Throat Culture, the only on-campus sketch comedy troupe at Hopkins, had its first show of the semester on Saturday, Oct. 14. Let me tell you, it had everything: inhaler jokes, back tests, vegans, inhaler jokes, witches and even more inhaler jokes.
I’m only exaggerating a little when I say that the show was about 80 percent asthmatic humor.
Still, it was a very well written show, and every sketch — no matter how odd — had the audience laughing.
In the style of iconic sketch comedy group shows such as Saturday Night Live,Throat Culture puts on shows three times a semester, performing both live sketches and pre-recorded content.
The show’s opening skit had returning club members William Bernardoni and Kaylynn Sanders — a sophomore and a senior, respectively — welcome everyone to the show, and, having only just realized that they didn’t have enough material to fill the entire hour, desperately stall for time.
Later, freshman Ben Straus played an animal-loving waiter who is unable to keep his love of animals out of his dinner recommendations for a young couple and ends up reciting a monologue about a sweet innocent calf alone in the woods.
My personal favorite was the final skit of the evening, a short about a talk show for the modern witch.
The show’s hosts have to deal with their new “diversity hire”: Gezmerelda, a scowling witch who is less “burn sage to cleanse evil energy” and more “talk to demonic forces and hex the innocent.”
With a premise like that, it was only a matter of time until a demon was parading around the set and one of the show’s guests — in this case, a Kim Kardashian-inspired blogger — was dead on the studio floor.
Watching the hosts try to keep everything running smoothly while also dealing with Gezmerelda was probably the funniest part of the entire show.
Did I mention the inhaler skits? The show’s funniest and only recurring sketch started with an Asthmatics Anonymous meeting, attended by a struggling mother, an addict high on eighty ‘hits’ of corticosteroids and one very confused alcoholic.
Later a man (played by junior Matias Eisler) struggles to resist the sweet rush of Symbicort and instead takes a drag from a helium balloon.
In the final asthma-themed skit of the night, two characters stress over how little helium they have left. Unable to keep themselves from draining their balloons, the two argue while the helium cranks their voices to a fiendishly high pitch.
When their balloons are fully deflated, the two guiltily turn away from one another and sneak a puff from their inhalers.
It was definitely the strangest concept of the evening, but when one of the actors blows out a puff of smoke after taking a long drag on their inhaler, it’s hard not to laugh.
Sophomore Emma Shannon was pretty pleased with her first performance in Throat Culture.
“I think [the show] went really well. It was super cool to be a part of it... We had a big turn out, and the audience laughed, which is always the goal,” she said.
She also spoke highly of her experience with Throat Culture.
“It’s nice to have a group of people who are super supportive... and love writing and acting. I was worried about getting into an established group, but we became close pretty quickly,” Shannon said.
Shannon is one of the six new members of Throat Culture, along with Shivani Pandey, Jakob Pollack, David Gumino, Straus and Eisler.
If Saturday’s show is anything to go by, the newcomers are excellent additions to the club.
Shannon wrote the Asthmatics Anonymous sketch, and Eisler and Straus also wrote sketches for the show.
Throat Culture’s next show is scheduled for Nov. 4 and will be their 24-hour performance. Judging by their first performance, it’ll be well worth checking it out.
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