Disappointing: Mask and Wig Still Not Funny

We need to be honest with ourselves. We cut Mask and Wig wayyyy too much slack. It’s literally just a group of guys. That’s it. Quick, off the top of your head, can you recall a single Mask and Wig sketch? A plot? A character? A single punchline? That’s what I thought.

The Mask and Wig Club is, in and of itself, not funny. The group’s basic premise, a sketch comedy troupe composed of men with musical theater backgrounds, is unpalatable in almost any other context besides that of the criminally underdeveloped cultural scene of the University of Pennsylvania. The Mask and Wig shows that I have attended have quite literally put me to sleep, the bassy drones of a 20 year old man wearing a blonde wig and doing a crude impersonation of Amy Gutmann facilitating a nap so deep and so restful that I have spent the following year and a half searching for a sleeping aid as potent and effective. 

How is it possible that, in the club’s 131 year history, no one has raised these concerns? How has the Mask and Wig club existed in three different centuries with little challenge to its glaringly unfunny presentation of University life? How have they achieved international acclaim? I have so many questions.

There is nothing intrinsically funny about a man in a wig. I thought that this would be obvious to supposed connoisseurs of comedy and jest, but I have been wrong before. Mask and Wig might as well exist as a satire of itself, a meta commentary on the limits of masculine humor and entertainment. Alternatively, if Mask and Wig seeks to bring “Justice to the Stage,” it should simply close its velvet curtains.