Musical comedy duo Jane Wickline and Liva Pierce brought their Brooklyn-based show, “Dukes,” to an audience of approximately 200 people in Statler Auditorium Friday night, incorporating original songs, sketch bits and crowd work into a humorous hour-long set.
The show, hosted by the Cornell University Program Board, ran from 7 to 8 p.m. and marked the duo’s second visit to Ithaca, with their first in April 2025 at Ithaca College.
Wickline, a cast member on Saturday Night Live known for her dry sense of humor, and Pierce, who trained at Chicago’s The Second City improv group and has performed stand-up, improv and sketch comedy across the country, joined forces in New York to create “Dukes.”
The pair began by discussing Ithaca itself, joking about the constant algae blooms in Cayuga Lake and describing Cornellians as an even split between “hippie” and “preppy.”
From there, the set moved through a run of original songs built around dating mishaps, phone addiction and the gloominess of a corporate workplace environment. One anthem told the story of a disastrous double date at a pizzeria, while another was built around the recurring line, “I hate my job,” that drew some of the loudest laughs of the night. The duo closed out this stretch of the set with a bit about their mutual phone addiction and a shared promise to limit their screen time.
Later, Wickline and Pierce invited audience members to share anonymous gossip that they wove into their next number, before closing with songs built around a date with a self-proclaimed psychic and a satirical babysitting-crush storyline that veered into questions of gender identity.
“This was my first time seeing a comedy show that was not a Cornell comedy group, like student-run, and it was really, really fun,” said Leah Condon ’29, who added that the psychic-themed song and the performers’ crowd work stood out most. “I would go back to something like this 100%.”
Kieran Betts ’30 said that he only knew Wickline only from SNL, but enjoyed the performance.
“I loved every minute of it — I was cheesing in my seat the whole time,” he said, adding that he wished the show had run longer than its hour.
Sasha Letizia ’30 said she was struck by how the duo balanced music and comedy, including moments of deliberate vocal dissonance between the two performers.
“I liked how just when you thought they were really, really good at singing, they would all of a sudden throw in some dissonance to kind of throw you off, and the lyrics themselves were very very funny," she said.
By the time the lights came up, the reaction in the room suggested Ithaca wouldn't mind a third visit from “Dukes.”
Rowan Wallin is a member of the Class of 2027 in the Nolan School of Hotel Administration within the SC Johnson College of Business. He is a senior writer for the news department and can be reached at rwallin@cornellsun.com.
