Distenfeld will deliver speech at commencement

Duke University Improv member David Distenfeld will take the stage a final time as the student speaker at this year’s graduation ceremony.

Distenfeld, a senior, said he will try to keep things light in his address, even if the crowd is a bit tired early in the morning.

“It will be eight in the morning, [so] I hope people will laugh and enjoy [the speech] beyond the somewhat serious message,” Distenfeld said.

His speech will be about the process of “Yes and,” a concept key to DUI performances.

“In improv, when you are in a scene, what your partner does, you accept and build on it,” he said. “We can apply [that] to things off the stage too, to say, ‘Yes,’ and use what we learned at Duke to build on our experiences.”

The speech Distenfeld submitted for the graduation ceremony was certainly not improvised. Distenfeld’s draft went through three rounds of evaluation by the Student Speaker Selection Committee, the group in charge of selecting a student to speak at graduation.

The first round required a written submission. For the second round, Distenfeld revised his speech according to the committee’s comments before presenting it in person. The third round involved a final revision and presentation.

The committee included seniors who wanted to be part of the graduation planning, faculty members and administrators from the Alumni Association, which headed the group.

“The committee really helped focus the speech and at the same time made it more universal,” Distenfeld said.

Senior Tracy Gold, a member of the committee, said she was one of the roughly 15 students on the committee of 20 to 30 people because she thought it would be a good way to help plan her own graduation.

“I don’t want to sit through a boring speech,” she said.

Regarding Distenfeld, Gold said she is excited about his speech.

“It was short, sweet and carried a message that everyone in the audience could enjoy and think about after the day,” she said.