Though the night didn’t have the same atmosphere as White Panda or Aziz Ansari, this semester’s Stony Brook Concert Series last Tuesday was still a sold-out show.
The Student Activities Board, or SAB, sponsored the Comedy Central on Campus tour that featured comedians Jermaine Fowler, Nick Vatterott and Sheng Wang as part of a continuing attempt to revive the once-thriving and famous concert series of the last 60s and early 70s.
“We tried to get an event that would get a good turnout on campus and we settled on Comedy Central,” said Farjad Fazli, the vice president of communications for the Undergraduate Student Government, or USG. “We thought that was the biggest thing.”
The event was moderately calm for an SAB-sponsored event, compared to White Panda, the mashup duo that appeared earlier this semester. Despite that, the comedy tour brought a large amount of energy to a usually stoic Student Activities Center, or SAC, on a mid-semester Tuesday night.
Five minutes before the set start time of the show, however, there were still a hundred free student tickets available at the SAC box office. A quick look around the auditorium would further prove that point; all of the seats around the perimeter of the room remained empty. This would change, however. Around 9:15 p.m. the ticket office was closed and all of the tickets had been distributed, according to Fazli.
A lone, red metallic stool occupied the stage in the shadow of an empty microphone stand before the start of the show. RockYoFaceCase founder and coordinater Patrice Zapiti gave her almost traditional speech to get the night and crowd started, and introduced the host for the night, Jermaine Fowler.
The wide-eyed D.C.-native-gone-Brooklynite opened the night by poking fun at the university, laughing at Stony Brook’s mascot, the seawolf. Unknowlingly, Fowler asked the question that can be found on the t-shirts of hundreds of Stony Brook students, but with a slight twist.
“What the f*ck is a seawolf?”
Murmured answers from the audience of “a fish,” “a mythical creature” and “I’m a Seawolf” rang in the air of the auditorium that had significantly filled up since the start of the show.
Throughout his 20-minute set, Fowler, who has been acknowledged in the New York Post‘s 50 Funniest Jokes alongside David Letterman and Jay Leno, drew upon experiences — ding-dong-ditch with his brother at the houses of registered sex offenders — and life lessons he learned from his father.
“When I was a kid and if I came back home with bad grades my dad would take my report card from school and say ‘Wanna [sic] see what happens when you get bad grades?’ put me in the car and drive me to the most dangerous part of town, roll down his window and pointed at crack heads and say ‘See what happens! You become a crack head. You wanna [sic] be a crack head!?’” Fowler recounted.
And with a final “thank ya’ll so much,” Fowler grabbed his still-full water bottle that he brought on stage with him from the stool, announced the next comedian and left.
“You guys like music?” asked the short comedian, Nick Vatterott who was holding an acoustic guitar when he took to the stage after Fowler. “I’d like to play you a little song for you.” And with that, the guitar suddenly fell to pieces on the stage.
“You guys like stories?” Vatterott asked after slowly looking up from the trick guitar in pieces to the audience with a comedically fearful look in his pale-blue eyes. With that he jumped into his set for the night.
Vatterott, who in 2008 was named “the funniest man in Chicago” by Chicago Magazine, was most definitely the most verbally clean of the three comedians. After the show, he explained that he believes that weak comedians rely on cursing as a crutch and as a way to get cheap laughs from a crowd.
He also explained that the fewer times that he dropped the “f’ word, as he put it, the more of an effect it would have when he did use it as the kicker of a joke 40 minutes into his set.
After Vatterott’s final joke and “goodbyes” to the crowd, he was off the stage and back on came Fowler to introduce the final act, Sheng Wang.
As soon as Wang opened his mouth for the start of his set, there was an instant buzz in the air; his voice didn’t match his face. The self-dubbed “Taiwanese Texan” had a bit of a Southern drawl that was unexpected.
Unlike the previous two performers who had a continuous stream of jokes that lead in to the next, Wang’s jokes were broken. The end of one joke didn’t necessarily mean that the next was going to relate to it.
However, it appeared that Wang garnered the most laughs from the night and even got a little debate started in the crowd about the topic of pubic hair. Two or three audience members were going back-and-forth on whether or not it was “natural.” Wang stopped their conversions to continue his set but said he would be interested in finishing the conversation after the show.
“I felt he was down to earth and he was very intertwined with the audience,” Charisse Noel, a senior math major, said of Wang, who was her favorite of the night.
After a glance at his set list, and an “I’m pretty much done,” Wang left the stage and the night was over.
