Scores of people flooded West Hall on a particularly cold Friday night to see Comedy Central’s Ed Helms give his two cents on the RPI handbook, his childhood, and the 2004 presidential campaign. While at times only getting obligatory chuckles from a glad-to-be-indoors audience, it was an enjoyable performance overall.
The show opened with the “raffling” of the front row seats of the West Hall auditorium by a Diversity Week staffer. After attempting to wring answers from the audience to questions about Ed Helms’ life, he finally gave away the seats to the first handful of people to wave their driver’s licenses in the air.
After Helms took the stage, his routine started off with the usual RPI nerd jokes, and of course, making fun of the male/female ratio; “That sounded like a distinctly 75 percent male yell,” he said at one point. While on that subject, he pulled out the RPI student handbook and started reading excerpts. “Let me say, before I get into the handbook,” he jested, “that heavy drinking – is awesome. If you engage frequently in heavy drinking, your life will change for the better.” He also credited RPI with being the only school he knew, that has specific provisions on strippers, and made jokes about the section on “electronic citizenship.”
He then delved into the humorous, albeit painful, portions of his childhood, noting how his brother derived pleasure from his continual agony, and an embarrassing episode involving his aspirations to become a professional baton twirler. Recalling that incident, he quoted his father as saying, “Son, you have a natural gift as a baton twirler. If you ever do that again, I’ll beat you.” He also pointed to that event as his inspiration for stand up comedy.
As a correspondent for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Helms naturally made some cracks at politics, pointing to the presidential debates and Howard Dean’s failed candidacy. He also took questions from the audience, stating that he usually gets asked questions concerning his sexual orientation (later professing to be “straight”). He was asked why he was there, to which Helms replied, simply, “cash.” When asked by an audience member for one of the breath mints that had been supplied to Helms, he threw the bowl of mints into the crowd.
The show closed with a venture into the world of Yanni, where he asked the sound crew to play a CD by the Greek artist, and offered narration. He then described a Yanni fantasy, where he was on the hood of a white Camaro, and Yanni was driving, taking the audience off a cliff, only to be saved by two flying Pegasii.
Overall, it was a well-received performance, though at times Helms appeared rusty with his standup routine. Surprisingly, he did not use very much (if any at all) material from The Daily Show, which might have bolstered the performance. It was still nice, however, to get a chance to chuckle after a grueling first week of classes.
