New York Comedy Festival: Carly Aquilino and Jessimae Peluso at Skirball Center

We stopped by the NYU Skirball Center to catch Carly Aquilino and Jessimae Peluso from MTV’s Girl Code perform at Comedy Central’s New York Comedy Festival this past weekend. The crowd consisted mostly of large groups of women with a few sprinklings of men joining their significant others. Host for the evening was comedian Luis J. Gomez who did some great crowd work. One highlight from his material was a joke stating that since he’s bald, if he’s wearing a hat people think he’s in college but if he’s not it looks like he would kidnap a college student.

Prior to the girls’ performances, a special guest took the stage in the form of new cast member of SNL Pete Davidson. Davidson, who came out to huge applause from the crowd, was there to support girlfriend Aquilino while also doing material on her and her penchant for thinking she can feel spirits in a room. It’s good to see that success hasn’t gone to Davidson’s head and he’s still the same performer he was before joining Lorne Michaels’ troupe.

Next on the stage was Carly Aquilino who basically had the crowd, which were mostly huge Girl Code fans, in the palm of her hand. One fan even made a sign for her which was assumedly a joke from the show. Aquilino’s main source for material was about women and relationships with a couple jabs at Davidson stating he’s so perfect that she can argue with him about that.

And finally, Jessimae Peluso took the stage to end the night. She walked the floor like Eddie Murphy from Delirious and at one point even tried to fake out the spotlight guy by jumping around so much. All in all, it was an enjoyable night and personally not being familiar with Girl Code, I was pleasantly surprised by their stand-up and hope to see them perform in a better, more fitting club setting soon.