"He's actually here!" shouted a female voice as Comedy Central's Dave Attell ran up one of the crowded aisles in Cohen Auditorium. Wearing an olive green sweater and khaki pants, Attell - who proclaimed himself both "short" and "bald" - was set to begin.
He was among two other comedians who performed to a packed-in Cohen crowd Thursday night as part of Entertainment Board's annual Fall Comedy Show. Despite heightened sensitivity created be on-campus political correctness, the show's expectedly raunchy humor continuously floored the crowd.
Local comics Robbie Printz and John Turco opened the show. Within seconds of setting foot onstage, Printz had the crowd roaring. Tall, lanky, and wearing a red baseball cap, Printz made use of his gangly appearance to turbocharge the laughs he elicited from the audience. Among his chosen topics were Internet pornography, traffic, and religion. The crowd appreciated his musings on heaven, hell, and purgatory, as well as his loud, lively impersonations of a sinister Hitler and a furious Mother Theresa. "There should be a separate hell," he eventually concluded, "where it's not hot, it's just really humid."
Turco followed Printz with a slightly lower-key set, pacing slowly around the stage and delivering sarcastic musings. He announced that he had attended the University of Georgia, "where all you need to get in is a number two pencil." His jokes about Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and Survivor seemed stale, but his ability to work with the crowd kept his set from capsizing.
After commenting on Tufts' tuition, Turco asked if students had cable in their dorm rooms. When one shouted out that it cost $300 extra, Turco responded, "Three hundred extra? They're porkin' you guys!"
After Turco's set, Printz returned to deliver a few more high-energy jokes and introduce the man everyone had come to see, Dave Attell. Attell calmly strolled across the stage, clutching a bottle of Poland Spring in one hand and a wireless microphone in the other. As soon as the applause abated, Attell launched into a raunchy set that delved into subjects from pornography to pubic hair, masturbation to midgets. Though it was perhaps not the broadest possible range of subjects, but the audience didn't seem to mind.
Although he was probably oblivious to recent spats between Tufts and Harvard, Attell mocked the Ivy's admissions policy - "Do you think you're better than everyone else, or your dad was?" - in the opening minutes of his set.
Throughout the show, he interacted with a pair of inebriated female students in the back row of the auditorium, a pair he discovered when he announced he was "looking for drinkers." Though many students were annoyed by the pair's never-ending, high-pitched commentary, Attell used their presence as material for his set.
"That's the worst thing about college," he said, pointing in the duo's direction. "You leave broke and fat."
Both males and females in the crowd laughed heartily, hunching over in their seats. They seemed to understand Attell's sexism to be a deliberate facet of his stand-up style. Indeed, perhaps Attell's raunchiness provided his audience the means to lighten up in the midst of Tufts' increasingly intense culture of protests and political correctness.
The only material that seemed to truly offend the audience was Attell's talk of midgets. "I have a friend who knows karate. He knows how to fight 20 guys at once, 20 guys at once!" he proclaimed. "Do you know how many that is in midgets? All of them!" Smiles dropped from some people's faces as Attell segued into his discussion by mocking his own alleged "midget friend" and discussing the unlikely possibility of one day having midget meteorologists.
But the then-absent smiles returned when Attell returned to more straightforward stand-up subjects.
"I travel a lot, I hate traveling, because my dad used to beat me with a globe," he joked.
With the current season in mind, he attempted to explain the mystery of the creation of eggnog: "I want to get a little drunk, but I also want pancakes." He admitted to shaving his pubic hair after a "horrible gum accident." And he continued to work with members of the audience, both male and female, throughout his set.
Even if some attendees were put off by Attell's jokes - always a risk at a stand-up show - the Cohen crowd appeared to leave a satisfied bunch. Afterward, Attell descended from the stage to spend time with his fans, chatting and signing countless autographs. His accessibility and trademark humor made for a memorable evening of laughter.
