College Comedy Festival returns to campus Feb. 12-13

A riotous stagefull of professional and collegiate comics will take over Skidmore's Bernhard Theater Feb. 12 and 13 for the 21st annual National College Comedy Festival 2010 - an event recently touted in a Boston Globe list of amusing things to do on Valentine's Day weekend.

Presented by student comedy groups the Ad-Liberal Artists, Sketchies, and Skidomedy, the festival will draw 170 college comedians from 20 colleges and universities to the Skidmore campus. They come to hone their craft and make live audiences laugh, to try out their best bits on each other, and to network like crazy, according to NCCF co-organizer Chris Jacobsen '10. "You talk to people in the business who say, 'Oh, yeah, I went to the Skidmore festival in the '90s'." 

The college comics also get to learn from some of the best in the business. This year's lineup of professional comics includes the Upright Citizens Brigade, Derrick, and Bleak! Comedy. All three troupes will perform Friday and Saturday nights at 10 p.m., and will coach the college comics in sketch and improvisation comedy workshops on Saturday afternoon. The festival's student performances will begin at 7 p.m. both nights, with each troupe onstage for 15 minutes. General admission is $2 to the college-comics' shows, $5 for admission to the headliners' shows; and $13 for a weekend pass. Tickets will be sold at the door before the performances, and in Skidmore's Case Center between noon and 5 p.m. February 8-12. For more information, e-mail skidfest@gmail.com.

The Upright Citizens Brigade Tourco is the traveling arm of one of the nation's best-established comedy resources, with theaters in New York City and Los Angeles whose nightly comedy shows draw perennial raves from the likes of New York Magazine ("the city's best improv workshop") to The Onion ("witty, irreverent, and conceptually ambitious") and dozens more. Uprightalumni include Amy Poehler ( Saturday Night Live, Parks and Recreation); Rob Corddry ( The Daily Show with Jon Stewart); and Ed Helms ( The Hangover, The Office.)UCB teaches and trains comics at its training centers in both New York and LA (see). Also on deck for the Skidmore festival will be Derrick Comedy, a troupe of National College Comedy Festival alumni turned YouTube phenomenonand Bleak! Comedy (whose manager is recent Skidmore grad Jane Clausen '09). Self-described as "four dudes and a chick based in New York City," Bleak! lives on Facebook and YouTube.

Among this year's college groups are the interestingly named Whistling Shrimp from Cornell University, Emerson College's This Is Pathetic, Yale's Purple Crayon, Trinity College's The Movable Joints, Harvard's Immediate Gratification Players, and Tufts University's Major: Undecided.

The National College Comedy Festival has been an annual tradition at Skidmore since its founding in 1990 by David Miner '91. A theater major who during his Skidmore years also started Skidmore's first comedy troupe, the Ad-Liberal Artists, Miner is a talent manager and Golden Globe-winning producer of television comedy shows, including NBC's Emmy Award-winning 30 Rock and new entry Parks and Recreation.

Each year the festival packs Bernhard Theater to the rafters as students and professionals from across the nation gather on the Skidmore campus for a few good laughs.