College Humor Live, a line-up of several comics well-known for their viral videos, took place Wednesday night at Goldstein Auditorium.

Students lined up as early as 6 p.m. for the 8 p.m. show, eager for entertainment. “I definitely needed a good laugh as the semester course load picks up,” said Tahirah Newkirk, a freshman public relations major.

All of College Humor’s cast — Jake Hurwitz, Amir Blumenfeld, Streeter Seidell, and Dan Gurewitch — admitted to being nervous before the performance. The guys agreed in unison that alcohol helps frayed nerves.

Blumenfeld joked in a pre-show interview that the group was a little bit nervous the show was going up against Syracuse University’s undefeated basketball team that same night.

Gurewitch, an SU alumnus, had great blunt advice for hopeful comedians. “The first 100 things you write will be really sh*tty, so start now.”

Hurwitz and Blumenfeld, who also star together in a web series highlighting their hilarious friendship, opened the show. A playful disagreement turned into a rap battle that the crowd loved.

“Your glasses make you look like a Jewish Harry Potter,” Hurwitz said. A majority of Blumenfeld’s lines referenced the movie 8 Mile, and the pair left the stage after reading embarrassing text messages from one another’s phones.

Seidell followed their act, and won the crowd’s affection with raunchy humor and self-deprecating jokes. Seidell joked about Syracuse’s snow dilemma, by suggesting all plows stop at Destiny USA.

“Just pull into the mall parking lot, and put it in the corner — that’s where the snow goes.” Referencing Game of Thrones, Seidell compared Syracuse to “north of the wall up here.”

He then talked about his own college experiences and said he only got “fat guy injuries” like ripping the webbing between his fingers on a peanut butter jar. He also involved the crowd in his act with playful heckling when he found a Cornell University student in the crowd.

Gurewitch, an alumnus of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, followed Seidell’s act with a set heavy in relatable Syracuse humor by recounting his time as a student.

Jokes about Greek Life were a hit with the crowd, especially a joke about Zeta Beta Tau’s fraternity house. Gurewitch’s juxtaposition of the grandeur of Alpha Xi Delta’s house to ZBT was hilarious. He compared the ZBT house to “Requiem for a Dream, but they don’t even have heroin as an excuse, they’re just gross.”

He then went on to make jokes about the stickiness of Chuck’s Cafe and how girls dressed at bars, before making fun of his alma mater. Joking about Newhouse’s reputation, Gurewitch said, “Newhouse is the number one school at letting you know they’re the number one school.”  The crowd reacted with wild laughter and some agreements.

Blumenfeld and Hurwitz closed the show with an interactive game for the crowd, asking audience members to embarrass themselves by answering shameful trivia for t-shirts. Male audience members were challenged to name four of the six main characters of Twilight while female audience members were challenged to name cartoon characters.

The show was consistently strong through the use of raunchy humor for college kids. Audience members left pleased with the entire ensemble, but students had their particular favorites.

“My favorite act was Streeter, I thought he was hilarious. I never heard of him before this but I’m definitely going to look him up afterwards,” Emelia Armstead, a junior public relations major, said.

 

Published on February 20, 2014 at 12:57 am

For more information, contact Autumn at: aboatner@syr.edu