Looking for comedic relief at the height of midterm season, students crawled out from the depths of their O’Neill 5 hideaways to show up in big numbers at the My Mother’s Fleabag Fall Café on Thursday. The Boston College comedy troupe did not disappoint, filling the hour with hilarious banter and witty improv.
Fleabaggers encouraged high audience participation throughout the night: The comedians crowdsourced topics for their improvised comedy, brought members down from the seats to set the stage for various games, and even sought dialogue for their skits from audience members standing on the makeshift “stage” in the small Gasson lecture hall.
A game of “Freeze” opened the café, during which the Fleabaggers pulled a member of the crowd onstage to position the Fleabaggers in odd formations that gave birth to various scenes. The audience burst into laughter when Maya Rao, MCAS ’21, fired off a topical punchline: “You’re going to tape Grandpa’s will to my back, and that’s my Halloween costume?”
Nick Edel, MCAS ’19, asked the audience for suggestions of radio stations for the following act, a game in which Fleabaggers Anna Livaccari, MCAS ’20; Ari Malliaros, CSOM ’19; Mike Bamford, MCAS ’20; and Tom Mier, MCAS ’19, had to adopt the role of radio host for their given station. Bamford belted out impromptu seafaring lyrics as the host of pirate radio while Mier gave those tuning into HGTV radio tips on how to put the finishing touch on their Greco-Roman style living room: the body of a dead man.
Mier prompted the audience with the question “What is something you would like to find in antique store for just $2.50?” before settling on the topic of whips for a game of pan left, pan right. Four Fleabaggers rotated scenes to create a total of eight concurrent scenes. Graysen Parish, MCAS ’22, opted to portray a mother with a dance class obsession during one scene.
“The whip can only last so long—it has to go out of style,” Parish said, causing the crowd to reply with a combination of laughter and poetry reading-style snaps.
Maggie Cetrullo, MCAS ’21, portrayed a murderous husband while playing a game in which Fleabaggers had to conjure up a movie plot based on the first letter of the crowd’s answers to various questions. Edel hilariously starred as a member of the dead wife’s book club, exclaiming, “She had next month’s book in her hand!” when he found the dead body.
The comedy group rounded out the night of asinine fun with fan favorite game “185 Blanks Walk into a Bar,” a game in which the audience fills in the blank and the Fleabaggers supply the jokes. Sam Harmon, MCAS ’21, stole the show with his consistent joke about a family in Cold War Poland during the segments. Riffing off the topic of TV shows, Harmon took up the identity of a Polish pilot who flew his starving family out of Poland and into “the Westworld.” In the final round of a game that centered on BC Dining specials, Harmon re-assumed his role for a strong ending: Fast-forwarding 20 years, Harmon found himself separated from the rest of his displaced Polish family in West Berlin. Grabbing the arm of his imaginary brother as the wall Berlin Wall fell, Harmon exclaimed, “Finally East Meets West!”
Featured Image by Steve Ebert / Heights Staff
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