“You guys are really nice people,” said comedian and actor Jaboukie Young-White to a crowd of around 250 Cornellians dazed by exam season. “But then I saw the nets under the bridges, and I was like, ‘They need this.’”
The Cornell Multicultural Community-Fueled Activities Board — an organization that aims to bring diversity through entertainment on campus — hosted its first comedy night of the semester Saturday evening in Alice Statler Auditorium starring Young-White and opener Sydnee Washington, both acclaimed Black and gay comics.
Washington, an Emmy-nominated comedian and actress, opened the show with a story about her senior year of college, when she was kicked out for plagiarizing a final paper. Her warning to students was simple: “If you’re in college, you cannot plagiarize. You can sell weed, because my ex-boyfriend was doing that. You can sexually assault, because my neighbor was doing that — but you cannot plagiarize.”
“There’s a couple things that you cannot do if you’re in school, what are they?” Washington asked the audience.
“Protest,” a student shouted, the room bursting with laughter.
“Protest — I think that’s specific to right now, because I don’t think we were protesting back then when I was in the ’50s,” Washington said, joking about her age (Washington is in her late 30s).
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Washington’s 20-minute opener hyped the audience up for Young-White, the main event for the night. Young-White, a writer for the hit Netflix comedy series “Big Mouth,” brought together a stream-of-consciousness act that included a slideshow on which insect species he thought were gay, an anecdote about how his X account was banned by the FBI during the 2020 George Floyd protests for posting instructions on how to combat the National Guard and his dating history.
“I’m dating right now,” Young-White said. “My ex really wanted kids, and I was like, ‘that is not why I chose to be gay.’”
Audience members told The Sun that the hour-long comedy routine brought important representation to campus — and a reprieve from exams.
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“Usually you don’t see comedians who are people of color and in the LGBTQ+ community,” Trisha Beher ’25 said. “It was nice to see that intersection as a person of color myself.”
“In the middle of prelim season, it was really relaxing to watch a comedy show and to just laugh for a little bit,” Grace Lin ’25 said. “It felt like a great celebration of diversity, especially with the audience and the performers.”
Rowan Wallin ’27 and Ashley Lee ’28 are Sun contributors and can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].