I found out about the 2009 Sit & Spin Stand-up auditions with less than 24 hours to prepare, no experience performing and a fat Legal Studies paper to finish. Anxious and over-caffeinated, I split my time in the library between interpreting the United States Constitution and writing jokes. By the time midnight rolled around, all I had come up with was a choppy paragraph about the forgettable Biggie biopic Notorious, but I went anyway. In the dimly lit hall outside the classroom in Kresge where auditions were being held, about eight students paced around nervously, muttering material under their breath, offering to perform and asking for last-minute feedback (“Is it funnier if I put an edge on the word ‘nuts,’ like I’m nuts?”). I passed on the chance to rehearse with them, intimidated there was this many aspiring comedians with whom I had never crossed paths at school. I started to wonder if they were sizing me up and trying to gauge how funny I was because admittedly that’s what I was doing with them. Waiting around together felt a bit like an audition in and of itself, abuzz with the same sort of suppressed tension as when leashed dogs sniff each others’ butts.

The show’s directors, Dan Siegel and Sam Allard, were also strangers to me at the time, but they bore witness to my first shot performing anything resembling stand-up. If my memory serves me well, those Notorious jokes earned subdued laughs of confusion and pity, and I can assure you the funniest parts of my short set that night were the hives on my chest, my vibrating hands and sudden incontinence. As far as my dignity is concerned, I would’ve rather undergone fraternity hazing or had my mom walk in on me having passionate sex with my desk. Student-run comedy auditions can be pretty unwelcoming when you don’t know anyone.

I knew right away I wouldn’t be chosen for the show, but somehow I still felt a little jilted, like I should’ve been given an honorable mention for detonating my self-worth into such spectacular flames of embarrassment. But that’s not how the world works unless you’re William Hung. At that moment I took it as my cue, rather, my destiny to fade into the background while my better-composed peers ran everything, and in my head I singled out Dan Siegel as some kind of comedy-cockblocking supervillain. My ego was bruised; I never said I was being reasonable.

With nearly a year’s hindsight, I accept-actually, I believe­-Siegel has a good head on his shoulders about running auditions. “It’s stressful,” he says, “because you’re really humbled and inspired by all the talent you’re seeing and there’s a lot of pressure to make the smart, objective decision. That can be really hard when you’re seeing a bunch of students, some you’re friends with, some you aren’t; some are freshmen, some are seniors. You want a balanced cast.” About having chosen eight performers out of thirty-three who auditioned for the show, he says, “I don’t like the power. I don’t take any pleasure in deciding who gets an opportunity.”

Northwestern provides neither direction nor a particularly well-tailored academic structure for those of us pursuing comedy, so it’s up to students to organize themselves in extracurricular activities, appoint their own overseers and to select and reject one another-and they do all of this outstandingly. If you decide crafting jokes is what you love, the first places you’ll turn are not academic departments or classrooms, but thriving groups like NSTV, Mee-Ow, Out Da’ Box and Titanic Players, where kids your age and of your qualifications will decide whether or not you get a shot at it. And though the sense of community is strong, you’ll see: There’s a good chance the odds will be against you, a good chance you’ll get shut down, and a good chance it will sting a little even when it shouldn’t.

The more I talk about it, the more I discover how common my first audition experience is. Though Ellie Reed was in Sit & Spin last year and has been acting in NSTV sketches for three years, she commiserated: “As someone who’s auditioned and been rejected a lot, you get used to it, but it’s different with comedy. In theater you can always tell yourself you didn’t have the right hair color for that particular part, but with improv and stand-up, it’s like, ‘That’s who I am!'” She adds, “There are people all over this campus who appreciate comedy but are too scared to audition and think they don’t know anyone.” Chris Poole writes for NSTV this year, but was turned down the previous three. In the process, he developed a thick skin in auditions and learned not to take rejection personally. “Do your work, show up, and that’s all you can do,” he says. “You have to tell the people to f— off in your mind. If they didn’t take you, and you want to be upset, great. Harness that.”

About 130 students are currently involved in comedy groups, and the ones I’ve met are some of the most creative, hardworking and talented people I know. I’m incredibly grateful the community exists, but what becomes a fairly tight-knit social group can discourage outsiders from getting involved. “By sophomore year, there’s a very clear group of ‘the comedy kids’ in a class. I imagine it’s very hard for someone to break in later,” says Jen D’Angelo, one of three members of Mee-ow who ran auditions this year. “For Mee-ow we went out of our way to find new faces…but you want people you know you’ll work with really well, so that makes it hard to take strangers. It’s hard to determine someone’s overall demeanor from a two-hour callback.”

