On the last Saturday night of the summer, hundreds of first-years clustered outside Sanders Theater, poised to cheer on their classmates at the annual first-year talent show. The show, hosted each year by the Crimson Key Society, brought together the Class of 2026 for a night of poking fun at Harvard.
Bobby McCarthy ’23 and Olivia Johnson ’25 hosted the talent show, decked out in red lanyards and mock Class of 2026 crop-tops—cropped for McCarthy, who joked that Johnson had bought him the wrong size. They supplied jokey, sometimes vulgar commentary between the acts, teasing the Class of 2026 as a reminder that, in Johnson’s words, “we don’t have to take things seriously all the time to still be great.”
The eleven performances ranged from virtuosic classical performances and heart-wrenching song duets to stand-up and musical comedy.
“I thought it was really amazing,” said Maren Wong ’26, just one of many first-years who professed their pleasant surprise. “It’s the kind of talent you hear about everywhere at Harvard but I hadn’t really seen it yet.”
McCarthy explained that part of what is so astonishing about the talent show is how quickly the performers prepared their acts.
One student, Hamza Masoud ’26, who performed a short stand-up comedy set, said that the talent show was his fourth time ever doing stand-up—following three previous acts he performed during his first week on campus. In his set, Masoud poked fun at the Harvard experience, teasing the prospective Economics concentrators in the house and going so far as to sport a Brown University hoodie on stage.
Masoud wasn’t the only act to make fun of Harvard. Ian Hua ’26 satirized the first-year experience through an original song played on piano, oscillating between amazement and desperation at life as a first-year.
Other acts, such as piano and violin duo Harvey Lin ’26 and Enoch Li ’26, found quick compatibility in the proximity of their dorms. Lin and Li are roommates, and figured out they were both virtuosic musicians when they moved in together on campus. Harvey learned his piano accompaniment for the piece, Antonio Bazzini’s “The Dance of the Goblins,” in just a couple of days—all while rehearsing his own classical performance, which opened the show.
McCarthy said this speedy preparation is part of what makes the talent show special. “If I wasn’t at auditions I would have assumed it had taken weeks for a lot of these acts but many of them were prepared no more than a day or two ahead,” he said. “The fact that in such a short span of time these acts produced the quality performances they did is actually remarkable.”
Most, but not all, of the acts displayed musical talents, from an array of different styles of dance, singing, and instrument-playing.
Lin and Li’s was not the only coordinated act. Three friends, Isabella Xue ’26, Linda Zhang ’26, and Kira Tian ’26, performed a traditional Chinese dance in matching newspaper-print outfits, while Brody Billingsley ’26 and Carolyn Hao ’26 closed out the show with a moving Celine Dion duet—so moving, in fact, that it brought several students in the front row to tears.
Johnson noted she was particularly touched by the enthusiasm that performers and audience members brought to the show. “I think we as upperclassmen have really been worn out from the Covid years of college and have historically lacked school spirit,” she said. “So seeing so many first-years show up for not only auditions but for the actual show was so refreshing and honestly inspiring.”
While almost forty students auditioned, only eleven earned the chance to perform. One quality brought all participants together: to not take the show too seriously.
“People have this perception of Harvard that doesn’t really encompass the true student experiences here. We take ourselves way too seriously,” Johnson explained. She said that their goal with the talent show—as well as other First-Year Week events such as Key’s Rocky Horror style screening of Love Story—was to “ease the tension that many of the freshmen were probably feeling coming into Harvard.”
Hamza, the show’s resident stand-up comic, also expressed that he wanted to unite students with his routine. “Everyone’s in the same boat right now and there’s a lot of insecurity, so it’s fun to kind of point out that we’re all struggling in the same way.”
Proof Schubert Reed ’25( proofschubertreed@college.harvard.edu) did not perform in the first-year talent show.