Get to know the Lilting Banshees

Between the kid who was seriously feeling himself in every musical transition between skits to the Bonnie and Clyde-esque rendition of Summer Nights from the hit musical Grease, The Lilting Banshees Comedy Troupe has raised the bar for campus comedy.

Although the performances put on by various theater groups at Wake are spectacular, for me, nothing beats a performance by the Banshees.

I went to my first Banshees show in Fall of my freshman year and I haven’t let myself miss one since. The way that the Banshees masterfully handle topics that range from international politics (their last show featured a skit about Apple’s newest technology called iSis… yes, you read that right. ISIS masked as a robotic sister) to the primaries, to making fun of people and places on campus, makes their shows impressive and an absolute pleasure. 

The Banshees only put on three performances each year: one during orientation, one near Winter Break and the last at the end of the year. This year, the show titled “Pants Down 10” ended the year spectacularly. I was so impressed by this show that I made it my mission to get to know more about the troupe, and I really lucked out.

The day after the show, I introduced myself to Blake Rutledge, a senior who I recognized from a skit where he played a looney Trader Joe’s check out clerk, and asked him to have lunch with me. Before I knew it, we were talking comedy over Chik-fil-a, where I learned a lot about this student run organization.

Blake told me of the origin of the comedy troupe that dates back to 1992 when a Wake Radio student named Benjamin Thompson decided he wanted Wake to have a comedy troupe. The unique name “The Lilting Banshees” came from a random encounter between Ben Thompson and an Irish cassette tape called, you guessed it, the Lilting Banshees and the name stuck.

One of the most impressive things he told me was that the group is entirely student-run and does not receive funding from the school. The budget comes from ticket sales which sell for just three dollars, but Blake said that there are about 1,000 tickets sold every night. If that isn’t a mark of their comic talent, this next piece of information will be.

While watching the skits, I always thought “Where did they come up with these incredible jokes?” but I figured comedy just came naturally to these students and cracking jokes was as easy as breathing for these kids. But then Blake explained the War Room to me. The Banshees practice three times a week where they spend hours writing skits and then, as the show approaches, they come to a mandatory meeting called The War Room where they read through 50 or 60 skits that were written. This meeting is the culmination of all of their hard work and can take up to 12 hours, but in they end, they come out of the War Room with an hour and thirty minutes of the best on-campus comedy.

Most importantly though, I asked Blake what drew him to join the Banshees on top of the other organizations he is a part of, a few being President Council, Lambda and first year mentor, and his said: “It’s a family driven by creativity. It’s a diverse group of students from all different walks of campus life that are connected through comedy, through the Lilting Banshees.”