Barely two years out of college, Aaron Karo had quit his job on Wall Street to pursue drinking, writing and stand-up comedy. At a show in Indiana, he realized that the college students in his audience were high – and they’d smoked up just to see his show.

‘That’s when I realized I made it big,’ Karo said.

As a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Karo wrote a monthly column detailing the foibles and debaucheries of college life. He soon turned the column into a successful book and launched an accompanying college stand-up tour, which hit Syracuse University last night. Student improv group The Zamboni Revolution opened the show, which was sponsored by Hillel, University Union Speakers and two SU sororities.

Much of Karo’s set focused on his roots – he’s Jewish and from Long Island. He joked about the five things everyone from Long Island had in common (from fridges in the garage to late-night races through Penn Station). He parodied jokes about cops and racial profiling, contrasting the police in his upper-class district of New York City to those in South Central L.A.

‘Jew down!’ a cop screamed in Karo’s description of a bar fight. ‘Gentile on the loose!’

He followed his stand-up routine with a choppy segue into the story of his life and his rise to comedic brilliance in college. He spent sleepless Sunday nights writing about the hilarity of his college experience during his four years at Penn, and the column spread from 20 high school friends freshman year to a readership of more than 11,000 at graduation.

He accompanied the tale of his success with excerpts from his book, which he read directly from several pages of computer print-outs. His college antics ranged from sniffing out fellow Jewish Long Islanders on the first day of school to frequenting ‘that bar,’ which everyone hates but goes to anyway.

And though the published version of his book censored most of his vulgarity, Karo’s stand-up routine rapidly degraded into stories about Sunday-morning vomiting and his friends’ (and sometimes his own) sexual exploits. As he warned the audience that things were about to get dirty, he dropped to the stage for a visual gag – demonstrating the difficulty of switching positions during sex.

Even Karo’s sickest humor is hilarious in print, but his delivery and physical comedy often fell flat – he’d do well to take a page from his Zamboni openers before his next live gig. And though a lot of his early jokes hit home with the Long Island natives in the audience, and The New York Post called him the ‘Jewish Chris Rock,’ it’ll be tricky to expand their appeal to a broader audience.

Karo’s got his eye on stardom – he wants to write sitcoms and has been recruited to do an advice column for Seventeen magazine – but he’s yet to translate the comedic genius of his writing into an engaging on-stage performance. Instead, he punctuates his stories with stale jokes about vomit and auto-eroticism.

‘Whoa,’ Karo gasped when his mom almost caught him masturbating during a stay at home. ‘That could have been a mess.’

And like his arousal, Karo’s live comedy is almost there.

Published on December 1, 2003 at 12:00 pm