2008 Woodie Awards
Comedian entertains students with jokes about students
By Andrew Carranza
Issue date: 10/7/05 Section: Life
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"I loved the crowd tonight," Adhoot said after the show. "Sometimes the audience and comic have chemistry and we were jiving tonight."
Adhoot, who wrote for Comedy Central's "Crank Yankers" and was a finalist on the second season of NBC's "Last Comic Standing," utilized the SRU audience itself to generate many of the laughs during the night.
First, he picked on a student in the front row who was taking pictures of him with his camera phone. When the student gave a shout-out to Founders Hall, Adhoot was confused.
"Wait, did you just say 'Flounder'?" Adhoot replied, amid laughter. "Are you giving a shout-out to fish?"
When the student explained he was talking about his dorm hall, Adhoot replied, "Oh, giving props to your dorm, huh? Yeah, that's almost cool."
Adhoot also picked on several freshmen in attendance, asking them if they had "hooked up" yet in their first month or so of school.
"Hey man, have you hooked up yet?" Adhoot asked a nervous freshman.
"Maybe," the young man replied.
"I'll take that as a 'no' then," Adhoot retorted, generating another round of laughs.
Students were not the only target of Adhoot, however, as he also poked fun at the town of Slippery Rock.
"You guys must smoke a lot of weed," Adhoot said. "I mean, we are in the middle of nowhere! What am I doing here?!"
Besides audience participation, Adhoot also tested out some new material, including a bit about the benefits of being a gay Iranian Jew.
"That joke has potential," he said. "It's a little risqué and needs some fine-tuning, but I think it's good."
Shayne Mitchell, an exchange student from Australia majoring in psychology, attended the show and enjoyed it thoroughly.
"It was awesome," Mitchell said. "He played with the crowd and got everyone involved. It was a lot better than what we get back home."
Mitchell also became part of the act when Adhoot asked the crowd if there was anyone from outside of the country.
"I even got involved because I'm an international kid," Mitchell said. "This was my first SRU event that I've attended but I'm going to start going to more now."
Towards the end of the show, in true "Crank Yanker" fashion, Adhoot brought several students up to the stage to make prank phone calls to their parents.
Aly Herk was the second student to be brought onstage, and Adhoot called her mother pretending to be a geography professor at SRU. He held up the microphone to his cell phone so the audience could hear both sides of the conversation.
"Your daughter is a great student and everything is fine," Adhoot told her mom. "But we have a policy at the university that if we want to date one of the students we have to get parental approval first."
Mike Savelli was the next person to go onstage and Adhoot called his mother pretending to be campus security.
"Your son and several others streaked naked on campus," Adhoot said. "He was very drunk and threw a beer bottle at me and he hit me in the head."
Savelli's mother could not believe her ears and asked to speak to her son.
"I'm so disappointed," she said angrily over the phone. "This is nonsense that happened!"
"I'm drunk," Savelli nonchalantly replied.
Adhoot got back on the other line and ended the conversation with a quick one-liner.
"I do have some good news though," Adhoot said. "I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance!"
The crowd burst into laughter and gave Adhoot a standing ovation.
Adhoot, who has being doing comedy for about five years, said he really enjoyed his experience at SRU.
"The University Programming Board (UPB) was very cool," Adhoot said. "They don't censor the artists like some places I've been to. They are very good about artistic integrity."
Adhoot also related the worst experience he has had as a comic.
"One time I did this all black room in Harlem and I lasted about 15 seconds," Adhoot said. "I got booed off stage and didn't even know it was happening. Then the DJ started playing music and I just walked off stage."
