Right before exam week, students can relax and enjoy this semester’s last student body program on Friday, April 26, at 11 a.m.
The theme of this year’s “funny” student body is “Expectations Versus Reality.” Aaron Berry, student body president and a senior Bible major, said the program will contrast students’ expectations of certain aspects of college life with what college is really like. Maddie Williams, student body president and a senior pre-physical therapy major, said this student body will be one that most everyone can relate to. According to Berry, they will exaggerate typical student quirks and students’ expectations, though, to make the program funnier.
The program will be divided into segments instead of following a single storyline. Like most previous student bodies, the program will be a BJU spoof. “But this [one] is legitimately all BJU humor all the time,” Williams said. Since it is right before finals and commencement, the second semester student body tends to be more nostalgic. According to Williams, it’s also fun to use BJU humor, because a year’s worth of inside jokes have accumulated.
Berry and Williams said it’s difficult to follow faculty body this year, and they don’t want to use all of the same jokes either. So they offered a preview of just a couple of the topics that will be explored: being asked to artist series and meeting your roommates for the first time — from both men’s and women’s perspectives.
Several students are working hard to make student body a success. Berry said that near the beginning of the semester a team sat down to generate ideas, and that’s when they developed the premise of this semester’s program.
After solidifying the idea, they chose Alicia Newcomer, a junior creative writing major, and Anna Brown, a senior speech pedagogy major, to collaborate and produce the script. Brown has also been acting as the program’s director, helping with things like staging and lights. Berry and Williams describe themselves as more in the role of producers, editing the scripts and making the ultimate decisions.
Both Berry and Williams agreed that their favorite part of the whole process is watching the actors as they interpret the script and make the lines come alive on stage during rehearsals.
Williams said during the first read through, they cried because they laughed so hard, despite the fact that they already had read the script many times and had even written some of the lines.
“We make it happen, but [the actors and writers] make it happen well,” Berry said.
