AMERICA’S NEXT TOP (BOY) MODEL NOW IN PRINT

Students’ Original Comic Material Published

A collection of 22 TV parody and comedy sketches by Lee Comedy Club Alumni Rachel Solomon, Leah Solomon and Sara Mozersky are now available to schools and youth groups around the world.  Meriwether Publishing Ltd. Contemporary Drama Service, renowned publisher of plays and musicals for school and youth group productions has just published their collected work under the title “America’s Next Top (boy) Model and Other Comic Sketches.”  This is the first collection published that is written entirely by students according to Ted Zapel, Vice President of the publishing company.

Comedy Writers Leah Solomon, Sara Mozersky & Rachel Solomon

Comedy sketches included in the collection are "America's Next Top (boy) Model", "Comedy Club Idol", "Why Can't You Be More Like Your Sister?", "LOST", "Battle of the Blondes", "Rude Cell Phone Guy - At The Movies", "Model Mania", “Ambush Makeover", and more.  These twenty-two sketches were written for and first performed by the Lee Comedy Club, the popular after school program at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Wheaton, Maryland.  All of this material was written while Rachel, Leah and Sara were students at Lee and members of the Lee Comedy Club, or later when the girls were in high school and were volunteer assistants with the program.

"photo" props from "Model Mania" comedy sketch

Rachel is now a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Leah Solomon and Sara Mozersky are both attending Northwood High School.  Both Leah and Sara continue to work as assistants to the directors at the Lee Comedy Club and will be participating in the Comedy Club at Northwood – the new extension of the Comedy Club program lead by co-founder Harry M. Bagdasian.
 
   

Scripts generated by members and leaders of the Lee Comedy Club are replicated around the world when published by Meriwether Publishing Ltd. Contemporary Drama Services – a unique occurrence considering this is a middle school performance group.  Twelve collections of comic material are currently in print and have been leased from the publisher over 3,000 times by schools and youth groups in every state of the US, throughout Canada and in Germany, Australia, Malaysia and Singapore.

  
"Battle of the Blondes" in rehearsal

More information about the Lee Comedy Club can be found at www.ourlaughingmatters.com or by contacting Club Co-Founder and Director Harry M. Bagdasian at hbagdasian@aol.com.  To purchase copies or inquire about performance rights, contact Meriwether Publishing Ltd. Contemporary Drama Service at www.contemporarydrama.com.

This year’s Lee Comedy Club show will be performed Thursday May 1 and Friday May 2 at 7:30 PM at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Wheaton, MD.

"Comedy Club Idol" in rehearsal

FROM THE INTRODUCTION

AMERICA’S NEXT TOP (BOY) MODEL

By Harry M. Bagdasian – September 2007

Comedy is risky.  And that’s the fun of it. You don’t know until the audience is in the seats and the words are spoken aloud whether or not you’ve succeeded or failed.  It’s even more risky when you are a middle school student writing an original comedy sketch amid the hyper-critical middle school environment. 

All of these sketches were written by three of the students of the Comedy Club at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School, Wheaton, Maryland.  The Lee Comedy Club was founded in 1995 to offer students the opportunity to shine the comic spotlight on their world.  They work on their own or with professional writers to develop material for an annual sketch comedy revue that they and their fellow Comedy Club members perform.  Written from a young person’s perspective, their comedy material is very popular with young people and adults alike and the published versions have been widely produced throughout North America.  Over the years, most of the material, although based on students’ ideas, has been written by professional writers working closely with the students.  But several students have stepped up and created their own comic sketches. 

Previous publications from Merriwether Publishing LTD Contemporary Drama Services have included material written by other Comedy Club students -- Rachel Shaina Bergstein (Show Me What’s On!) and Austen Villemez (Law and Disorder: Comic Intent.)  This, however, is the first collection of Lee Comedy Club sketches written entirely by students. 

Creating and performing original comedy is an exciting, challenging and rewarding experience.  What I find even more exciting is when students take on the challenge of writing sketches by themselves and the material succeeds with a student audience.  The three students who wrote the material that follows were, and continue to be, very brave writers and I am very pleased that their material is now available for others to perform.