BruinFest presents UCLA club Shenanigans, other stand-up performances

The campus felt empty, dark and cold on Saturday night. It seemed like nothing could be happening except dull, intensive studying, and something in the air suggested that the ratio of frowns to smiles on campus was probably leaning heavily toward frowns.

Fortunately, Shenanigans Comedy Club, a UCLA student club for those interested in performance comedy, hosted BruinFest: Stand Up Comedy Night in Kerckhoff Grand Salon.

“I came to this school as a freshman last year, and there weren’t really any outlets for stand-up comedy on campus,” said Austin Nasso, a second-year computer science student and president of Shenanigans. “We’re all about stand-up, sketch and improv, and we’re trying to make comedy big at UCLA and put on some really good shows.”

By 8:30 p.m., the room was bustling with a mixture of students and comedians, chatting, laughing and ready for comedy, but still no sign of the show. At 9 p.m., everyone was startled by the sound of flutes and drums bursting from the sound system. It was a recording of the opening music from the “Austin Powers” movies, which introduced Nasso. Nasso said that they tricked everyone into showing up early so that the comedians could be “fashionably late.” Even if this was true: No one seemed angry. The audience showed their approval with laughter and applause.

Nasso was an affable, welcoming host, and his observations about pot brownies – “inefficient modes of transportation” – on Bruin Walk and iPhone autocorrect woes eased the crowd into the tone of the evening.

The first group of comics were all students and members of Shenanigans.

Chris Valenzuela, a second-year economics student, slouched a bit and opened by making fun of his own hat, a beret he bought from Target. His style was a mixture of casual and nervous, discussing, among other things, his fear of magicians.

Next, second-year English student Nathan Mosher, having recently injured his leg, came on stage using crutches and performed sitting down. Throughout his set, which consisted mostly of short, quickly delivered jokes, he interwove a running joke about a hypothetical unfaithful girlfriend who seemed less “hypothetical” with every increasingly specific mention of her infidelities.

Luke Moran, a second-year French and linguistics student, opened with a few short jokes and then went to his stack of index cards, each containing a quick one-liner joke, to finish his set.

“These are some jokes my mom packed for me,” Moran said.

One of the cards, Moran said, featured only a pornographic drawing. He asked if anyone in the crowd wanted it and when he passed it to the person with the raised hand, he winked and mimed “call me” as he walked back to the microphone.

Nasso said that to perform at BruinFest, a student must be an active, participating member of Shenanigans, and frequently attend open mic events with the group.

“They can be in ridiculous places,” Nasso said. “Coffee shops, supermarkets, wineries, basements. Just random places where you can get time to go up and practice.”

The club’s most frequent open mic venue, The Improv Space in Westwood, is where the members met many of the non-student comedians who performed in the second half of the evening.

Richie Rosales’ slow-paced, dramatic, storytelling style pulled the audience in with quiet tones and released them with each punchline, while Mike Menendez’s frenetic movements across the stage and animated style generated big sustained laughs. Chris Gardner’s tone was terse and confident, and he carried himself with an exaggerated bravado, contrasted by Garrick Bernard’s self-effacing yet welcoming demeanor.

The final comedian of the night, BuzzFeed video resident Quinta Brunson, climbed the stage to rowdy applause, apparently preceded by her internet fame. Brunson’s set mixed autobiographical and observational material ranging from her mother’s inability to understand what BuzzFeed is to half-kidding advice to all the students in the audience that they should quit school.

Nasso closed the evening by announcing that he plans to make BruinFest: Stand Up Comedy Night a quarterly event and hopes to close the school year with a larger comedy festival in the spring.

– Hugh DeFrance