All year long, York’s Sketch Comedy Club has been creating and refining sketches to perform during Fine Arts Week.

With their performance occurring this week, Sketch Comedy Club is making their final adjustments for their show.

“We have a show on Thursday first period of Fine Arts Week,” said senior Adam Montesantos, club co-founder. “We have about a half hour-40 minutes of sketches that we got planned out. We’re super excited. We’re gonna have bazookas, hoots, doots, bazoots and kazoos.”

Although they didn’t put on a performance, Sketch Comedy ran all last year writing sketches and practicing improv. During much of that time, they were hoping to perform and write sketches with the goal of a Fine Arts Week performance. Ultimately, the club ended up using these ideas as a basis for some of their sketches this year.

“We didn’t put on a show last year; we weren’t really prepared,” Montesantos said. “We took tons of sketches that we did last year and we rewrote them and made them better. It was fun having something to go off of, something that we knew at least worked in a sense.”

For the show, many of the sketches being performed have been worked-shopped for a year or more. However, that doesn’t mean they have every detail of the sketches mapped out. Much of the show is based on improvisation, something the club works on during nearly every meeting.

“The sketches are a bit nonsensical at times, it’s free form,” Montesantos said. “It’s very free form. All the sketches have points that we’re trying to hit but a lot of the dialogue in between is mostly improvised. So that’s why it’s super important for us to practice because you can’t choke up before a show. You can’t really think about what you have to say, you have to know what you have to say. I really like it, I think it’s cool. Sometimes when we [practice] the scenes it’s funnier, just because someone says something that’s really funny. Sometimes that can get lost because we don’t remember to write it down…  We’re not perfect, we’re just learning.”

As is the nature with a comedy show at a school, there are certain concerns that needed to kept in mind while the club was planing their performance. As a way to make sure the show was appropriate, the club kept the administration in the loop with details of their performance.

“I think we definitely need to offer a special thank you to Drew McGuire and the administration for letting us continue to be a club because, again, comedy can be a little touchy,” said Josh Green, the club’s sponsor. “[Drew McGuire] has stepped in on a couple of our practices to make sure things are going smoothly. He let us have our creative control, definitely, but also reminded us, like: ‘Here are the expectations at York, I know you guys are gonna do a great job’. He definitely has a level of trust for us so that’s something we really appreciate. We’ve been working to get better at refining our sketches to make sure they are appropriate but still funny.”

Because this performance is their main event, the club has made working, writing, and perfecting these sketches a priority since their first meeting of the year. However, the club sponsor is hoping to keep the club going with a focus on the concept of comedy rather than preparing a specific show.

“Pretty much the whole year builds up to this for a lot of the guys,” Green said. “We’re trying to also include some things for after as well. We’re gonna try and focus on how the show went, reflect on that, and take some of the best sketches on the show and workshop those on to full on scripts, and create what is called an SNL package. For the guys that are really serious about making comedy a career or something in the industry, they’ll hopefully walk away after the year with skills on how to take next steps.”

With nearly two years of work behind them, each member of the club is looking forward to this moment. Many of them have been waiting for the opportunity to perform for a long time and are currently pushing through any anxiety they have to accomplish their main goal: make the audience laugh.

“Hopefully we’ll make people laugh,” said Calvin Shollenberger, senior and club co-founder. “There’s no guarantee. That’s the scariest thing about sketch; you could go up there and no one could laugh at a single joke you’ve written all year, but that’s also what’s fun about it. If you subvert your expectations like that, people tend to like it, it’s a great feeling. I think that’s why most of us do it: we feed off an audience’s energy and it’s a lot of fun.”