Theater TRaC recently visited The PIT (People’s Improv Theater) to see a sketch comedy show by a group called The Impending Moustache. Our instructor had told us that their humor was more “dry humor” rather than “insulting or dissing humor,” which struck me as a good thing once I thought about it. The kind of things my friends and I usually find funny are jokes or stereotypes about people that could be insulting if heard by the wrong ears. The Impending Moustache’s skits were each very different and random, and I think that meeting them and being able to get to know each of their personalities before seeing the show really made an impact on how I saw each scene.

There was one sketch near the end where a girl and boy, both in college, were sitting at a table in some sort of cafe setting. The prologue explained that they had been dating for about two years. As the scene starts out, you can tell it’s going to be awkward. The girl is stammering on about how she doesn’t want to make a big deal out of their two-year anniversary, when the audience can obviously tell she’s dying to shout it out to the whole world. The boy, on the other hand, looks utterly bored and kind of uncomfortable. After she gives him a book that she apparently thought he would greatly appreciate, he shoves it inside his bag apathetically, as though rushing to get something off his mind before she could say or do anything more.

He abruptly brings up the topic of sex, recalling their “first time last night”. She immediately starts rambling on about how she thought it was great – real passionate and sexy, and how glad she was that they’d waited for that moment. This whole time, the boy avoids eye contact with his girlfriend and has a rather pained look on his face. This causes the audience to assume there’s going to be a break-up, or something else bad for the poor girl. Finally, after a few seconds of awkward silence, he goes, “Yeah…I think we should both pretend that it never happened.” At this, the audience laughs at the cruelty of his words. And then he continues, “Just…pretend that we’re both still virgins.” Then he delivers the “punch line”: “…Single virgins.” And the scene fades to darkness, the audience applauding and snickering.

I chose this moment to write about because it affected me the most deeply. This was the only sketch I didn’t smile or applaud for. All I saw when I looked at the giddy girl on the set was me, and the actor Gabe’s face molded itself into the face of my ex-boyfriend, Gabriel. I remember, when we were all waiting outside the theater to see the show, I asked this particular actor what his name was. He told me it was Gabe, and my face instantly fell. He asked me what was wrong, and I simply replied, “Nothing ….you just remind me of someone else…who has the same name.” How ironic was it that the one scenario that could have affected me, with the one actor playing that role, would appear just twenty minutes later?

I’m not going to get into my feelings towards my Gabriel, but that skit really made me think about things. Relationships between teenagers can be very serious, and sex is one topic that causes a lot of controversies between teens. In some ways, for girls, sex is a trap you can’t escape from. As quoted in the movie The Breakfast Club: “If you say you’re a virgin, you’re a prude. If you say you’re not, you’re a whore.” I’ve had bad experiences going down this road, and I know the pressures that teens sometimes feel to be “good in bed”. That idea has affected me and my life more deeply than most people know, and I think that to put that idea out and make it seem comical is…well, wrong.