Friday was the first of the two nights of the 16th annual Sketch Comedy Festival, featuring opening acts by Skidmore College’s Sketchies and Yale University’s Fifth Humor, and Brandeis’s beloved Boris’ Kitchen.

The Sketchies opened with a few humorous sketches. One sketch portrayed a group of students talking about their semesters abroad and focused on a girl talking about her gap year in Israel. Her peers were making fun of her by accusing her experience abroad as not being as authentic and different as theirs. This was clearly an allusion to Brandeis and it was captivating to see another college play fun at the culture of the University.

Fifth Humor presented quite a number of hilarious and memorable sketches and the sketch that they closed with was extremely popular. In the scene, a boy wants to take a condom from a table with a sign on it that says “Free Condoms” but worries about anyone seeing him take one. It is parents’ weekend at college, so the boy struggles to take a condom in secret because there were several parents, including his own, on campus. The boy makes several hilarious attempts to grab a condom from the table, each time being interrupted by a parent on campus.

The show continued with the much-awaited performances by Boris’ Kitchen. They performed 15 hilarious sketches, several of which were written by Brandeis students who were not part of the troupe. Many were fairly short, but did not fail to make the audience laugh. 

One of the short sketches was entitled “Chicken,” and was written by Rachel Zhu ‘18, and featured Yael Matlow ’18 and Ayelet Schrek ’17. Matlow tells the well known “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke to Schrek, who responds with a very scientific response. When Matlow counters “To get to the other side,” Schrek analyzes this answer for a few seconds and then bursts into uncontrollable laughter. Matlow laughs along with her at first, but Schrek cannot comprehend how hilarious it is and continues to laugh long after Matlow had stopped. Matlow, very concerned, looks at her and then at the audience and exclaims “It’s not that funny!” 

The last sketch of the night, which was one of the most memorable, was entitled “Wank Robbery” and was written by Andrew Agress ’17. It depicted Mira Garin ‘19 and Rodrigo Granados ’18 as parents going to a sperm bank to get a sperm sample so they could have a child. Jason Kasman ’16, the receptionist at the bank who is assisting them, leaves a sippy cup on his desk while he momentarily leaves the room. Suddenly, a robber — Dennis Hermida ’16 — runs on stage with a gun, threatening to kill the parents if they do not give him money. Garin and Granados explain that it is a sperm bank, not a regular bank, but Hermida grabs the cup and presents a variety of threats to Garin and Granados, threateningly holding the gun to the cup each time they refuse to follow his orders. 

Eventually, they give the robber a gold watch to compromise, and the robber returns the cup to them. When Kasman returns to the room, he proceeds to open the cup and start to eat it with a spoon. 

Garin and Granados nervously try to stop him, but he says it is his breakfast in the cup. Garin and Granados proceed to groan at how many sacrifices they made to the robber when it wasn’t even their sperm sample in the cup that had been at risk.

The sketch comedy festival was an absolute delight to watch. The show was Zephry Wright’s ’17 first time ever directing, and he did a fantastic job. In a director’s note in the program for the event, he described how he almost gave up as director many times, but the whole troupe was always there to support him. “If this had been any other cast, I can say with full confidence that I would not have survived this process,” said Wright. “I may be the director of this year’s Fall [Sketch Comedy] Festival, but without Mira (Garin ’19) and the rest of this group, it wouldn’t be a show worth watching.”