From a spelling bee skit to stand-up sets, Comedy after Dark had a variety of acts Friday night.

The night started out with the Don’t We Boys comedy sketch group including Sonny Pandit as “Don’t,” AJ Schraeder as “We” and Joe Anderson as “Boys.” Their act combined sketch comedy with elements of stand-up.

Pandit, the newest member of the group, said that the group has been performing together for nearly five years.

“We just love it. It’s fun, it’s goofy and it’s a good time,” Pandit said. “The guys, they’re fantastic. They’re hilarious. They do nothing but make you better. I mean my standup been a billion times better just from working with them. You just get a broader horizon of every sort of comedy.”

Pandit said he felt comedy was the right fit for him because he was good at making people laugh and selling people stuff. He said many of the skits performed have taken interesting turns in the past, including a freeze tag skit about a man being frozen in a game of freeze tag for decades.

“They have to put their fingers in my mouth during the frozen tag skit and we were in Sonoma, California and they actually had hand sanitizer,” Pandit said. “It was my first time doing the sketch and I thought it was going to be okay except they squirted half of it into their hands and I couldn’t make a face because I’m supposed to be frozen. There was nothing but hand sanitizer in my mouth. So, when I unfroze, it literally drooled out. It was super gross, but it was hilarious.”

Joe Anderson, founder of the group said the group started when he quit Second City and started writing sketches with people he met at standup shows and conferences. The group started performing with a few local shows in Michigan and continued by submitting to different festivals and going from there.

Anderson said bringing up meaning through his comedy is one of his favorite parts of being part of the group.

“Finding things whether it’s social, political or familial that we can poke some holes into is the best,” Anderson said. “Whether it’s an ideology that one of us either really agrees with or disagrees with and being able to mess with that and stretch it or dismantle it, and using humor to do that is really powerful.”

Kadarrious Hooks, a graduate psychology student, experienced one of these skits up close by participating in the spelling bee skit and using his psychology background to win a seemingly impossible word challenge.

Larro the Comedian, ended the night with a stand up set containing more adult focused content.

Chrissy Miller can be reached at 581-2812 or clmiller9@eiu.edu.