On Saturday, January 16, the Crystal Formations Synchro Skating teams hosted their annual fundraiser Yuk Yuk’s comedy night. The night started off with a dinner, door prizes and had a bar open to sell drinks throughout the night. Because of the bar, the event was 19 and above to get in. During the dinner, a couple of women went around selling tickets for a 50/50 that was aided by Scotiabank (the grand prize being close to $500). There were 250 tickets sold for the night, which did not fill capacity at the Best Western Convention Centre, but was still a fairly large crowd.

“It started off with just a lot of parents when we had it at Lions Park because it was much smaller,” said Brandi Clarke-Rogãl, “we could only have up to about 150 people at Lions, and then it just kept growing. We moved it to the civic centre because friends of the parents of skaters went ‘Oh that’s a good show, let’s go to that’ and then we brought it here. Now it’s out to the public so we get anybody because we just put it on Facebook. We get friends of friends of friends of friends come, I don’t even know half the people who come now.”

The comedians were hilarious (provided humour is subjective, a Westboro Baptist might not find it as funny). There were three comedians in total and their show lasted close to two hours. Peter Anthony headlined the show, bringing his Maritimes humour. He followed Adrian Cronk, a Kingston comedian. Michael Harrison hosted the show, giving his small town Saskatchewan routine. All three had fairly impressive resumes and it showed in their acts. The routine was not PG-13 by any means, but that’s not to say it was crazy raunchy.

The whole goal of the show is to raise money to make the costs of skating on a team lower. With the extra funding, more and more teams can be made. Currently, Crystal Formations is hoping to get younger teams on the ice, with their youngest member this season being seven years old.

“This is our first year for having younger people in it actually,” said Clarke-Rogãl.

“We’ve been trying to get younger teams going so that they foster their love of synchro skating throughout their lives, that’s where I got started. I started skating when I was three and then stopped when I was 16 and came back when I was 30, so for the last 12 years I’ve been on an adult synchro team and I love it because I did it in my youth.”