Although it may not be NBC's "The Sing Off" (2009), several talented Tufts performers are working to gain national fame in a competition in which fellow Jumbos can determine the outcome. Sophomores Ian Donovan and Matt Nazarian, junior Brian Agler and senior Sam McCauley are competing in the 3rd Annual RooftopComedy.com National College Comedy Competition, sponsored by TBS.
RooftopComedy.com is a website that hosts videos of stand-up comedy as well as short humor videos. Thirty-two teams from colleges across the nation are competing in the bracketed tournament. Users can watch videos of stand-up from comedians on each team and vote for the team they think should advance to the next round.
The winning team of each of the four brackets (North, West, Midwest and South) will travel to Aspen, Colo. to take part in the Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival in June. Four MVPs at that tournament will win performance slots in a TBS comedy festival airing June 15-19.
"They pay for your plane, and you get to stay in Aspen for a week and you perform and get to be on TV, so it's a really big deal," Donovan said.
If the Tufts team gets more votes than its current opponent, Emerson, it will go on to face the winner of the competition between Boston College and MIT.
The four students in the competition all have one thing in common: They are members of the Tufts Stand-up Comedy Collective (SUCC), which Nazarian founded last fall.
SUCC members meet weekly in an informal, workshop atmosphere in a room in the basement of Aidekman Arts Center to practice their routines and run new jokes by other members.
"There's a lot of little things [about stand-up]. You have to get your persona down, and you have to get the right wording. Sometimes if you change one word, it'll change the whole joke," Nazarian, SUCC's founder, said. "That lends itself more to this workshop style."
"It's a new group, and it's not very formal, but it's nice because you get a lot of peer advice as to how to make yourself better," McCauley said.
Group members also give performances, usually in Hotung Café, about once a month on Thursday nights (including last night).
SUCC members support each other by going to open mic nights at comedy clubs together. "You can be there late, and there can be these miserable comics, and it can be lonely if you're there and don't know anyone," Nazarian said.
Nazarian got his stand-up start in a high school talent show. "When I came to college, I really wanted to pursue it more, so last year I performed in places around here … and I performed in open mic nights, but it's hard to get stage time when you're like nobody," Nazarian said. "I wanted to have a way to make some stage time for myself and everybody else and get other people interested."
Nazarian, who is also a member of the sketch comedy group Major: Undecided, proposed the idea to his fellow comedians and got plenty of positive feedback.
Nazarian heard about the Rooftop College Comedy Competition through a fellow comedian at Emerson. The competition's organizers needed another Boston-area school in the bracket, so Tufts found a slot.
To choose the eight Tufts competitors who would compete in the competition, the SUCC group held a stand-up night in Dewick-MacPhie Dining Hall in mid-March. The event filled the venue to capacity.
Although technically not an open mic night, as entrants had to register beforehand, anyone from Tufts was eligible to perform. According to McCauley, 16 people performed, and the eight comedians who would represent Tufts at the next round of the competition were selected by an audience vote.
In the next round of the competition, the eight Tufts students performed standup, along with eight Emerson students, at Mottley's Comedy Club in downtown Boston. A panel of three judges from RooftopComedy.com selected the four best stand-up routines from each team. Videos from that night were posted on the website yesterday.
The four Tufts students chosen to advance to the next round all have different comedic styles.
Agler, like Nazarian, did his first stand-up act at a talent show in high school. He cites comedian David Cross as one of his influences. "He'll tell his jokes but not just set up a punch line. He'll tell a full story, essentially, and the jokes just kind of come out of that. It's clearly a very personal thing, and I like doing jokes that are fairly true and about me," Agler said.
"A lot of [my material] is about being Jewish and growing up in Texas," Agler said. "In the act, the TBS thing, a fair majority is about Texas and being Jewish."
Nazarian is from a different school of comedy. "I have these things I think of that are funny little bits — one-liners and situations," Nazarian said. "It's more random than the story type of comedy."
"My jokes are usually pretty short in general. My longest joke's probably one-and-a-half to two minutes, whereas someone else might tell a whole story that takes seven minutes that works in a lot of funny things that they like," Nazarian said.
Much of McCauley's experience is in the sketch comedy realm. He is a member of both Major: Undecided and The Institute, a video sketch comedy group.
The skills needed for a successful stand-up comedy routine are a bit different from those required for sketch comedy, according to McCauley. "There's a fair amount of pressure in stand-up because the pressure is immediate. If a joke fails, that's you, on the stage with the joke that fails," McCauley said. "On the other hand, stand-up lets you kind of build up a tempo and a sort of rapport with the audience. With a good stand-up comedian, even if a joke fails, you don't have to lose the entire audience. He can recover well."
Unlike his teammates, Donovan has only been doing stand-up since November. Although interested in stand-up for years, it was only after learning about SUCC from Nazarian that he got involved in the scene.
"I wrote some jokes and went to the meeting. It turns out my jokes were OK, so then I started doing stand-up," Donovan said.
As for his comedic style, Donovan describes it as lowbrow. "[It's] observations on pooping, just a lot of lowbrow poop jokes," Donovan said.
Though all the competitors love stand-up comedy, none currently plan on a future in it.
"I'd love to keep doing comedy after graduation. I don't know if I'm going to be able to next year, at least not in a formal sense, but there's a lot of ways to do comedy," McCauley said.
Agler hopes to get exposure for himself and SUCC through the competition. "I'm only really exposed to professional comics, so it's really nice to see people my age and see what they're doing," Agler said. "It's a learning process as much as a competition."
"I'm going to do it as much as I can, as long as I can, and see where it goes from there," Nazarian said.
In the future, Nazarian hopes to have SUCC take more trips to comedy clubs off campus and get a more substantial budget. According to Nazarian, SUCC's budget for this academic year is $5.63, which came out of the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate buffer fund.
"I asked for $500 to go to off-campus things. They were like ‘No, that doesn't improve the Tufts community.' But [we could use] $5.63 for posters. I was like, ‘Alright, fine,'" Nazarian said. To pay to use Dewick-MacPhie, SUCC had to charge $10 for admission, but still managed to fill the venue.
Those who want to support Tufts' team in the first round of the competition can do so by voting at RoofTopComedy.com/College before 9 p.m. on April 26.
"I know we're not the Bubs on ‘The Sing Off,' but that was a big deal, so this should be at least half that," Agler joked.
"You can also vote more than 30 times," Nazarian added.
