17th Annual College Comedy Festival

So, I went to this comedy festival with Hope, and the college groups' show we went to (Friday night, second show) was mostly amazing. I will never forget that gay killer whale or the "Dank Cola" executives eating babies.

But I'll also never forget the group from GWU. I need to look at the program again and figure out what their name is, because I'm drafting a letter.

I have never been so offended by a comedy show in my life.

Draft of letter so far:

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To the members of Recess at GWU:

I'm a student at Skidmore College, and I saw you perform on Friday night, February 10th at the 17th Annual National College Comedy Festival. I am writing this letter because your group seemed unaware of the implications of your comedy sketches. Perhaps you intended to offend and insult people. If so, consider this a letter of congratulations. If you wish to avoid insulting large groups of people in your future performances, perhaps you will take some of my comments into account.

Your opening film, which showed a male performer playing a woman in labor, put me off slightly. After all -- yes, intense emotions are involved in women giving birth; yes, lots of hormones come into play; yes, this might be humorous in some contexts. Unfortunately, your depiction gave the impression that you were skewering women who are giving birth. Sorry, but I value women who are willing to push babies out through their vaginas, and there is no reason to make fun of that courageous and miraculous feat.

I attempted to put aside my misgivings and enjoy the rest of your show. But if your intention with this next segment was satire, you failed. This is the sketch involving a female god giving different babies their introductions to the world, letting them know what their gender assignments would entail. The girl, for example, was told that she would encounter a glass ceiling preventing her from rising in the business world. As I'm sure you know, the glass ceiling is the result of men's oppression of women. It is not intrinsic to the condition of being female. But hey, way to dismiss that and reinscribe patriarchy as divinely ordained. The upside to being a girl? She can use her breasts to get free drinks. After all, the only thing a girl has going for her are her looks and sex appeal! Then, god tells the baby boy that his life will be easy; his mother will take care of him, and then he'll find a wife. Again, a female god endorses the subjugation of women; their purpose is to take care of men. Third, we have an intersex infant, mischaracterized as "having both [genitals]." Actually, there are a great variety of intersex conditions, and true hermaphroditism (where an individual has full-formed sets of male and female reproductive organs) is not possible in our species. Snails are hermaphrodites. Earthworms are hermaphrodites. Humans are intersex. If you'd like more information about what "intersex" means, and the issues facing intersex people, ISNA.org is a great website. Also, Jamie Lee Curtis is probably not intersex (see http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/jamie.htm). Most importantly, people with intersex conditions are HUMAN BEINGS. Despite the shame and secrecy surrounding intersex conditions, being intersex in itself does not mean someone's entire life is ruined. But in your act, intersex people's existence itself is treated as a joke, and their struggles are simplified to a giant scribble blotting out any chance at a happy or productive life. Just the idea of being intersex was enough to send a certain segment of the audience into peals of laughter. Did it ever occur to you that some people in your audience might have been born with ambiguous genitalia? At this juncture, frankly, I felt like throwing up and almost left the room. I stopped myself, figuring that it couldn't get any worse.

But you managed to outdo yourselves once again, with a skit recasting Hitler and "Mrs. Hitler" as a sitcom-style couple! You expected people to laugh at a pun about the "Final Solution," even as some of us know that our relatives' corpses are still rotting in mass graves all over Eastern Europe. So, that wasn't too clever. And not only did you manage to trivialize genocide, you managed to stick in gratuitous ethnic stereotypes with your Mussolini and Hirohito characters. Plus, you managed to trivialize WWII in general, despite the approximately 62 MILLION people who died in the war. Their deaths are not a joke, either. It takes a lot of skill to make fascist dictators look like jokes, and I'm sorry to say that you did not pull it off successfully.

And at last, your magnum opus, the film about beer pong! First you show how much girls suck at beer pong, reinforcing your earlier anti-woman message. They need a big strong man to train them so that they can beat the boys! A montage scene, presumably a spoof, shows the girls looking ridiculous as they "train." Finally, they beat the boys. But the boys are going to win in the end, because they have a secret stash of ping-pong ball-shaped roofies. Yes, the girls drink their drugged beers, and pass out. End of film. Right . . . so explain to me how that's funny? Well, having your beer drugged is not funny. Passing out from having your beer drugged is not funny. And what happens after you pass out? Well, you're raped by the people who drugged you. And that is not funny at all, especially to people in your audience who have actually been raped, or who have close friends or family members have been raped.

In conclusion: if you are trying to offend people, great job! If not, you should take some cues from the other college groups participating in the festival.

Sincerely.
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Comments? Criticism?