Carolina Productions hosts open mic Wednesday
They hated on South Carolina. They were racist — all inclusive racist — and sexist and completely vulgar. They were adorkable and cocky and oblivious.
Carolina Productions hosted their annual Comedy Open Mic Night Wednesday, and brought a crop of completely opposite, and so very similar, student comics into the grand Russell House Theater spotlight.
Andy Farag, a fourth-year chemistry student and the Carolina Productions comedy coordinator, emceed the evening and tied together all the lost and random and unwinding strings.
“We’re not here to judge, we’re here to laugh,” Farag said.
Farag was, arguably, the favorite of the crowd of 40. He started the night playing on his Egyptian heritage, and as the night drew on, it lasted as his favorite topic.
“I’m the typical Arab guy who only knows Arab joke, so deal with it,” he said.
He joked about his big dream of opening a restaurant called the “Allah-ve Garden.” It would have a women’s section “where they can show their face and their ankles” and every Wednesday night, an 80s cover band called “Quran Quran” would sing “Hungry Like a Wolf.”
Lane Chamberlain, a first-year biochemistry student, was the next to take the stage. He started recounting his first USC football game: “You heard about all these girls passing out. I was one of them passing out.”
Jacob Zulanch, a veteran to the Carolina Productions comedy scene, was vulgar. The audience howled at his plot for a show called “Ghost Assholes” and its complex dialogue that went like this: “Hey ghost, guess what I was doing? F*****g your living relatives.”
He also acted out his sabotages of university tours — he loudly recounts the previous night’s sexcapades just in earshot of proud soon-to-be-freshmen fathers.
Farag jumped back in: “Have you noticed how dumb the people are here?”
He told a story of a girl he tutored who thought Alaska was right next to Mexico. And, naturally, she had one question: “Why’s it so cold?”
A running theme in the stand-up acts was misplaced profanity. Many of the comedians felt the need to throw a “f**k” into almost ever sentence, just because. It wasn’t offensive, but a bit desperate.
“Tee” changed the pace of the night with an apathetic, but still charming approach to his comedy. He walked up to center stage, stared out at the crowd and matter-of-factly said: “I really don’t know what I’m doing here, like, I have a paper due tomorrow.”
He just wanted to share what was on his mind.
First topic: zombie apocalypse. He posed a scenario to the crowd: “You’re pregnant. Raise your hand if you live and let the baby die. Raise your hand if you would let the baby live.”
All but one participating student chose to let the baby die.
Tee’s response? “I was a third whell on a lesbian date to an Ingrid Michaelson concert.”
His set was a series of statements, and it worked. He shared that stomach ulcers affect one in three people and there’s a new iPhone game called “Whale Trail.” He played the theme song from his phone, over the mic.
And, to end his set, he “twerked,” on stage, to the beatboxing of a volunteer student named Winston.
As the hour-and-a-half of comedy dragged on, students from the crowd got inspired and signed the performance list. Mostly, it was a mistake.
Mike “fo sho” Pell (as he signed on the set list), one of the last few stragglers to the stage, rattled off a few golden one-liners, like: “Are the cops in the capital city of Idaho called the boise in blue?”
It was a night of hits and misses, but like Farag said, it was a practice stage for bigger things. Each fall, Carolina Productions hosts the open mic night so students try new material on an audience of friends and peers.
In the spring, there’s the Comedy Competition for the cream of the Russell House comedy crop.
“People aren’t expecting an all-star comedian. You get what you pay for,” Farag said.