Imperial KVN team take comedy crown

On Sunday, Imperial College KVN Team “IMPACT” became the UK League Champions, beating 17 other teams from other universities and combined team all over the UK for this title.

KVN is a Russian version of University Challenge within standup and sketch comedy. KVN (translates as Club of Funny and Ready-witted) has been running for over 50 years in Russia, now spread all over the world including Australia, Canada, USA, Israel, Germany, and it started in the UK in 2010. It has had enormous success, and attracted teams from all over the world for the Inter-continental Festival of KVN last year and also a set of world-famous judges such as a Russian football player Roman Pavlyuchenko, previous world champions of KVN and famous Russian artists and producers.

Our team was mainly made up of masters and undergraduate students – our team captain Elena Yaklych, Natalia Yankova, Alex Bukharin, Oksana Iamshanova, Anna Volokitin as well as four PhD students – Artyom Romanov, Alexey Denisov, Irina Tsymashenka, and Nickolai Vysokov, as well as two guys from outside of the university, Egor Savvin (LSBF) and Igor Jevseev.

The team has performed brilliantly on stage throughout and took the first place in quarter-finals, then in semi-finals round and won the finals! In the finals we have withstood a fierce battle with LSE, London Kazakh Society (who took the second place), Bournemouth University, and a joint team from Oxford Brookes and City University.

We have presented the best jokes, funniest and most original sketches to over 800 people from the Russian community living in London. It took us hours of brainstorming, weekends of rehearsal, and sacrificing the time we should have devoted to education to come up with the jokes tailor-made for the audience and to perfect the details of our acting to deliver a show we can be proud of.

No words can describe the energy emanating from the stage during the performance and no English words can translate the witty wordplay, so to experience it one would have to come and see it live if you speak Russian or if you’re learning it and can come along with someone who speaks Russian (to explain the references to political and cultural background). But to give you a flavour – our first performance in the quarter-finals started with a geeky character coming on stage with a dead-serious announcement that “Imperial College scientists have successfully crossed Large Hadron Collider with a washing machine. Now we know how to do money laundering with the speed of light” followed by an annoying granny ranting about immigrants and such turning out to be Queen Elizabeth, stoned Neo and Morpheus being “in the Matrix” and finished off with the geeky character announcing that “Imperial College scientists have really enjoyed the experiment, where they crossed… Imperial College scientists! Now we’re looking for collaboration with scientists from other universities for crossing scientists of a different sex.”

As the prize for winning the competition our team has been invited to go to Jurmala, Latvia this summer for the annual Singing KiViN festival, where they will have a chance to compete with teams from all over the world.