travishelwig:

I wrote this article on Skidmore’s National College Comedy Festival for Splitsider.  It’s easily the most research I’ve done in my life.  

Read, comment with your Skidmore stories, pass it along, and tell me what you think! 

Wow. This article does a pretty good job capturing the overall feeling at Skidmore — the feeling, as a college comedian, that you’re part of a huge national community of starry-eyed idiots.

On a personal note, it’s fun to see T.J. Miller take some jabs at the early-2000s Skits:

“receSs was the reason I am the comedian I am today but Skidmore was the magnifying glass. I learned my style. [Cornell’s] Skits-o-phrenics were a well-timed machine but we were a tornado. Individually, we were funnier, but way less disciplined.”

The whole article spends a while hailing my buddy Mark as the “King of Skidmore,” and it’s a worthy title for a pretty deserving dude. But it is amazing how that one weekend in February in a small, bone-cold town always felt like paradise, a secret idyll of comedy nerds swimming naked on the stage.

My first year at Skidmore, Alex and I came up with the idea for Andrew Jaction Hero in the front seat of his truck, and along with Dan we wrote the sketch (and its sequel) that, for some reason, will always be my favorite. I waited three years to bring it to Skidmore, and when we finally performed it — opening the evening in front of a sold-out crowd — I felt my college comedy career come full circle. Sure, Skidmore was the place where, throughout the night, people would point at you and congratulate you on your work and treat you like a king, but it all seemed so silly when Skidmore was always the place that inspired that quality of work in the first place.

Also, watching myself perform as a freshman? Thank God we didn’t bring that sketch there sooner.