An audience of college students is one of the hardest for a comedian to impress. There are no drunk audience members to rely on, no pity laughers and few ways for audience interaction when the venue is so big. Even further, hundreds of college students who have been waiting for over an hour in a place where most of them associate with taking final exams on a Sunday evening right before dinner makes things all the more painful.
Cornell University Program Board’s Colin Jost event on Sunday was a highly anticipated event across campus, with tickets selling out the week before the show. I arrived with minimal expectations but was excited to see Jost, who I only know from SNL’s “Weekend Update,” do stand-up in front of an audience of college students — a group who I think is hardest to impress in terms of comedy.
After arriving at the venue a few minutes after 4 p.m. for a 5 p.m. start time, I waited patiently for the show to begin. 5:30 p.m. was when things really got started, but needless to say, by the time the first opener Michael Longfellow walked onto the stage, everyone was feeling antsy.
Longfellow’s set was somewhat dated with references and impressions of people not relevant to the student body’s generation. Molly Kearney’s set was my personal favorite. The SNL alum provided interesting and hilarious personal anecdotes relating to being queer, nonbinary and from a very opinionated family with varying dynamics among members. What I found most enjoyable about Kearney’s set was that it was all grounded in personal experience, with them focusing on when they were in college. They showcased their great comedic physicality instead of relying on easy laughs.
By the time Colin Jost graced the stage, I had been sitting for almost an hour and a half. The beginning of his set felt like he was playing Mad Libs by inserting Cornell vocabulary into otherwise subpar jokes. He opened with a bit about ICE (in reference to current news on graduate student Momodou Taal) and followed with his personal ties to the University, mentioning how his aunt went to Cornell and telling another story about how he skied at “the Greek Peak.” A joke about Ithaca College got awkward when a group of Ithaca College students made everyone aware that they were in attendance.
Of course, Jost had to mention how he went to Harvard, yet most of his bits were about hotels (in which he pointed to a group of hotelies each time), traveling and other miscellaneous stories that seemed to be aimed at a slightly older demographic. Some of his jokes were painfully millennial — a joke about a “2025 bingo card” got no laughter as Jost dug himself into a bit about bingo numbers. A somewhat lengthy Spirit Airline joke was prefaced with “I’ve never flown Spirit.” Additionally, there was little mention of Scarlett Johansson, and besides a joke about her being a plumber and travelling to Thailand for work, Johansson was mostly referred to as “my wife.” Yet, Jost’s last punchline was about her – “but I thought she was a superhero!”
Comedians often use college and other lower-stakes shows in order to practice and refine their stand-up sets. However, in an audience so diverse and different from the people in an average comedy club, I wonder if this venue is truly a good way to measure what jokes would land in other audiences. Because most of the audience had waited almost an hour for the first act to begin, patience and energy was already low to begin with. While this is not to discredit the hard work of the event organizers, the unfortunate result of delays for whatever reason was a tougher crowd. While I didn’t find anything to be incredibly laugh-out-loud funny, I still enjoyed watching SNL comedians, who usually stick to the script and their predetermined sketches. Even these seasoned professionals found it challenging to land on jokes that resonated with Cornell students, and that in and of itself was kind of hilarious.
Eirian Huang is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. They can be reached at ehh56@cornell.edu.
