Class Clown: Matthew Cole

Being “a goofy, goofy guy” is no easy task. Just ask this year’s Class Clown Matthew W. Cole ’24, who sometimes finds himself “unnecessarily stressed” about doing exactly that.

I meet him outside the clubhouse of The Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770 on a dark and rainy afternoon. He punches a code into the front door’s keypad and leads me inside. We walk up a grand, spiral staircase, past walls teeming with memorabilia, and into the organization’s library, where we sit in opposing leather chairs.

Matthew tells me he is driven by a desire to make himself and others laugh. “I’m someone who is very serious about the very silly things that I do,” he says.

Matthew has been a cast member of Hasty Pudding Theatricals since his freshman year, though Covid-19 kept the show off the stage that year. Matthew played Millie O’Nair during his sophomore year in “Ship Happens” and Aunty Establishment in last year’s production “Cosmic Relief,” which he also co-wrote.

Performing in a show he wrote was “very Lin-Manuel Miranda of me,” he says.

Alongside the Pudding, Matthew performs stand-up comedy and is part of the undergraduate improv troupe On Thin Ice. Harvard’s Office for the Arts even awarded him a grant to practice and perform stand-up in Brooklyn during the summer after his sophomore year.

At the start of the semester, he auditioned for the “very sincere” undergraduate musical “White House Princess” by singing “a very overwrought rendition of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’” to make his friend who co-wrote the show laugh. The show’s production team loved it so much that they asked him to come back and do it in front of audiences before each of the performances, dressed up as the Statue of Liberty.

He describes performing as a vulnerable endeavor. While performing improv with a team helps soften the challenge of having no script, solo stand-up performances heighten the stakes. “If you fail, it’s all on you. If you succeed, it’s all on you,” he says.

An English concentrator, Matthew was also awarded a grant from the English Department this past summer to work on his thesis, an hour-long single-scene play tentatively titled “Speed Bumps (and Other Things Jesus Wouldn’t Have Wanted).”

“That grant was for me to go to New York for a bit and watch plays,” he says. “If nothing else, I’ve really learned how to ask Harvard to give me money, so I can go to New York and do whatever I want there.”

Matthew tells me that last year he created and co-hosted the “Salient Pod,” a podcast that masqueraded as part of the self-described “free speech publication” The Salient, most of whose writers conceal their identities. He and two friends published weekly episodes on Spotify, trying to “disrupt their messaging” by talking at length about celebrity gossip.

The Salient Pod garnered little fanfare until a series of popular posts about it materialized in a forum for Harvard students on the anonymous social media app Sidechat. “There was a brief flurry of people trying to guess our identities,” Matthew says.

No evidence of the podcast currently exists on the internet. Matthew attributes this to “ongoing legal disputes that I will not disclose more about at this time.”

Despite his passion for comedy, he tells me that he is surprised to be named Class Clown. He describes himself as “more of a mild-mannered sort of guy” in the classroom, one without the “desire to disrupt” that his newfound title may suggest.

“What I lack in class, I more than make up for in clown,” he says with a laugh.

“Externally, I do possess some very clown-like qualities, not just facially and with my large feet but also in how I live my life,” Matthew adds.

After he graduates, Matthew hopes to write for film and television and live in New York City. Still, he doesn’t consider himself a “capital ‘A’ actor,”and promises “if you ever see me acting again, after college, my hope is that I do it by way of writing.” (“I hate auditioning,” he says. “It’s very stressful.”)

If a career writing comedy does not come to fruition, he has a backup plan: medicine, or as he calls it, “the family business.” Matthew’s parents are both doctors, and his sister is in medical school. And alongside his English concentration, Matthew has completed all the courses required to attend medical school.

“I wish so much that I loved medicine and could happily fall in line with a path that makes sense, that I understand, and that my family understands,” he says. “But, unfortunately, my joy lies elsewhere, and I’ve been chasing that as far as it will take me.”

— Associate Magazine Editor Graham R. Weber can be reached at graham.weber@thecrimson.com.