Student theater at Northwestern is about to take a new form: stand-up comedy.

Sit & Spin Stand-Up features traditional stand-up comedy acts and also includes solo and duo character-based comedy acts. According to producer Zora Senat, a Communication sophomore, stand-up comedy had yet to be explored by NU student theater.

Unlike a traditional stand-up comedy show, all the performers, who auditioned Winter Quarter, collaborate with each other regularly to test out jokes and ideas for characters. “You don’t think of (stand-up) as a student show, like sketch comedy, because it’s not really collaborative, but it is here,” says performer Joel Sinensky, a Communication sophomore who describes his act as “combining all the most humiliating experiences of (his) life.”

“We feel stand-up is a scary, scary thing to do,” Zanat says. “People need a place to not be scared with the crazy stuff they come up with.”

Even though they work together to create comedy, performers say they still find anxiety in the starkly personal nature of stand-up comedy. “I’m terrified, because it’s all you,” Sinensky says. “You write it, and the audience expects to laugh.”

It’s all personal.

“I’m not playing a character up there. I’m me,” says Adam Welton, a Communication junior, who describes his act as covering all the stuff that irritates him. “And another scary part is that most people watching will probably know us and will judge us afterwards.”

Unlike traditional theater actors, these performers only have one goal: to get the audience to laugh. “(Stand-up is) a really mathematical, fumbling experience,” says Claire Neumann, a Communication sophomore, who says she discusses sororities and passive-aggressive girls. ” You sometimes don’t get laughs when you expect to.”

Sit & Spin Stand-Up is Friday and Saturday, April 6 and 7, at 8 and 10 p.m. at Caf