Students poked fun at prank calls, Olympic athletes and Thanksgiving dinner during the student-run comedy event “The Lemonade Stand-Up” Tuesday in South Campus’ 3M Auditorium.

About 50 students attended the event hosted by juniors James Brown and Matt Crowley and senior Austin Guertin. The trio charged $3 for admission to the show, which satisfied their lemonade stand project for a 200-level entrepreneurship class.

“We’ve been working on this since September, and we came up through the initial idea with the play on words in ‘lemonade stand,’” Guertin said. “This was a lot of fun to do because it wasn’t your usual project.”

Brown and Guertin performed short bits for the crowd, and the group invited other students to perform as well. Sophomore David Zosel also performed.

“This was a great experience to be provided for students who want this way to express themselves,” Zosel said. “I have always wanted to try stand-up comedy and this was a great chance to try it out.”

Zosel said he thinks that more students would have attended if the show was not the week before finals.

Performers did not have many restrictions, but were advised to keep the content appropriate, Guertin said.

“It was pretty much ‘just-keep-it-clean’ because it is on-campus, and go as long as you want,” Guertin said. “I think we did a good job of that, and the timing went well for how many people we had.”

Senior Jacob Rudd said he enjoyed watching students perform during the 30-minute show.

“I really was surprised that I had so much fun,” Rudd said. “I wish it would have have been longer … but I’m glad that it wasn’t a rant. I’m sure there is more that the performers could come up with.”

Brown said the turnout was better than he anticipated. He said the toughest aspect of hosting the event was talking to university officials in order to have the event on-campus along with promoting the show.

“It was nice to see people actually got out here,” Brown said. “We used Facebook as a tool and had someone tweet to raise awareness for us.”

Both Brown and Guertin said there is potential for another show, but they would have to look for more students willing to entertain an audience.

“Maybe we’ll do another one next semester, but I think it went well,” Guertin said.

Anastasia Straley can be reached at stra0669@stthomas.edu.