CUMB bands together

“Just because it’s suicide doesn’t mean it’s not funny!”

Welcome to East Campus 1418, where the Natty Light is cold, the Doritos are spicy, and absolutely nothing is held sacred. It’s a Sunday night, three weeks before the start of finals, and 20 or so members of the Columbia University Marching Band are gathered in the common area of the “band suite” with their laptops. While the many students in Butler Library are regretting a weekend’s worth of procrastination, this motley crew of band members—“bandies,” as they call themselves—are running through a rough draft of the script for this year’s Orgo Night.

The 51st consecutive Orgo Night will take place at midnight this Thursday, the night before finals start. Every year, CUMB storms popular reading room Butler 209 to play music and tell jokes that poke fun at campus life, current events, and pretty much everything in between.

CUMB then continues on a tour through the Columbia and Barnard campuses, always stopping in front of University President Lee Bollinger’s mansion on Riverside Drive to sing “Hava Nagila” in the hope that he will come out and dance with them. “We used to go and ring the doorbell, but they [Public Safety] don’t let us do that anymore,” Kevin Gould, CC ’12 and CUMB’s head manager, said.

For members of CUMB, Orgo Night is a time to showcase their musical talents and comedic passions, and comes at the end of a long planning process. “I’ve been thinking about it since immediately after the last Orgo Night,” Bree Doering, BC ’12 and CUMB’s scriptwriter, said.

“Official” scriptwriting meetings start a month before the performance, though these meetings are informal and often get rambunctious. Doering, whose title in band-speak is “poet laureate,” heads the process, but anyone who shows up to scriptwriting meetings can contribute. “It’s really a big collaboration,” she said. “It’s so much fun for me because they [members] are all hilarious.”

Is anything off-limits for jokes? Not really. “We try and keep it tasteful. We don’t want riots,” Doering said. “But, like, bare minimum tastefulness. If I want to say Barnard girl X is a fucking slut, then I can say that—in those words.”

Jokes poking fun at Barnard, along with SEAS, have long been an Orgo Night staple. Ironically, Doering is the first Barnard student ever to serve as head scriptwriter.

“I think they’re hilarious,” Doering said of Barnard jokes. “I think that talking about it [stereotypes] and making jokes about it is a fun way of showing how ridiculous some things that people get all wrapped up in are. ... To make fun of that sort of illuminates people’s ignorance.”

Still, the band’s commitment to edginess has alienated some. In the fall, a joke about murdered Yale student Annie Le elicited shouts of “Too soon!,” and religious jokes on some flyers drew direct complaints from offended students. “There’s always going to be people who are upset about what you say. It’s kind of inevitable,” Gould said. Still, he added, “We try to use our best judgment.”

When it comes to the actual performance, “Orgo Night is really the shining moment of the year,” Tyler Benedict, CC ’13 and CUMB “minister of propaganda,” said. “You walk in, there’s hundreds and hundreds of people packed in that room, waiting for you... It showed me that people do, for one day a year, care about what the band does.”

“It’s the closest I’ll probably ever come to feeling like a rock star,” Jonathan Jager, GS/JTS and CUMB’s drum major, said.

The original Orgo Night was a spontaneous prank pulled by CUMB members hoping to upset the curve on the following day’s organic chemistry exam—hence the catchy and easily punned name. But its recorded history is otherwise shaky at best, as no one is quite sure when the first Orgo Night actually took place.

Even outside of Orgo Night, bandies love to share stories about their predecessors. “One kid came with a didgeridoo... And he played that on the field for a season,” Benedict said. They also look back wistfully on debauchery past—“We were a lot drunker my freshman year,” one band elder reminisced at a scriptwriting meeting.

The band has high—and characteristically irreverent—hopes for the future of Orgo Night. “We’re going to do it until they [the Columbia administration] tell us to stop,” Benedict said. “And probably even if they do.”