Eddie Vedder once wrote, "I'll swallow poison until I grow immune / I will scream my lungs out till it fills this room." Well, I just saw Boris' Kitchen, and I must say, the crap they spewed out at the audience during the first half did not leave me immune to the garbage that came out in the second, but there was a lot of yelling. Yelling and cursing and trying to shock us. It's truly a sad thing when a penis joke gets one of the biggest laughs. In their defense, it was a decent penis joke, but all the same. And, what makes it even more disappointing is that when I saw them last, I wrote a good review. I genuinely liked them and what they did for the most part. But this, this "performance," was awful. With a whole semester to work on the show, there is no excuse for what I saw. The evening began with the show starting 25 minutes late, only to have the second sketch fall to technical problems that could have been figured out beforehand. The first sketch had two guys undressing and hitting each other with bacon. Need I say more? "Bran Van Down" was an interesting, well-shot spoof on the war movie, except it wasn't funny. It also was the first of six or seven references to the same Dave Matthews Band song, "The Space Between." Over and over again, they played this goddamned song. Oh the horror, the horror, they think they're clever or something. They stole Weekend Update from SNL and did it twice, once with old people. Yeah, getting old people to curse, fall asleep and pass out is sooooooo smart, such great displays of talented minds at work. I'm so impressed.

I must admit that the second half was better than the first; this doesn't mean that much, but it is true nonetheless. It had two people unable to read jokes without messing up, a guy making fun of the Brandeis statues with comments that anyone could have come up with, a just-plain-idiotic skit involving Tom Ridge's son and yet another short making fun of people on cell phones in line. It was good the first time they did it last year.

They had one sketch that was without flaws however - "Dog Day After School Special." A good title, from a great Pacino film, that can't be described well on paper, but it was good. What they achieved here was a sketch that didn't run too long, something that most of the show suffered from, and got to a well-timed punch line. "Subtle Messages," using the Instant Messager format for an argument, was good until the tired Dave Matthews reference. They have a real problem in not being able to let ideas go; they ripped on Creed, the band we all love to hate, too many times. Overkill, look it up boys and girls.

Most of the other ideas failed to stir a laugh without resorting to saying a curse word, a mother joke or locking children in basements. The closing sketch had its moments, but decided to end with yet another slow motion, Dave Matthews Band fiasco. They have 19 people mentioned in the roster, and maybe two or three with any discernable talent for comedy. A friend of theirs that I know, told me that their shows are mostly for their clique, their friends and close associates. Well, if I were their friend, I'd be pissed off, besides being slightly embarrassed, for having to pay $5 to bathe in their ineptitude. But what I lost was something far more valuable - my time and patience. Thank you, Boris' Kitchen, for wasting my Friday night sitting in Levin Ballroom for over two hours.