At Harvard, O’Keefe was a veritable Renaissance man: a ’Poonster, Krokodiloe and theater maven.

O’Keefe flourished at Harvard—though only outside the classroom, he says.

“The closest thing I came to academics was theater,” he says.

O’Keefe worked at the Pudding as both actor and composer. After graduation, he continued to help write scripts and arrange music.

He credits the Pudding with showing him “the traditional musical theater thing,” times “when you’re sitting up until 4 a.m. writing a song because you have to rehearse it tomorrow.”

“Really almost everything I do now, I learned how to do at the Pudding show and at Harvard,” he says.

Course Correction

O’Keefe put his acting career on hold after an audition in New York during a Pudding tour. After he auditioned, the producer asked if O’Keefe would fill in for the rehearsal pianist.

He obliged, scoring a couple hundred dollars and a tip from the producer:

“He said, ‘Thank you very much, and by the way, if you have any other job skills, you shouldn’t be an actor.’ ‘Do you mean in general, or just me?’ And he said: ‘Both,’” O’Keefe recalls.

Soon O’Keefe decided to pursue a graduate degree in Film Scoring at the University of Southern California.

In California, O’Keefe joined the Actors’ Gang, a theater known for its “really brilliant, stolen commedia dell’arte technique.”

“[It’s] very vaudevillian, and very artificial and it allows you to be very funny, heightened yet deep at the same time,” he says. “It was a fortuitous match to my Pudding training.”

This mix of emotions, depth and comedy was indeed apparent in a Pudding song O’Keefe wrote a decade ago at the behest of Mo Rocca ’91, then the Pudding’s president and currently a correspondent on “The Daily Show.”

“[Rocca] said it shouldn’t be jazzy, it should sound like Sondheim, it should sound almost tragic,” O’Keefe says.