The screen above the stage at the Dekelboum Concert Hall on Thursday depicted red solo cups scattered around a dimly lit room, the kind of place where your shoes stick to the floor.
It was a quintessential college party scene, ready for Maryland Night Live actors to take the stage.
The show began with a time traveler who started by scolding present-day students for being discriminatory against artificial intelligence. They then helped their college-age father accept his sexuality and become a positive male role model for the time traveler.
Reminiscent of Gen Z’s critique of mansplainers and emotionally absent fathers, the opener set the stage for a comedically chaotic night.
Maryland Night Live’s 15th season featured a free comedy show with a mix of sketches, stand-up, recorded skits and jazz music written and performed by members of the group as part of The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s NextNow Fest.
Maryland Night Live, in name and content, takes inspiration from the long-running NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live.
“I wasn’t as familiar with SNL as a concept, so this was pretty fun and intriguing,” sophomore computer science and information systems major Mira Balakrishnan said. “They were really funny. I especially liked the stand-up.”
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For years, Maryland Night Live shows have made sketch comedy widely available to University of Maryland students. Jaden Chen, a junior computer science and immersive media design major, said he was excited for his first show from the group.
“I like comedy,” Chen said. “I’ve never been to a live comedy show … I’m excited to see what we have here.”
The performance included humor specific to this university that the comedy troupe is known for. Its news segment featured a joke about the first traffic signal on campus, its mere mention prompting outcries from the crowd.
The night’s guest stand-up was performed by Trisha Anand, a senior computer science and mathematics major and member of Hysterics, this university’s comedy troupe for underrepresented genders. In her set, Anand joked about the dangers of exposing her future unborn child to hours of TikTok every day, concerned the baby would emerge from the womb too familiar with the internet and already crafting Reddit posts.
“[Comedy is] the most special type of audience,” Anand said. “Everyone is interacting, everyone’s laughing … It makes it very special.”
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In the 90-minute span, the lights went up three times on an excited patron sitting in an Applebee’s as the audience watched their rocky attempts at finding companionship as a messy food lover. Don’t worry — the series had a happy ending as the customer ran offstage with a like-minded Applebee’s employee.
Rather than having an outside musical guest like in past productions, the group opted for an extended solo from their accompanying jazz band midway through the performance led by tenor saxophonist and senior geology major Alli Stavely.
What most stood out about Maryland Night Live was its collaborative comedy style. The actors constantly bounced off one another, reacting to the energy of the moment.
In one of the last sketches, a YouTube how-to video on fixing a dryer devolved into chaos when the dryer suddenly came to life. As the actors ran around the stage chasing one another — one of whom was wearing a cardboard dryer costume — it was clear they were having a great time.
“There’s a really special community in [Maryland Night Live],” Anand said. “It can be a way to break out of your comfort zone, even if you have never done anything with comedy.”
