On Saturday, I performed with members of the Penn State Monty Python Society in a night of original sketch comedy and songs. Eventually, there might be pictures. I think it went about as well as we had expected. We had fun and were allowed to act silly, and that’s really all that matters. Nobody forgot their lines, and nobody in the audience booed. They didn’t always laugh — especially during a difficult second of three shows — but they didn’t boo. And somehow, inexplicably, we seem to have developed a small — very small — following. Between performances, a woman asked me quite politely who had changed the lyrics^* to the penis song, and when we told the audience at the start of the first show that we would not be performing our “Necrophiliac Sketch” (wherein the University president has sex with a dead body), there was genuine disappointment. There’s just no accounting for taste.

* I have never been comfortable, for hopefully obvious reasons, with the last line of the fifth verse. In the original recording, I — or rather the character I am playing — compare my penis to “a long locomotive” and encourage “kids under twelve [to] ride for free.” I changed this to the less pedophilia-friendly “groups after twelve”, which makes me feel better, and which I think gets a bigger, certainly less hesitant laugh.