Comedian earns laughs with ‘toilet humor’ on ‘Black is White’ tour
About 600 students packed the Russell House Ballroom to see Michael Ian Black’s stand-up Tuesday evening. And where was the performer to be found?
Well, as Black said on his Twitter account shortly before the show: “To all the people waiting for me to perform at USC, I am currently backstage masturbating to your profile pics.”
Perhaps not, but that was far from the last joke of the night about the university, South Carolina, or the South itself — and yes, it was brash and unabashedly low-brow.
“I did not wear my University of South Carolina uniform. I don’t have khakis or Polo shirts. Had I known, I would have worn it,” he joked early in his act.
Shortly thereafter, he remarked on his frustration with the South and how it isn’t living up to his expectations — by not living up to its stereotypes.
“It is those stereotypes that allow me to feel superior to you. When you don’t live up to them, I look like the a------. For example, would it kill ya to have a couple of Klansmen at the airport?” he asked with a mixture of sarcasm and irreverence.
For all his jabs at the South, though, Black mostly pointed a finger right back at himself.
Fundamental to his comedic style, you see, is his self-aware, overstated, and fairly puerile storytelling; all the stories he shared Tuesday fit that bill to a tee and recounted his own experiences.
Appropriately, Black jumped in with what can only be described as straight-up toilet humor.
After first considering how “seven times out of 10, when I go into a public restroom stall to take a poo, there’s already a poo in the toilet,” Black had an admission: his jokes were somewhat hypocritical.
In a “fancy hotel,” he recalled, “I flushed the toilet, and the water rose, and we’ve all had that experience, where the water goes up instead of down, and your heart kind of seizes.” His embarrassment stopped him from calling for a plunger, and — you can see where this is going — later that afternoon, after ditching his predicament, he returned to a tidied room and to the paralyzing fear that someone had been forced to attend to his toilet.
Of course, Black brought this story to life, moving about the stage and pantomiming his actions and reactions throughout this story and others.
He attempted a headstand as a demonstration of his poor skydiving form; used his microphone as a prop representing, at various points in the evening, a stripper’s body and his baby son; and whirled his arm around imitating a rectal examination, likening the motion to “making cotton candy up there.”
By the end of the night, he had likewise whipped his audience into a frenzy of laughing and clapping, all in appreciation of Black’s hilarious, brash and unabashed immaturity.