This week marks the Carolina Union Activities Board’s annual comedy festival.
Tomorrow night, the festival will present The Monti, a Triangle-based storytelling group that features ordinary people telling extraordinary personal stories.
“This act was an attempt to break the mold and do something different,” said Vinny Tagliatela, comedy chairman for CUAB.
“It’s not limited to the set up, punch line, set up, punch line format.”
Jeff Polish founded The Monti in 2008 by inviting local authors to join the group.
Polish said he was approached by Tagliatela to do a show at the comedy festival about “life.”
“Life can be funny. It can be tragic. It can be sweet. And it can be incredibly messy,” Polish said.
“It can’t be anything but interesting when someone has something intriguing to tell you.”
Tomorrow’s show will feature Tom Keller, the 2010 Carolina’s Funniest Comic.
Prior to working with The Monti, the stand-up comic had not done any serious storytelling, he said.
“It stretched me in ways that I had not been before,” Keller said.
Other performers in the show are John Reitz, Amy Scott, Robert Bland and Erica Eisdorfer—former buyer and manager of Bull’s Head Bookshop.
Tagliatela said he considers The Monti’s performance the riskiest event of the comedy festival but also one of the most important.
“It’s one of the most significant events as far as broadening the horizons and laying the events for the rest of the festival,” he said.
See the show tomorrow in the Carolina Union Great Hall at 7 p.m. Admission is free for students and tickets are $10 for the general public.
To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.
