On Friday night, the Golding Auditorium was packed with excited students, waiting for Brandeis’ five comedy groups to make an entrance. Organized by Julia Green ’18, this event was titled “The Comedy Bunch” and featured all of Brandeis’ improv groups — Bad Grammer, Crowd Control, TBA and False Advertising — as well as the sketch comedy group Boris’ Kitchen. The combined humor and entertainment from all the groups had the audience engaged and laughing for the whole show.

The show opened with a game in which TBA's Dan Hirshfield ’16 was sent out of the room while the audience came up with a crime that Hirshfield committed, which he would then have to guess per humorous questions from other comedy group members what he was guilty of. 

The audience decided that Hirshfield had murdered Donald Trump at Planned Parenthood with Paris Hilton. Hirshfield was able to guess the exact scenario impressively quickly, with the aid of several of the other comedy members’ hilarious questions.

The groups played several other games throughout the night that caused many laughs among the audience. A popular game, which was played twice during the course of the show, involved several members from all the groups. Participants lined up and, two at a time, had to act out a short scene based on just one word that Matt Guerra ’18 from Bad Grammer gave to them. After everyone had gone, Guerra gave the words to groups of two again, and the pairs had to act out a much shorter version of the skit that had been portrayed with that word previously. Many participants had trouble thinking of ways to act out the scenes in such a short time,and would sometimes end up running out of the performance area, to the audience’s delight.

The troupes also played a game called “Good, Bad and Worse,” which is a popular improv game played at many of the Brandeis improv troupes’ shows. 

In the game, an audience member describes to the troupe a “problem” that they are having, and the troupe will give them (humorous) good, bad and even worse advice on how to solve the problem. For this game, the four improv troupes played together, with each of the individual groups answering an audience member’s question one at a time. With every new question, the groups switched places and then had to give them advice from the perspective of the group that was originally in that place. Seeing troupe members try to impersonate members of other troupes was very comedic and entertaining.

Another extremely entertaining game involved five pairs of participants, each with a different relationship or conflict. They were thrown a scenario that they had to act out based on their conflict, and when they were called to stop, another one of the pairs had to start a scene with the last line of the previous pair’s scene and relate it to their own scenario. 

The pairs did a great job of incorporating the humorous sentences from the other pairs to fit their scenarios. Additionally, it was extremely impressive how they could come up with such funny conflicts on the spot.

The last game, which was played by all members of all the troupes, is a popular one that is commonly played at several of the comedy group’s individual shows. The crowd would yell out an object, and members would run to a chair in the middle and say “I once dated a [object from the crowd], but…” and insert a pun related to the object. For example, when the word was corn, one member shouted, “I once dated a corn, but it kept stalking me!”

The show was delightful and hilarious to watch. All the comedy groups working together succeeded at multiplying the humor of each group while also allowing each of the groups to show off their individual differences. The show provided much-needed comic relief for the Brandeis community during the stressful midterms period.