A Completely Impartial Review of the Varsity Show

Went to the 110th annual Varsity Show, first time ever. It's a Columbia tradition. Thanks to what I'll call a confluence of events — the show was oversold and we couldn't get seats, Wonderfalls was cancelled because people have bad taste, and some guy screaming "Yeah, Kevin!!" at the end of each scene — I left during the intermission. Nevertheless, I'm going to give a completely honest and disinterested review of the show, because if one word describes me, it's "cynical".

For starters, jokes about Yale aren't funny. Neither are jokes about Harvard or Dartmouth. We know you didn't get in and you're bitter, but we still heard all those jokes during orientation, and again during homecoming and spring fling, and they weren't funny then either. You're just insecure, get over it. However, Brown and Princeton are great targets for jokes, because they rejected me.

The show was about some guy with minions who wanted to move Columbia from Morningside Heights to New Haven, Connecticut. Now, I can say from personal experience that New Haven is a total shithole, but it's not like Morningside Heights is Eden either. Much as I love a song featuring references to Duane-Reade and Columbia Hot Bagels as much as the next guy who can tell good from bad, I don't have enough imagination to believe a song that glorifies our neighborhood via the West End restaurant and pub — that poorly-lit bar where everybody looks like their pet gerbil just died. The good guy is a bike-riding Columbia professor who can't bear to move his beloved university; the dude with boring henchmen falsely accuses Professor Tighty-pants of drawing a racist cartoon in the Fed, this crappy Columbia newspaper that appears in my mailbox every week even though I didn't ask for it. Columbia's liberal students turn against our doofus professor, and then, because Morningside Heights is located at the nexus of a time-space vortex that causes ninety-nine percent of the community to ovulate constantly, those same students sing about how sad they are that Columbia will be moving out of state.

Naturally, nobody is going to explain how exactly Columbia is going to move. Is Low Library going to walk to New Haven? You see people, satire only works when it's believable. They should've taught that in Lit Hum, then they could've sung about it during the Varsity Show.