“There’s an inner circle of comedians here,” says Christopher Lyons, who directs Out Da’ Box, an undervalued sketch group composed mostly of minority students that doesn’t publicize as aggressively as its comedy counterparts. “And it’s a lot of the same people (across groups)-not speaking negatively, it’s just an observation to be made. In Out Da’ Box, we’ll give someone new the opportunity who shows potential. All you need is a shot because the more you do it, the better you get.”

As mentioned before, Northwestern lacks an opportunity for students who want to workshop material and sharpen their sense of humor to do so in a risk-free environment: There’s no improv class through the Theater department, no sketch writing through Radio/Television/Film, no satire writing through English and so forth. “Comedy doesn’t get the attention it deserves from an academic standpoint,” says Lyons. “There’s a lot of technique involved in writing and performing comedy, and there’s a lot to gain from having those sorts of classes.” While no one can be taught how to be funny, there are skills that can be built, self-editing that can be learned and concrete tricks that consistently make funny jokes funnier. Arranging your syntax so the funniest word falls at the end, being economical with diction, abiding by the rule of threes-these are some approaches that require some trial and error. And while knowing these things may reveal the magic of comedy a little, they work, and they demand lots of practice. “There’s a real art to it,” Siegel says.

By contrast, Columbia College in Chicago partnered with Second City Theater to create a program in comedy studies in early 2007, where college students enroll in classes such as “Context for Comedy,” “History and Analysis of Modern Comedy” and “Creating Scenes Through Improvisation” for credit. The prerequisite isn’t being a theater major, having friends who are involved or even being funny; it’s having the interest. Given how many students have already demonstrated passion for the subject through their extracurricular activities, demand for similar courses exists at Northwestern.

To my knowledge, the closest we’ve come to having a comedy-oriented course was in spring 2009, where “Performance Studies in Comedy” was offered as an elective. The 20 of us who enrolled excitedly anticipated a chance to perform and create in a classroom; instead a visiting professor showed us clips from dreadfully outdated and downright distasteful comedic subge
nres like Wild West shows, vaudeville and minstrelsy. Besides her odd, depressing choices of teaching materials, many of us were blown away by her Amelia Bedelia-like ineptitude: She screened part of Albert Brooks’ “Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World” but unblinkingly introduced it to us as a documentary by Mel Brooks.

My classmates’ and my revenge manifested in 1.7 ratings on the CTEC report, accompanied by eviscerating comments like “(This professor) lives on another planet,” and, “It’s bad news when your comedy professor doesn’t know that Richard Pryor is dead, or that the year isn’t 2006. Yes, that happened.”

Without classes or extracurricular groups to channel creative energy, students have forged their own paths to pursue comedy. Freshmen Dan Selinger and Chloe Cole have been brave enough to perform at open mics twice a week since October. “I auditioned for all those things and didn’t get in, but that lead me to have enough free time to go into the city and do open mics,” he says. “It’s been such an educational experience for me. Sometimes I look back and have no regrets because I’ve learned so much.” Cole agrees: “Most of them were embarrassing, but open mics are the best time to go. I’ve gotten used to performing in front of people who don’t want to laugh.” Some find chances to perform in unexpected places, like sophomore Lex Singer. “Man pageants have really been my outlet for comedy,” he says. “I’ve been in three and placed in all of them, but I don’t want to be defined as just a piece of meat. I’ve officially retired from the man pageant circuit, though I don’t want to come off as bitter about it.”

Poole and fellow NSTV-writer Scott Baumgartner took the initiative to direct the first winter stand-up showcase, which gave 11 performers a chance to perform on campus-including Cole, Selinger, Singer, Reed and myself. “We wanted to give a lot of new people opportunities to show their stuff-we wanted people who were actually interested who wanted to work hard, who were dedicated,” says Poole. All of us were thrilled with the response: Both nights of the show sold out beyond capacity and made about $2,000 for NSTV, which Siegel now directs. As he says, “(Northwestern students) are the best crowd ever-young, smart, maybe drunk people who really appreciate humor.”

Performing in the show, I had the utterly redemptive experience of proving to myself that I’m not a wuss. (And much to my delight, I neither puked, wept nor fainted, at least not in public.) It was as good a place and time to try stand-up as I could ever want, and the audience was wonderful to us-so wonderful, it was like we were lifelong super best friends that had all coincidentally been slipped the same party drug. The weeks of workshops and rehearsals were a time commitment, certainly, but to produce such a show requires little else. There’s no reason for there not to be more opportunities like it. And with any luck, as this community expands and diversifies, students will mobilize and prove themselves unwussy.