The Reporter's Notebook

Profitable Laughs

More than 600 people were kept in stitches Saturday night during the Harvard Lampoon's Comedy Night, a three-hour charity event to benefit Phillips Brooks House.

The event, held in Sanders Theater, pulled in over over $2500 in proceeds, according to Jonathan H. Lawrence '90, one of the organizers of Comedy Night.

The evening featured John Katz, frequent guest on The David Letterman Show, Jimmy Tingle of Star Search fame, and Harvard's own improvisation group On Thin Ice.

A few members of the audience also had the chance to test some of their party jokes in front of the better-than-expected crowd for a $5 gift certificate.

"I'm just glad everybody had a good time," said Lawrence, adding, "The event was such a success that I hope it will become a yearly occurence."

Tingle, who described himself as a "thinking man's comic," expressed relief throughout his performance that the night's audience was so smart. In Georgia, he would have had to explain most of his jokes, he said.

Hard Rock Waltzers

Adams House dining hall served as a multipurpose indoor arena last week, becoming a ballroom and night club in a matter of eight days. Last Saturday, groups of sophisticated students danced away the night in the house's annual waltz. Then, this Saturday, a less elevated audience, including a group of slam dancers, rocked to the beat of three hard core bands.

The three rock bands, two of which include Harvard students, played their own music for about 400 people Saturday night in "The Hate Your Friends Show," named for the Lemonheads' soon-to-be-released album on Taang Records, organizers said.

From the Blake Babies' "quirky pop" music to the Bullet LaVolta's "melodic punk metal" and the Lemonheads' "melodic punk," the night was "a rousing success," said Clay B. Tarver '88, who plays guitar for Bullet LaVolta.

"I don't think anything quite like it has been seen or will be seen for a long time in the Adams House dining hall," said Tarver.

The ideas for the night of music began when Bullet LaVolta band member T. Corey Brennan, an Adams House resident Classics tutor, heard a tape of the Blake Babies at WHRB, where he is a disc jockey.

Jesse W. Peretz '90 started the one-year-old Lemonheads with friends he met in high school in Boston. The bass-playing Peretz said that, while 1977-78 British punk music has influenced his style, the band is turning more pop.

The Harvard show was a welcome change from the Boston club scene, he said.

"I vowed to myself at one point in my life never to [play Harvard] because I was wary about connecting my band with Harvard," Peretz said. But he added, "It was nice not having to deal with swindling people and people swindling you."

Flintstones in Adams

Now Adams House has black room where all the residents with black clothes can go to watch film noir.

After a year-and-a-half of hard labor, a group of Adams House residents and affiliates this weekend put the finishing touches on "Explosives B," the new video room in the basement of D-entry.

Sarah Dawidoff '87 held a black tie ceremony last weekend to celebrate the opening of the room, which features a television, refrigerator, video-cassette recorder, and some of the most modern chairs ever seen at Harvard.

The room, which was once an ugly, empty shell with grass growing between cracks in the floor, has now taken on the guise of a preshistoric cave right out of the Flintstones, some visitors say.

Doug Fitch, a non-resident Adams House tutor, and other residents spent over a year designing and constructing the avant-garde furniture, which was paid for, along with the room's other furnishings, out of House Committee funds.

Everything in the room: the chairs, couches, tables, and even the stylish hand-made rugs, are a work of art, says Dawidoff.

All who worked on the room, said it was a "group effort." More than two dozen devoted workers spent hours mortaring and polyurethaning the floor to make the room durable.