It's college humor

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

— Mel Brooks

Last weekend, Princeton’s Tiger Magazine hosted students from 14 other college humor magazines for the first National Intercollegiate Humor Conference.

“We started out with some early humor writing exercises and things like that. We had a slam dunk contest; it was very ironic and awkward,” Jim Valcourt ’12, Tiger Magazine’s president, explained. When asked about the winner of the slam dunk contest, Dan Abromowitz ’13, the magazine’s head writer, said, “It was about skill, not about tall.”

Tiger Magazine editor-in-chief Myra Gupta ’12 also explained a prank contest that was won by an anonymous prankster who bought and created the website jimlookslikecolinhanks.com during the conference. The premise may be debatable — personally, I do not believe that Jim Valcourt looks much like actor Colin Hanks — but the website is hilarious and impressive.

“Part of the goal of the conference was to not only do some writing and have some fun but also to meet other people, so there’s been a lot of group mixing,” Valcourt added.

I spoke with some of the students visiting from other schools who traveled a long way to meet other humorists and participate in the conference’s writing exercises and panels. David Faulkner, a senior at the University of Michigan and editor-in-chief of Michigan’s Gargoyle Magazine, said he and his friends drove for 12 hours to get to Princeton. However, Faulkner assured me that “no question, it was worth it.” Ben Schlanger, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, said that it had been one of the best weekends of his life.

There was also a panel featuring the executive editor of College Humor, Streeter Seidell, who spoke about the comedy industry. Gupta explained, “He said that the most important thing in comedy is fighting for your voice and fighting for the integrity of your work, because a lot of people are going to try to move in and change it to fit their own agenda.”

To close out the conference, both professional comedians and students performed stand-up comedy. Stand-up comedy takes confidence, skill and practice, something that many of the conference attendants had a lot of. Faulkner, who performed that night, said he tries to avoid particularly dirty humor and go more for clever witticisms. “Whether or not I achieve that remains to be seen.”

The stand-up portion of the night, which was held at Campus Club and open to the rest of the campus, was lively and exciting. The performances ranged from highly polished jokes to awkward ramblings, but the crowd, filled with fellow humorists, was highly encouraging.

One of the professional comedians, Carmen Lynch, a semi-finalist on the first season of “Last Comic Standing,” was supposed to leave right after her set but stayed after to watch the student comedians perform.

When asked about the stand-up comedy scene (or lack thereof) on campus, Abromowitz said, “Technically, I’m the president of the Princeton Stand-up Comedy Club. I think there is interest on campus; there is talent on campus; it’s just a question of getting an outlet. I’d also like to see more stand-up as openers for Quipfire! and Fuzzy Dice, and, I don’t know, diSiac.”