In a local caf?(c), a girl sits diligently reading her book, until she notices the boy sitting behind her. Suddenly aware of her every move, she glances back only to notice the silent self-conscious struggle he's also enduring. They nervously edge their chairs closer, then back again, and so on, until that's it, they can't bear it any longer.

Passionately, the on-key Tricia Miller '12 delivers a hearty high-five to her funny partner, Christopher Knight '14. So began Boris' Kitchen's 13th Annual Comedy Festival, which occured last Friday night and Saturday night.


Before the sketch comedy troupe took the stage, the hilarious EVIL troupe from Chicago, featuring Brandeis and Boris' Kitchen alumni Sam Roos '09 and Amy Thompson '11, provoked the first bouts of laughter with their professional tricks. In one especially memorable sketch, they presented the 2013 dictionary. It includes a word that describes the gibberish apology you give after briskly bumping into a person in public. In another sketch, Roos donned a half Phantom of the Opera mask in solidarity with the emotional scars the Chicago Transportation Security Agency left him with en route to Boston.


In Boris' "Captain DUI" sketch, shown on a retractable movie screen, the mask prop appeared again, this time on Michael Frederikse '15, the captain. Slurping a stupefying amount of alcohol, he fumbles with the emergency phone that's ringing in his Rosenthal suite to tell him the mayor's in trouble. He braces the jump off of a couple of bricks before swerving around Loop Road in his superhero car. Frederikse gave a clever performance as a drunk, delivering hilariously futile lines to the Brandeis Police.


Following Frederikse's performance were two sketches written by Ben Setel '13 called "Vialis" and "Fuck History," also presented on screen. The latter delivered a parody segment of a National Geographic show, tracing the origin of the word "fuck" all the way back to the original "motherfucks" in history. Setel's most sophisticated sketch was "The Book of Chad," named after a recently-found gospel. The audience cracked up as a priest assured his confessee, a humorously sheepish Jason Kasman '16, that it's not his fault: it's Chad's.


The idea of God, or lack thereof, sprinkled the set-list. Yoni Bronstein's '13 "The Nihilist," garnered sympathetic giggles throughout the festival. At first he apathetically chewed a carrot. In another appearance, he barely mustered the energy to hit a few bars on a xylophone. Finally, he appeared scribbling the same sentence repeatedly on a chalkboard: "God hates figs."


Most of Bronstein's sketches had an absurdist tone. In "It's The S," an upperclassman, played by a particulary expressive Deesha Patel '16, couldn't stop drooling over a pair of sketchers, glorifying in the sound and shape of the letter "S." In "Swinging Crabs," Bronstein ended a relationship between him and his lover, an oversized crab, becoming distracted by a flock of birds overhead.


The final sketch, "Dear Diary," featured Karen Lengler '15, posing believably as a young girl writing about ketchup and other harmless things to the tune of a cutesy voice-over. Disturbances turn deadly when her brother, an exuberant Dennis Hermida-Gonzalez '16, arrives. She indifferently strangles him and pulls a gun on her father in an apt exit for the players before they returned the next night. The Saturday performance featured Yale's 5th Humour troupe and Tuft's Major: Undecided.