Bringing Laughs And Smiles to Harvard

It’s time to go home for winter break this year, and a bus full of Harvard students bound for New York is wondering why one scruffy, energetic individual keeps jaunting up and down the aisle while a friend videotapes him.

He keeps his eyes on the camera, brow slightly furrowed, his entire goateed face animated as he dives into an investigatory spiel about the integrity of the Harvard shuttle bus service.

“It’s uncertain whether the so-called miracle solution to Harvard’s transportation problem is really a solution at all,” he says in a stoic reporter’s voice. “Just take a look at these cramped quarters, where two people must sit next to each other, side-by-side.”

In fact, he contends, it is not a service at all, but a money-making scheme thrown together by the Undergraduate Council.

Of course, most of the people on the bus seem to figure out what’s going on pretty quickly—they know that B.J. Averell ’02-’03 is up to his old tricks.

Whether he’s pulling a prank, leading his own variety show, running for Undergraduate Council president or just running naked through the Yard during Primal Scream, B.J. is a one-man circus, an unstoppable improviser, a consummate performer.

To Harvard students, though, that description may be unnecessary; it seems like everyone already knows B.J.

A Traveling Circus

His shuttle bus escapades—part of an unfinished documentary project B.J. has been working on about Harvard life—are not the first time he has raised eyebrows among his fellow travelers.

He was catapulted to fame at Harvard his sophomore year after being arrested at Logan Airport trying to sneak onto a plane home for Thanksgiving in 1999.

Since his seat on the last remaining flight home had been given away, he wiggled past security and took the one remaining seat on the plane—in the bathroom.

His “brilliant” scheme didn’t work out as he’d hoped. B.J. ended up kneeling on the runway, handcuffed, in the care of a group of unsmiling police officers.

Before his airport stunt made him a campus legend, B.J. had already experimented widely to find his place on campus.

During his first year, he joined the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus and the lightweight crew team, captained his dorm’s intramural teams, performed magic shows for nursing home residents and acted in three shows.

But it was only after bungling his tryouts for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and the improv troupe On Thin Ice (OTI), however, that B.J. began to realize his true calling at Harvard as a performer.

So his sophomore year, B.J. tried out again and made both groups. He performed for OTI and the Pudding for three years, and acted in nine shows total while at Harvard.

And during his sophomore year, B.J. teamed up with B.J. Novak ’01 to produce a variety show that was more Vegas than Harvard—a singing-dancing vaudeville affair hosted by the two B.J.’s and showcasing various acts, including a reverse stripper, final club gladiators and a cat-fighting female a cappella group.

The show was a giant success, outdone only by the following year’s “B.J. Show” in Sanders Theatre which featured Bob Saget of “Full House” fame reprising his television roles in a few skits and ending the show with his own standup routine.

B.J. says the show—like his other activities—was something he couldn’t have done anywhere else.

Always Improvising

All of B.J.’s various extracurricular commitments have at times meant a bumpy academic experience. His junior year was especially challenging—during that year, he juggled the B.J. Show, a part in the Children’s Theater show, a popular comic strip for The Crimson and an elaborate campaign for council president, as well as his committments to OTI and the Pudding.

It was late that year, right before being forced to take a year off for academic reasons, when he had the sobering realization that classes and books should come before plays and former sitcom stars.

“That’s why you’re here,” he says. “You learn from your friends, you learn from extracurriculars, but the thing that counts the most are academics.”

But B.J. hardly seems regretful about his college career. His attitude is always optimistic, and his method is improvisational.

“Everything with B.J. is spontaneous,” says Thomas O’Dell ’04-’05, who acted in this year’s Pudding show with B.J. “He’ll try anything, and he’s always coming up with new ideas. He loves to improvise.”

Beyond the stage, his antics have ranged from walking out of exams screaming to making loud pronouncements in the strictly-silent Lamont Reading Room. When the time came to take his final for Social Analysis 36, “Religion and Modernization: Cultural Revolutions and Secularism,” he donned a red robe and sandals, glided into the exam room, and proclaimed to the assembled test takers the end of secularization in grand style.

And while the Pudding’s productions are scripted, occasionally B.J.’s penchant for over-the-top improv has led him to introduce new props, alter lyrics mid-song, or step outside the box—literally. In his junior year, he danced off the edge of the stage and into the orchestra pit.

“I landed on the pianist’s head and a trumpeter’s music stand, but I crawled right back up and went on,” he says.

Behind the Laughter

B.J.’s positive attitude imbues much of his comedic sensibility—a shtick that’s a mix of Andy Kauffman’s inscrutability, Tom Green’s prankishness and a heaping of Bob Hope’s charm.

“I think he’s descended more directly from clowns than from comedians,” Novak says.

His mother Elizabeth attributes B.J.’s array of theatrical pursuits to his zest for seeing people smile.

“His activities are a lot about enjoying life, trying to bring joy. He doesn’t do it just for himself,” she says. “He wants people to feel good, feel happy.”

She recalls a five-year-old B.J. asking his mother to roll down the car window so he could wave hello to passers-by.

These days he bounces gleefully down the street, saluting friends and non-friends wherever he’s going.

“I like making people laugh,” B.J. explains. “It’s good to have a humorous perspective on life.”

And he plans to continue to keep that humorous perspective in the future. Next year, he plans to travel and to work more on comedic writing.

But it’s still always anyone’s guess as to what pranks B.J. has left up his sleeve.

“I don’t like talking about my goals,” he smiles mischeviously. “I think it’s better to surprise people.”

—Staff Writer Alex. L. Pasternack can be reached at apastern@fas.harvard.edu.