Modern Hasty Pudding Shows Are at Opposite Pole From Those of Earliest Years--First Comic Sketch in 1844

At the time for the first public performance of the seventy-ninth annual theatrical production of the Hasty Pudding Club, the days are recalled when these production were in their infancy and "Laugh It Off" would sound as incongruous for a title as "Bombastes Furioso" sounds today. The evolution of these performances from mock trials and impromptu sketches to elaborately modern and professionally coached musical comedies has a parallel in the change of the American vaudeville from nineteenth century burlesque to the present type of musical extravaganza.

The great change in the type of production came in 1844 when it was decided to abandon the traditional mock trial which had been held yearly from 1795, in favor of a comical sketch. According to the report of J. T. Wheel-wright, who has left an account of this first performance, it was indeed an impromptu affair. The date picked was Friday the thirteenth and 11 Hollis Hall was converted into the stage. A large plank, slightly longer than the room, was bowed so as to serve for the footlights, boots were made of blackened cardboard, wigs and dresses were borrowed from the "goodies", and all was in readiness for the opening night before an audience consisting of the thirty members of the club.

There is little actual record of the first evening's performance except that which has been left by the secretary of the club in an astonishing doggerel. He writes that "A fragile boy as thickhipped Distaffina sung and skipped" and chronicled the actions of the other members of the cast in a similar manager. He spends more time, however, in a description of one of the club's annual celebrations and ends his poem as follows:

Thus was the mighty evening spent

And thus to bed we soaring went."

"As we may judge from the record of this supper", comments Mr. Wheelwright. "Local option did not then damn up the founts of inspiration in Cambridge".