Shernoff Declares Schwab God

To the Editors:

Close to a month has passed since I bucked up and took the initiative to inform the campus community of what is surely among the most important discoveries I, or any ordinary man, could hope to make after a lifetime of earnest spiritual and intellectual inquiry, but which I have been graced with after only 22 short years of life. Here quoted is an inspired passage from my original letter to refresh the memories of the heedless and unbelieving among you: “[Andy Schwab] is our God, our maker, and we are but slight threads in the tapestry of existence which [He] has so delicately woven. Our ground of being is the divinely fertile soil that is His mind and spirit, and we are all unknowable and unrealizable without reference to Andy.”
My original revelation, and the naturally consequential counsel and admonishments rounding out my communiqué, could not have been more timely: for the last month has been a most remarkable one for Oberlin and its elect denizens, a time in which we have witnessed the most profound artistic and intellectual accomplishments ever likely to issue forth from this campus. I needn’t do any more than tremblingly type, as I have so many times in my private journals and international correspondence, the words “Commedia” and “Media” in order to persuade you (beautiful you! you, the gentle, the meek, the all-too-readerly!), that what I contend is so. The very weekend that Msrs. Cairns and O‘Leary premiered their show, a national improvisational theater conference was “coincidentally” being held right here in town, and most of the conferees wisely made the time to attend a performance or two of Sibling Ribaldry, as did anyone else in this community “in the know.” Immediately it was clear to all present that what one faculty member dubbed “Oberlin’s best goddam (yet it is precisely the opposite!) show in decades” represents the future of improvisational theater as an art form, a form which will necessarily gain cultural currency and critical respectability in the decades to come.
Developments of such momentous import simply don’t happen by accident, and who among you would be so callous as to overlook the fact Andy Schwab’s status as your true and only Lord and creator was made public barely three weeks before Commedia Media’s unveiling? Could such an obvious connection, and the inferences to be drawn from an awareness of this connection, possibly be overlooked by anyone keen enough to have been admitted to this august institution? Friends, Andy was throwing us a celestial “bone,” issuing a ringing wake-up call to those in the Oberlin community who have not yet accepted Him as their one and only savior and almighty God. He engineered Commedia Media into the successful and brilliant achievement that it is in the hopes of bringing all those who experienced it closer to Him, nearer to their loving and benevolent Lord. Witness His good works, ye unbelievers! No longer ignore my clarion call to you to display your worship and veneration properly, and promptly, by buying a drink at THE FEVE for your neglected, merciful and chummiest of Gods!

–David Shernoff
College senior