On Campus
Budding Stand-up Comics at Rutgers Show Their Talent
Georges Garcon Jr., a neuroscience major, had never performed stand-up comedy.
Nevertheless, he stood center stage at the Cook Campus Center last week delivering jokes about some of Rutgers’ most venerable institutions to an audience of several hundred students and relatives.
“I love Rutgers but I can’t do the fraternity thing,” Garcon said. “I have to give them half my life savings and then it’s: ‘okay you can spank me now?’ ’’
While his jokes may not win him many friends in the fraternities, they struck a chord with the organizers of the New Jersey Comedy Festival. Garcon, and two others, Dina Hashem, and Nick Marinelli, were named the winners among 22 Rutgers students who performed in the festival’s campus competition.
The three will now match their comedic skills against students from 46 other New Jersey colleges and universities at the festival’s state championship finals in January – an event that Rutgers is hosting for the first time.
“I’m ecstatic – I don’t even know how it happened,” said Garcon, a junior. “I just got on stage and said to myself: ‘don’t mess up.’ ’’
Now in its third year, the comedy festival begins in the fall with campus competitions throughout the state and concludes with a one-day final and the crowning of the New Jersey “King or Queen of Campus Comedy.”
Dennis Hedlund, the founder and principal organizer of the festival, said learning the art of comedy should be a required course.
“They don’t teach it in public speaking class; they don’t teach it at debate class,” he said. “But it’s a talent you need to develop to go through life, and we want to nurture that in the students.”
The championship will take place Saturday, January 30, at the student center on the College Avenue Campus. The winner will get The Good Humor Award; $1000 cash, and a scholarship to the Manhattan Comedy School.
Matthew Ferguson, an assistant director with Rutgers University Student Life, said the campus competition at Rutgers went so well last year that the festival organizers asked if they could also hold this year’s finals at the university.
“It was just a supportive, spirited environment,” Ferguson said. “Stand-up is not easy, but students were getting up there and everyone applauded everyone. Everyone supported the comedians.
“The organizers thought the flagship university in New Jersey should be hosting the New Jersey Comedy Festival, and we agreed.”
At the campus competition last Wednesday, Rutgers students pulled out an array of routines: Russell Cox did an impression of inebriated movie and TV characters, including the beloved purple dinosaur Barney. Alan Javier Martofel read from an explicit advice column in Cosmopolitan. Daniel Grek did an impression of elderly men limbering up in the locker room of a campus gym.
“You’re coming in [after a workout] and you’re sweating and you’re delirious and they’re just standing there, buck naked, stretching in the most odd ways possible,” Grek said.
Dina Hashem, one of the three winners, began her routine by noting that her entry into the contest prompted her friends to ask: “Don’t you have to be funny to do that?”
Hashem, a junior double majoring in English and Philosophy, imagined what they would say about other pursuits, such as modeling.
“Don’t you have to know how to walk and put on clothes?” she quipped.
Nick Marinelli, the other winner, and a senior in the School of Communications and Information, began his routine with a few self-deprecating remarks.
“I am ugly,” he said. “I tried to turn my TV on and it just wanted to be friends.”