Campus Comedy

[Cerek]

Reader's Digest collects amusing stories from college and high school experiences for their magazine, so I figured the members here at IW could do the same. Tell us some of your favorite stories that happened in college or high school.

One of my favorites was actually told to me by a friend I met in college. It happened in one of those typical freshman or sophomore level general education classes. Each student in the class was expected to give a presentation on a topic chosen by the professor. One of his friends put off preparing his presentation until the night before class, so he ended up copying everything straight from his resource books. When he gave the presentation the next day, it was painfully obvious he was reciting data rather than having done any actual research. Each presentation was followed by a mandatory question & answer session, but the professor actually appeared to be somewhat sympathetic and was apparantly going to let the student slide without grilling him on the material. He asked if any of the students had a question, and just when the guy thought he was going to get off the hook, one of his classmates DID raise his hand and asked a rather detailed question about the material. The student just stared at him blankely for a moment, then said "I'm sorry, I've obviously given you a false impression that I know what the hell I'm talking about" - and then he promptly returned to his seat.

[Illumina Drathiran'ar]

Hm... Aside from spending four hours at a restaurant, what do I have... that's appropriate?

Freshman year. Intro to Theatre. I don't know how I forgot, but there I was, the day our oral presentations were due. The project was to research something relating to theatre and talk to the class about it. There were people doing Vaudeville, Noh, the works. I stand up, confident, with a stack of papers. I shuffle through them, clear my throat, and address the class.

"My report is on..." ::tosses papers over shoulder:: "Improvisation." I proceeded to talk up a storm for ten minutes, including discussing the importance of audience participation (I dragged a friend up to play an improv game with me), physical comedy, the works...

I got an A.