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Jason Chuang

Students slumber under the hypnotic spell of Sailesh, “The World’s Best Uncensored Hypnotist,” at a performance in Memorial Auditorium Monday night. The Comedy Club-sponsored event also featured appearances by four comedians.

Many students feel like they’re under hypnosis as they trudge through Dead Week, but Monday night in Memorial Auditorium, several Stanford students actually were hypnotized.

In the first study break of its kind, four comedians and a hypnotist performed a two-hour show for an audience of more than 200 people. Organized by the Stanford Comedy Club, the event featured comedians Tim Babb, Kevin Avery, Andrew Norelli and Kellen Erskine, followed by Sailesh, who is heralded as The World’s Best Uncensored Hypnotist.

“My girlfriend is great as a person, although not so much at spelling,” said Erskine, who opened the night. “She texted me this morning: ‘I had a great night last night. TREVOR.’ I think there was a big typo there.”

Babb kept the jokes coming, as the comedians’ routines ranged from race to relationships to gender.

“My wife’s great and she loves being a schoolteacher,” Babb said. “A schoolteacher and a comedian getting married — that’s got to be the lowest combined salary of any family in the U.S.”

The star of the show was clearly Sailesh, however, who kept about 15 student volunteers hypnotized for more than an hour.

“It was weird,” said Cameron Barnewall ‘11, one of the volunteers. “I knew things weren’t actually happening when I was hypnotized but it felt like they were.”

Under Sailesh’s hypnosis, the volunteers landed on Mars, saved people on a sinking ship, spoke in East Indian accents and became pelvic-thrusters and river-dancers on command.

“I didn’t know how good I apparently am at pelvic thrusts,” said Caitlin Berka ‘08. “It was weird, since you know what you’re doing is bizarre but you can’t control it, like the time we were having sex with the chairs.”

Among his other scenarios, Sailesh hosted a Jerry Springer show where his volunteers were asked to divulge secrets about their friends. One volunteer revealed that his friend had a “thing for his cousin’s animals,” something he said was just plain wrong, while Berka said her friend had two vaginas, which thoroughly amused the audience.

While students were certainly entertained, Sailesh himself was also thrilled to be on campus.

“It was great performing to such a multicultural environment here at Stanford,” he said. “The students were truly appreciative of the show and the humor, and it reinforced my love for my profession of 13 years.”

Overall, audience members were entertained throughout the night — despite their initial questions about the validity of hypnosis.

“I was very skeptical to begin with because I had never seen a hypnotist before,” said Sabine Bergmann ‘10. “However, tonight’s performance was truly unique and entertaining.”