No one can say Michael Ian Black isn’t a ‘people person.’ Unfortunately, the people he had to deal with last night were college students.

Black, best known for his commentary on VH1’s ‘I love the (Insert Decade)’ and ‘Best Week Ever,’ as well as the cult film ‘Wet Hot American Summer,’ performed for an hour and a half to a crowd of about 1,100 in the Schine Student Center.

Instead of approaching the night in a typical comedic fashion of joke followed by joke, Black used everything available to him to make people laugh. He did physical comedy with things he found on the stage. He singled out audience members to either talk with or sexually harass, and most of all, he mocked himself.

‘I am not a joke teller … I am not that guy,’ Black said. ‘I’m the guy who talks about The Rubik’s Cube on VH1.’

The night started extremely low-key. There wasn’t an opening act; there wasn’t even any music before it began. The lights went out and Black walked on stage, wearing a blue shirt/orange sweatshirt combination (for both school pride and because it was ‘laundry day’) and sporting a new ‘Natalie Portman in ‘V for Vendetta” shaved haircut. But he immediately broke the crowd’s awkward tension with a slew of amusing, but horribly offensive, race and sex jokes.

‘Nazis sounds like nachos and rhymes with Yahtzee,’ Black said when talking about groups with the worst PR and how to fix it. ‘You find a way to combine (those two), I don’t care what your politics are, I’m in.’

There was a certain irony as he spoke about the Nazi Party, since the event was sponsored by The Winnick Hillel Center, as well as University Union. It was clear by the crowd’s reaction that, although a little racy, it was still just comedy.

‘We’re all college students … that’s our world,’ said Jessica Martin, a freshman public relations major. ‘We swear; we deal with race issues; we deal with sexuality. So I thought it was really good.’

Black’s idea to talk about anti-PC topics in order to get a rise out of students was a brilliant move, and the crowd was very loose for the rest of the night. At one point near the beginning of the show, Black commented about the fact you could get away with anything as long as you followed the statement with a cheer.

‘You add ‘yay!’ to anything and it goes from being offensive to kind of cute,’ Black said. ‘Dead puppies, yay! Adult onset type two diabetes, yay!’

The whole night was based around the sometimes amusing, often awkward stories Black told. The problem was he couldn’t concentrate long enough to tell the whole thing. Anything would distract him. An audience member would scream out, whether it was a coherent sentence or just a ‘Woo!’ at the mention of a place or occupation, and Black would run with it. One of the show’s running gag’s was Black whispering (in the microphone) to different shouting girls that he ‘was staying at the Sheraton.’

Still, when he did tell stories, they always provoked a laugh. Black detailed everything from watching the dance moves of Black Crow’s singer Chris Robinson, to his own kids and even his troubles with a restaurant called Taco Palace, which did not come close to his expectations of a royal Mexican experience.

‘If you call yourself a Taco Palace, then you should mean what you say and say what you mean,’ Black said. ‘That’s why I like Pizza Hut.’

Many, it seemed, did not enjoy his sporadic comedic styling. Some in the audience looked bored or frustrated with Black’s constant interruptions and free-flowing attitude.

‘I didn’t think it was funny,’ said Carlos Rosales, a freshman environmental biology major at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. ‘He didn’t have much material, he just talked about anything. He tried too hard (and) didn’t come prepared.’

Black did at least have the college atmosphere in mind when playing Syracuse. He knew names of college dorms as well as Otto’s name, which he mocked insensitively after learning it was just The Orange instead of The Orangemen. Black also had a lot to say about his favorite collegial pastime: co-eds.

‘I love that college girls are at an experimental time in their life when they’re, um, what’s the word? Easy,’ Black said

There was a little explanation dealing with his time on VH1, but only to admit to his own humiliation with negative fan feedback. Black talked about how he would check message boards to see what people would say, and became depressed when seeing comments like, ‘MIB is an idiot,’ or ‘Gay’ (with or without the question mark). He countered this by doing the only thing he could do to boost his sprit: work on his MySpace profile.

‘MySpace is the perfect American invention, because we finally found a way to make friendship into a competitive sport,’ Black said.

When Black finished his material, there was still some time left, so he took questions from the audience. Without a microphone, it was often amazing watching students trying to make their questions heard with Black mocking them. Some of the questions, such as those asking about Black’s favorite comedian and current Halloween costume, were good-natured and were answered with a certain amount of truth and sarcasm. Others though, like asking about his underwear choice and what he would bring with him on a dessert island, were not taken so well.

‘What is the average SAT score to get into Syracuse?’ Black said in shock after being asked when the last time he ‘pooped (his) pants?’

‘He was a lot more edgy than I thought he was going to be,’ said Ben Lidman, a sophomore business major. ‘I thought the questions were kind of strange, but hilarious. But he handled them really well.’

Whatever was thought of Black’s performance, one thing was clear, with all the excessive cheering throughout the night, it was impossible not to find him ‘kind of cute.’

Published on October 30, 2006 at 12:00 pm