Chief Ref Room Correspondent Sameea Butt forayed a floor below her usual spot to recap yesterday evening’s this morning’s Orgo Night. If you want to see video, you can check out one from a commenter or CUMB’s YouTube channel.

There was a little more excitement than expected in 209 last night, as the crowds sweated it out for the “53rd consecutive, 69th semi-annual drive to lower the curve in Organic Chemistry.” As usual, there were people piled atop desks and chairs, kids squeezed between anxious band groupies, dudes passing out CULPA fliers (do it, comrades!) and diligent students trying, also as per usual, to study through the ruckus. In what we naively hope was a rare display of school spirit, the eager audience burst into applause before the band even got there and started singing the Fight Song… yeah they were probably just jazzed about school ending.

A guy in a fedora led a slow clap to herald the band’s actual entrance. They proudly marched in playing the “Roar, Lion Roar,” with a few sporting sunglasses and one member carrying what this Bwogger heard described as “ohmygod an inflated penis!”

The speakers, Tyler Benedict, CC ’13, and Travis Alvarez, CC ’12, started the night off with a topic still fresh in students’ minds: the “bureaucratic error” that forced Bacchanal to move to the lawns.” Also, please step back from the fence. The show cannot continue unless you step back.” Someone from the crowd responded with a shout out to the co-president of Bachannal: “We love you Jody.” Shit happens, we forgive you too.

The crowd seemed largely to agree with the band’s assessment of Bacchanal this year: “saying ‘Snoop Dogg is coming to campus!’ is a lot more fun than him actually being here.” Although people were visibly annoyed by the comment, “Guess they [the barely-intelligible Das Racist] shouldn’t have booked the sound guys from the Varsity Show,” two band members shouted “Swag, swag!” The band then played “Push It,” “in honor of sticking your dizzle in a hot piece of pizzle and doing it all night lizzle”.

The second group to take a hit was CU Democrats for asking Public Safety for permission to protest at the “Swipe-In-Sit-In.” “Seriously? Did the Egyptians fill out a space request for Tahrir Square? Did the Freedom Riders stop singing ‘We shall overcome’ because it was quiet hours? Did Gandhi obtain consent before beating his wife?”

“Yikes,” you say? Keep reading, there’s plenty more where that came from (Seriously, where did that come from? Have you, too, ever wondered who writes the script?)

That last one did not go down without some booing; however, even stronger were the jeers from the crowd after just mentioning the CU Republicans. “Alright, this isn’t a tea party folks,” the announcer said, before moving on to announce that Orgo Night was a safe space for Republicans (“Yep, all ten of you!”), because “they are the best example of a minority group at Columbia.” To much approval from the audience, the band played “Any Way You Want It” in honor of the two-party system, “because, let’s face it, that’s really all Columbia’s social scene can handle”.

The Greek Games events were amply mocked: “Hoop rolling… Plato’s Pilates… Watermelon. What the fuck is Watermelon?” “It’s fucking delicious, that’s what it is!” came the response from a (strong, beautiful?) lady in the crowd. The speaker tried to come up with a response, but just ended up repeating her words to the crowd before commenting on the toga party: “If we’re lucky, we’ll have multiple V-shows this year”. Booing and jeering came aplenty with that, but more than laughter and applause? Obviously not. There weren’t enough people in the room to take offense to good ole Barnard jokes. To be fair, we don’t either. Nor do we take offense to the ugly CC girl, awkward SEAS guy and old GS student jokes. We do wonder, though, where our good CC gentlemen are in the script… what’s that? Oh, they’re writing it? Gotcha.

There was a semi annoyed shout of “that’s racist!” about NoCo succeeding Kent as “the most Asian—sorry, most studious building on campus,” but nowhere near as much disgust as at the crack about people going in to Joe’s to peer at the brownies—“and we don’t mean the Harlem residents.” The disapproving “ohhhh” from the crowd succeeded in eliciting an apology—“We didn’t realize it’d get that strong of a reaction, sorry guys”—from the speaker, who went on to express his concern that the new hottest study destination, Joe, would “sell out, just like Justin Bieber did.”

In one of the most memorable moments of the night, an audibly upset girl in the crowd swiftly responded: “NO!” “Puberty is like so mainstream now,” the announcer noted before the band played “Hips(ters) Don’t Lie”.

Then the band took a dig at the the AEPi brothers’ forced exodus from their brownstones. They must now “wander Low Plaza for 40 years in search for a new land of beer and honeys.” It would be for the best, the band mused, that the Palestinian Student Organization’s “refugee camp” guarded with “cardboard guns” wouldn’t be available to them because”those debauched frat bros would probably just turn the place into a Gaza Strip Club.”

The band even took a stab at the ROTC’s return to campus. Over a trombone womp womp a la Charlie Brown, the speaker shouted, “Transgender! Racism! Heckling a vet!” It was refreshing to see the band adopt this unique presentation style. The next number “honoring Columbia’s anti-discrimination policy,” saw the most enthusiastic response. The 90s babies in the crowds danced and warbled along to the Mulan classic “I’ll Make a Man Out of You.”

The last segment included the most anticipated joke on the tale of Hektor bin Laden finally being taken down by Barack Obamachilles. “Two hundred tortured prisoners, three thousand dead soldiers and one Nobel Peace Prize later,” he “drags his body round Ground Zero seven times and stuffs some rocks in his turban, covers him in bubble wrap and dumps him in the ocean. Exactly as the Prophet Muhammad intended.” This one probably received the most disapproving “ohhhh”s of the night. The band dedicated the next song,”Fuck You,” to Osama bin Laden, with “two towery fingers” raised in his direction. The dancing, singing, and warbling reached its apex with people sing-shouting along “WHY!”

The night wound down with a the usual jokes about organic chemistry, and the band exited playing the fight song, leaving the sweaty masses rushing to escape out of the humid room. There were a few comments from the crowd on song choice (“Fuck You is the worst pick for that segment. That song’s about unrequited love!”), and a sarcastic “real good comeback” at the delicious watermelon comment, but not a negative word beyond that as people headed back up to the third and fourth floors to finish studying for their finals.

All in all, Bwog has to agree with that assessment. Although some jokes were more offensive than usual, (ragging on Gandhi, fine. But “brownies” of Harlem? C’mon, guys) and we’d hoped for some newer songs, the CUMB made the very most of the material it had to work with this semester. And bonus points for the Disney song. Orgo Night was a rollicking good time.