POWER BOTTOMS

The NYU classmates the year's behind most delightfully dumb comedy.

- RACHEL HANDLER

It was 2015 in New York City. Hamilton was on Broadway, Donald Trump was hosting Saturday Night Live, and, at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, a fresh crop of comedy kids was striving to become fuck-you famous.

The key, as historically proved by their forebears, was making it into one of the highly competitive on-campus sketch, improv, or stand-up groups—ideally Hammerkatz or Dangerbox or Astor Place Riots—and riding those waves to their seemingly inevitable destinations: Saturday Night Live; Comedy Central; a series on FX or the CW or HBO.

Rachel Sennott, a freshman acting student, and Ayo Edebiri, a sophomore teaching student (who’d soon switch to dramatic writing), first passed each other in the hallway after one of their auditions. Neither got into any of the groups, a fate that at the time felt like the doors at 30 Rock were preemptively slamming in their faces. (Indeed, some of their peers who did get in ended up exactly where they thought they’d be: SNL hired the Please Don’t Destroy boys, a sketch-comedy group comprised of NYU alums Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy.) Shortly thereafter, Edebiri noticed Sennott at a party on a friend’s roof, drunkenly ranting to fellow aspiring comedian Moss Perricone. “Well, I don’t care about getting in because I’m just going to do comedy by myself,” Sennott said. “This gives me a better push to go out in the city, where there are mics if you look for them.”

“I was like, Who the fuck is this?” says Edebiri, laughing.

“She’s blackout drunk, but she believes there’s another way,” Sennott says in a singsongy rasp.