Aasif Mandvi headlines 14th Annual Intercollegiate Comedy Festival

Trading a black suit for a ginger wig and polka-dot pajamas, Aasif Mandvi, member of the Daily Show’s Best F#@king News Team Ever, joined the cast of Mask & Wig on stage for the 14th Annual Intercollegiate Comedy Festival Friday night. The event was co-sponsored by the Social Planning and Events Committee.

Penn Masala opened the show for Mandvi, who claimed he felt like he was “back in Mumbai” while greeting the a capella group members backstage.

In a sketch, Mandvi stood in the middle of the stage as lonely man with a red helium balloon witnessing a parade of Mask & Wig cast members cartwheeling, modeling and dancing past him in slow motion.

From the side of the stage emerged another member dressed in a pink dress and holding a matching balloon. He slowly approached Mandvi for a forced kiss to the roaring laughter of an almost full Harrison Auditorium.

In ten minutes of stand-up comedy, Mandvi joked about being Muslim as a child in England and as an adult in the United States.

“We are the dumbest people on the planet … Americans,” he joked, “Not because of our low math scores, but because we are just too pretty. We are too pretty, and we are rich, and we have a Mercedes and a big gun. Nobody needs to be smart when you have that.”

This year’s ComFest featured five comedy troupes hailing from various colleges and universities, including Swarthmore College and Tufts and Cornell universities. Each troupe performed three sketches, including some musical numbers.

The University of Maryland’s Sketchup was the first troupe to perform, followed by Cornell’s Humor Us! and Swarthmore’s Boy Meets Tractor. The cast of Mask & Wig, accompanied by Mandvi in two of its three sketches, closed the show.

College senior Shep Berg, ComFest co-director, said, “It was a pleasure to work with Aasif,” adding that the comedian personally chose his roles after reviewing the sketches.

College junior Andrew Davis, the other co-director, expressed his satisfaction with the event. “It was a great collaboration, and we are really happy that it worked out well,” he said.

“Mask & Wig aims to enrich university life by bringing together all these groups from different universities exposing Penn to talent that you may not otherwise see, and SPEC also aims to enrich undergraduate life by funding and planning events like these,” he added.

College junior and Mask & Wig member Harrison Lieberfarb believes ComFest is a unique event for Penn’s comedy troupe. While most events are geared toward the Penn community, he said, “[ComFest] allows us to reach outside the university.”

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