One of the reasons Austin Kaufman chose to move to Boston from southern California for college was because he’d heard it was a university town. But when Kaufman, now a junior at Harvard University, arrived in Boston, he didn’t find a cohesive college community.
“I think I found it to be harder than I was expecting to meet people from other schools,” Kaufman told BostInno.
It was only this semester when Kaufman joined Wicked Smaht Comedy, a Boston-based intercollegiate sketch comedy group, that he finally started interacting with students from around the Boston area. The group will host its first show Saturday, October 21 at 7 p.m. in the Boston University Dance Theater.
“This is the first time I’ve had sustained, proper, actual relationships with people from other schools doing what I’m interested in,” Kaufman said.
Bella Ramirez founded Wicked Smaht Comedy for the same reason. Ramirez came to Boston University from Florida in 2021 and felt that same sense of isolation from other schools. At first she chalked it up to the pandemic’s impact on social networks. But she soon realized people from different schools just weren’t crossing paths.
Rather than accept that fact, Ramirez decided to create a solution.
This isn’t Ramirez’s first rodeo in interscholastic endeavors. When she was a sophomore in high school she organized the production of a superhero movie with students from different schools with the proceeds going to a charity.
Last year during her winter break, Ramirez said she was watching Saturday Night Live to motivate herself to work out.
“Eventually I was lounging on the couch watching this thinking, ‘Why don’t we have this in Boston?’ I was just complaining out loud. ‘We should have something like this in Boston. I should know students at all these different schools. This would be a great thing for college students,’” Ramirez said.
When she returned to BU, Ramirez met with Katie Quigley Mellor, program director for social entrepreneurship at Innovate@BU. On her advice, Ramirez applied for the Innovation Pathway program. Over the summer, she also participated in Innovate@BU’s summer accelerator.
Wicked Smaht Comedy ran as a pilot program in the spring semester. This fall, the organization is officially up and running and moving toward its first show on Saturday. The show will benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Students from schools like Tufts University, Simmons University and Northeastern University have joined to write, produce, act, edit and film comedy sketches. Ramirez said half of their sketches are pre-recorded for the show, which brings in students interested in film and television. The other sketches are performed live at the show. Wicked Smaht Comedy also includes business and advertising teams who handle funding for the group.
Ramirez said 33 students are involved this semester.
Ramirez has a few goals for Wicked Smaht Comedy. She wants to help students gain experience in different aspects of comedy work and meet friends from different universities. She also hopes to be able to provide stipends to students in the future.
“I definitely want this to be sustainable. The goal is for this to exist long beyond my time at BU,” Ramirez said. “I’d love for this to be the kind of thing where when people go and they choose to go to BU or Emerson or Harvard or wherever in the Boston area, they think of WSC. Maybe that’s part of the reason they wanted to come to the Boston area specifically because they know about that collaborative network.”
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