When the Buttered Niblets announce a new show, it is practically a guarantee that Arellano Theater will be filled to the brim with people ready for a good laugh after a hard week. This week was no different; people packed the theater.
They had to stand and sit in the back due to a lack of seating in the venue. Although the low ticket price ($1) may have been part of the attraction, the greater impetus for people to come see the show was probably how well-known and anticipated the group is throughout the entire campus.
The people who came because of the alleged talent and charm of the Buttered Niblets were not misled; everything they heard was completely true.
From the get-go, the show was full of energy and hilarity. The troupe appeared on stage amidst a crescendo of stomping and cheering from the audience.
The lights went up to reveal the 11 members of the Buttered Niblets ready for an evening of comedy.
They jumped right in with the game “SpaceTime,” in which senior Andrew Yip and sophomore Benjamin Zucker performed a scene in three different settings, each suggested from the audience members.
The first scene was done in a used car lot and then the same scene (buying a car) was adapted to a medieval English setting as well as a Stone Age setting. Yip and Zucker were brilliant in how quickly they were able to move from one scene to another — they barely hesitated in changing “buying a car” in a used car lot to “buying a horse” in medieval England to “buying shoes” in the Stone Age. The audience laughed freely, and this was one of the best games, if not the best, of the evening.
Yip was also in the next game, “Slideshow,” in which he and sophomore Hilary Barker narrated a documentary about ghosts, another prompt from the audience.
The rest of the actors in this game acted the part of the “slideshow” by freezing in poses, and Yip and Barker had to come up with ways to explain why their co-actors were posing in the way they were.
They came up with very creative ways to explain the poses, often invoking laughter.
This game was one of the weaker ones in the show, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t enjoyable to watch.
The Buttered Niblets did seem to recognize this, because they kept it short enough that it didn’t begin to drag, but long enough to satisfy the audiences who did enjoy this game.
“Armando,” which had been performed at the show in the beginning of the year, improved a lot in the time since.
A guest star who wasn’t in the Buttered Niblets was brought on stage to tell a story based on a prompt from the audience (“tips”), and then six members of the troupe acted out scenes based off that story, which prompted another story, and so on and so forth.
Although the format of this game itself hadn’t changed, it no longer felt like it lagged, as compared to the first show of the year, and was, as usual, hilarious as they touched on topics from freeloading neighbors to blind professors.
In “Foreign Film,” freshman Claire Rosen and sophomore Evan Wiley are blindfolded and must “dub” a foreign film while Zucker and Barker act the scene out without saying anything.
Watching Zucker and Barker try to follow the dialogue from Rosen and Wiley was highly amusing, although it did not garner as many laughs as the rest of the evening had.
Yip was the star in Last Minute Soap Opera; he played the main character in a scene of a soap opera titled “Gestapo Town” by a member of the audience.
He along with Rosen, Barker, and Wiley performed a scene while randomly inserting sentences written by the audience before the show started.
This would have been funny in and of itself, but it was most hilarious point of the game was when Barker was yelling at a baker and pulled out a line that aptly said, “I like pie.” The laughter from just this was nearly unmatched the rest of the evening.
The final game of the evening was “Late for Work,” in which Barker was late to work, and her boss Wiley demanded to know why.
Her coworkers, Yip, Rosen and Zucker attempted to mime and even a sound effect of a toilet flushing at one point that she had been “stuck inside a neurotic whale,” “pooped in a car” and was “attacked by zebras while having a colonoscopy.” Although Barker needed a hint in the form of senior Jeremy Bremmer, she eventually managed to guess all three reasons to raucous cheers and applause.
There are only two criticisms of the show. First, there were people who seemed to be featured heavily, like Yip and Barker, and others who were only in one game, like freshman Jen Diamond and senior Ian White.
The show could have benefited from mixing up the actors and spreading them out more evenly. The other is that while the audience was laughing, the actors kept going, and since the laughter masked what was happening on stage, the audience missed several lines every game.
The troupe must live and breathe comedy, because everything they did was done so smoothly.
They know what makes people laugh, and they know exactly how to work a crowd. In a nutshell, they understand the art of comedic delivery.
Their effectiveness was extremely clear if one only listened to the volume of laughs that evening in the tiny theater.
There is no doubt that there will be many returning audience members in the Buttered Niblets’s next show in March. After all, as the doctors say, laughter is one of the best remedies for stress, and the Buttered Niblets deliver to perfection.
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