Seriously Funny

When you meet senior Sarah Durning for the first time, it’s hard to ignore her wide smile, exceptionally bright eyes, and wickedly caustic sense of humor.

After being asked to characterize her own comedic style, Durning was able to rattle off adjectives like she had studied them for a vocabulary quiz: “Vulgar. Cruel. Sarcastic,” she listed without hesitation or a twinge of guilt. Her sense of humor, whether it has been embraced by everyone or not (it hasn’t), has resonated with her peers, as she was voted the funniest girl in a Drops of Ink poll two weeks ago.

Alex Barton, one of Durning’s closest friends, is a personal witness and fan to Durning’s whimsical ways.

“Sarah is so funny because…she doesn’t care what people think. Her sarcastic comments and humor always find a way to make me laugh,” she offered.

While not all students interact with Durning on such an intimate level every day like Barton, it’s not hard to feel the shock waves of her creative, and occasionally abrasive, comedy. The line between a dreary mood and eyes teeming with tears of laughter is drawn at the Twitter login page. Durning’s renowned and oft-recited Twitter account is both her favorite social media platform and her most powerful comedic amplifier.

“I put a lot of thought into my Twitter and Instagram captions…” she admitted. “It’s my only redeeming quality.”

Listening to Durning analyze the tweeting process is like hearing Picasso break down his artwork, or watching Ankur Rastogi derive a polynomial function. (See page 16) It’s hauntingly beautiful. Scroll through her Twitter page, @SarDurn, for a while; it should suffice as a challenging ab workout.

But Durning’s wit is prevalent even beyond the internet realm. Even in person, her jokes are transcendent of the gender lines that usually isolate people as “girl funny” or “guy funny.” There are several reasons for this — undeniably sharp wit and an infectious laugh, to name a couple — but perhaps the most prominent is the way she shamelessly uses the famous, or infamous, depending on who you ask, sarcastic language of the senior class.

“It kind of started out as joke,” she explained. “My friends and I would use it just to poke fun at the people who used it. But now it’s just bade.”

Durning frequently employs the vernacular that often draws raised eyebrows and condescending smirks from many of her counterparts throughout the school, who often deem the language immature.

“It’s so funny. It’s in all my (social media) captions and everything. I hate when people get bothered by it, just live with it…we’re in high school, we’re not supposed to be mature. Just deal with it,” she preached, playing hopscotch with the line between comedian and philosopher in the process.

While Durning’s way of inducing laughs is relatively brash — she describes herself as outgoing and loud — she holds a special appreciation for those with a snarky, drier sense of humor.  She cites classmates Nick Jennings, Lily Simpson, Annie Farrugia, Chris Akers, and Eryka Jones, and actor/comedian Nick Offerman, as the people who draw laughs from her more than anyone else. There is is also one LHS staff member that stands out as particularly hilarious to Durning:  the LHS Testing Center commander, Mr. Ken Gallivan.

“Whenever I’m in there, he says something funny every time,” she managed to croak between fits of laughter.

Perhaps her most impressive feat is managing to evade the scorn of Mr. Gallivan and the rest of the LHS staff, an inevitability for most of Libertyville’s notorious jokers. Considering some of her stories and jokes make Daniel Tosh look like a saint, it seems to be a matter of time before Durning spends one of her Saturdays at 708 W. Park Avenue. But for now, she’s clean as a whistle.

Whether or not a more official comedy career lies in Durning’s future remains unclear, but one thing stands certain. If all else fails, she still has a hidden talent that will take her as far as she needs to go.

“I do a perfect Shakira impression,” she revealed with a proud smile. “It’s my username on Snapchat — iloveshakira666.”

Sean Ferraro

 Just a couple weeks ago, senior Sean Ferraro was doing something he has become very accustomed to over the years– making people laugh. This time, however, he was inducing unconcealable grins and gut-busting laughter without even opening his mouth. He let the pronounced stripe of hair right above it do the talking.

“It was somewhere between a creepy pedophile and Ron Burgundy,” he said of his defined mustache.

Ferraro has the unique talent of prying smiles out of people even when they’re reluctant, and he does so in more ways than donning obscene facial hair for days at a time. His sense of humor is multifaceted — it’s categorized somewhere at the intersection of political incorrectness, hilarious immaturity, and a range of voices and noises that liken him to Ferris Bueller’s famous keyboard.

Senior Jimmy Keefe, one of Ferraro’s closest friends and comedy comrades (he received the second-most votes in the Drops of Ink poll on the funniest students, behind Ferraro), still finds his friend of over seven years as amusing as when he first met him: “The way he moves his body, the way he says things…he’s quiet until he’s in an environment where he’s comfortable. Then when he’s comfortable? It’s over,” he said with a laugh.

That’s the paradox with Ferraro: his peers voted him the funniest person they know, but his guard is often up with those he doesn’t know well. He describes himself as “cool, calm and collected,” and his dry sense of humor reflects his generally moderate temperament. This personality trait was amplified when he first moved to Libertyville before the start of middle school. It took him some time to break out of his shell, but when he did, his friends never saw the serious side of him again.

Keefe recalls a situation where Ferraro earned him the funniest bad grade of his high school career: “In class, I was presenting something and Sean was just doing stuff at his desk to make me laugh. I just lost it. I got a C on the presentation (because) I was laughing so hard.”

For his main comic inspiration, Ferraro cites an older source that most people under the age of thirty often fail to appreciate: “I love Seinfeld,” he shared. “The way the beat of the show goes and everything, it’s hilarious.”

He also listed stand-up comedian Louis C.K. as one of his favorite comics: “(He) always makes me laugh, any time I listen to him he’s hilarious,” Ferraro said.

However many chuckles Ferraro is able to generate, something more widespread than his obscure jokes crowns him as the comedy king of LHS: he is one of the Founding Fathers of Libertyville’s notorious sarcastic language.

“You know it started out really immature, just saying the opposite of stuff…it’s more of how you say stuff than anything. It’s hard to explain,” he shared sheepishly. It’s easy to forget that it was the class of 2015 that generated the native Libertyville tongue that has expanded beyond the confines of just the seniors.

“I don’t know a kid that doesn’t know the language,” Ferraro said. “Once you get to know the humor behind it, it’s pretty funny.”

The sarcastic language has evolved from just a few inside jokes among close friends to a Libertyville epidemic; it’s commonplace to hear it floating around even Highland and Oak Grove. Whether or not the language will be easy to kick after high school — it is more of a habit than anything — only time will tell.

And as for Ferraro? He’ll keep making people laugh, keep coming up with fresh new jokes, keep watching Seinfeld, yada yada yada.