2022 Senior Series: Cecilia Cipullo

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“I am a senior Italian major and have been a part of the improv troupe Mission Improvable in the UMass comedy league since my first semester freshman year. I am doing an honors thesis on writing for comedy television. Over spring break, I filmed the pilot episode for it, and am currently in the process of editing that. It’s a mockumentary, and it’s about the daily happenings of a college newspaper. The paper’s called The Daily Bell — that's the title of the show. It’s set at the fictional University of Belling in the fictional Belling, Mass. I’m imagining it is a type of school like UMass Amherst, in a slightly bigger state school. 

Around my junior year of high school, I started doing improv in my high school troupe, and I loved it. I think making people laugh was something I'd never really done before, and it feels so good and is really cool to be around. Being a part of a comedy troupe, I feel like you laugh more on average than other people do, because this extracurricular is literally laughing for an hour and a half, three times a week. It’s really good for your mental health in general. I fell in love with it, and I didn’t want to stop. 

While being a part of Mission Improvable, I feel like I've grown so much as a comedian and made some of my closest friends. UMass has a great comedy league — it was a big part of the reason I came here, big part of the reason I stayed, and most of the reason that I loved my experience at UMass.

"One of my favorite memories in the troupe was in the second semester of my freshman year, before I went on leave. We have shows every Saturday night at 8 p.m., and my birthday fell on a Saturday. The theme of the show was ‘Volley’s 19’ — we have spy names as Mission Improvable is a play on Mission Impossible, and my name is Volley. So that was really special. It was the last show I was in before I went on leave. I felt very loved by the rest of the troupe.  

After graduation, I am excited to return as a head camp counselor at my summer music camp where I direct musical theater shows. In the future, I plan on perusing screenwriting specifically for sitcom-type writing. I do care a lot about that show, so the long-term goal is to produce The Daily Bell one day. The short-term goal is to start working on film sets. I want to be a production assistant, or a script writer in a writers room, and even keep up improv."

Cecilia Cipullo '22 is an Italian studies major and a member of the Commonwealth Honors College. Her honors thesis is on writing for comedy television — she is creating a mockumentary called The Daily Bell. She's a part of Mission Improvable, one of the improv groups on campus in the UMass Comedy League. Directly after graduation, Cipullo will be a head counselor at a summer camp in Maine where she will direct musical theater shows. She hopes to work on film sets, and even produce The Daily Bell one day.