Sugarman Tries Out His New Material

Until his decision to write a speech for this year's Ivy Oration, Michael Sugarman '98 says he restricted his humor to "making fairly simple jokes about people's mothers." However, he soon realized that the sheer number of proud mothers who were expected to attend Commencement week ceremonies would present him with a unique comedic challenge. "I mean, we're talking about upwards of 1,500 mothers for the senior class alone," Sugarman says.

To reach more people, he figured he would have to try his hand at something different. Instead, he turned his eye to the most amusing aspects of Harvard, such as high-achieving students who can sometimes be misfits.

"For every article in The Crimson about some ex-Westinghouse Fellow Phi Beta Kappa Harvard Senior Fulbright Scholar who just won a Rhodes and is also a Crimson editor, there's another article on the same page about some sophomore who woke up naked in the back of the Hong Kong babbling about communism," Sugarman says.

While writing for a potential audience of several thousand people may be a new experience for the literature concentrator, doing comedy is not. By his own calculations, Sugarman estimates that he can imitate more than 50 voices--from that of a redneck to that of a 60-year-old chain-smoking Jewish woman.

Sugarman's ability to imitate voices has served him well in the theater productions. In one Hillel play, he had to play a Russian cab driver, a character who Sugarman describes as somewhat "overzealous with his relationships with American women."

Aside form his amusing portrayals of off-beat characters, Sugarman has channeled his humor into other areas. His first year at Harvard, he briefly comped the Lampoon (a semi-secret Bow Street social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine). However, he says that he eventually lost interest in the organization and has done no institutional writing since then.

But toward the end of college, Sugarman's work on the Ivy Oration as well as the pleasure he gets from personal writings have made him increasingly consider a career as a writer--a notion he never entertained before. "I've never construed myself as a writer," he says. "But I can't escape the idea that it's something I enjoy so much and wouldn't it be nice to do it professionally,"

Sugarman is still unsure whether he will finally settle on becoming a writer, and when asked what he sees himself doing in the future, he says with a serious expression on his face that "it might be nice to control the means of production."

However, at least for now, he has taken much more concrete steps toward pursuing writing than taking over the world. He has applied to become a speechwriter for the director of Hillel International, a position that would also involve a mixture of speechwriting and logistical work for Edgar Bronfman, who heads the World Jewish Congress and owns both Seagrams and Tropicana.

As the recipient of a Bronfman fellowship in high school, Sugarman developed connections with the community fellows and he found out about the opening when he got a call from Washington asking if he would be interested in applying.

The type of work Sugarman now thinks he might end up doing is a far cry from the jobs he was interviewing for earlier this year. Like many seniors, Sugarman thought that he would either go into finance or consulting.

However, midway through the process, Sugarman says he realized his heart wasn't in it He found himself left with several job interviews for positions he did not want, but it was too late to cancel. He decided he would have some fun with his interviewers by convincing them that he was mentally unstable.

"When they asked me about my weaknesses...I told them I was embarrassed to say so but I can't play basketball to save my life even though I'm 6-foot-1," Sugarman says. "I also told them I didn't particularly want to work in consulting but anyway it seemed like the thing to do so I was there."

When Sugarman wasn't preoccupied with wreaking havoc on the recruiting process, he worked with the Harvard Hillel, an activity that not only comprised a significant part of his career at Harvard but also served as a sanctuary.

"Hillel to me has meant a community, a comfort and a haven throughout the time that I've been here," Sugarman says. It's an entirely unique place and I don't expect to find it's parallel after I graduate."

In 1996, he and Talia Milgrom-Elcott '98, who is also a Crimson editor, started an institute for Jewish studies at Hillel. Sugarman says the institute offered classes that many people were interested in but were not part of the Harvard curriculum, such as elementary Yiddish or the development of Jewish law from Sinai to modernity.

Looking back on his time at Harvard Sugarman says, "It's impossible to leave Harvard after four years knowing you've experienced everything Harvard has to offer. There will always be classes you wish you could have taken, people you wish you could have spent more time talking to, and experiences you could have had."