments. Kids On Campus seeks to bring it all together in one power-packed show, and I can’t wait to see what they bring to the Black Box at March 2017’s show, their next.