Audience members were seen doubled over, slapping their knees, wiping away tears and choking for breath last night when University Union presented “A Night of Comedy with Seth Meyers.”

“It is so great to be here at Indiana University…Oh, f*ck,” said Meyers as he was greeted by a roaring crowd Wednesday.

Seth Meyers is a comedian most widely recognized for his parody-style news segment on “Saturday Night Live” called “Weekend Update.” Meyers has also been a head writer for “SNL” for six years.

Meyers yielded an energetic stand-up routine to a sold-out crowd in Goldstein Auditorium in the Schine Student Center.

His agility in transitioning from subject to joke led the audience through an hour and a half of seemingly pure enjoyment. The comedian did everything in his power to make himself relatable — and it worked.

After he figured out who exactly was in the audience — making fun of the freshmen for acting like freshmen by waving their hands and telling the juniors, “You guys are d*cks” — Meyers told the audience about the two years he spent in Amsterdam after graduating from Northwestern University.

To a few hoots and hollers, Meyers said there is always someone in the audience who says, “Oh yeah! I know why!”

Sarcastically, Meyers confessed, “I lived there for two years because weed is legal there.”

Meyers said he stopped smoking so much because eventually, “you wake up talking like Matthew McConaughey.” Meyers impersonated him, saying, “Alright, alright, alright!” in an emulating suave, Southern drawl.

“When you outgrow weed, you outgrow friends who smoke weed,” he said.

Piggy-backing off of his Amsterdam shtick, Meyers told audience members, “When you come back from studying abroad, everybody hates you.”

Mockingly, Meyers impersonated a student who had been abroad: “Oh, it’s really hard for me to drink American beer now.”

The audience’s laughter was a sign of agreement.

Meyers said that these friends want others to know they’re bilingual, and thus “accidentally-on-purpose” slip in a foreign word into casual conversations.

“Buona notte — what? Why would I say that? That’s not English,” Meyers said.

He spoke of studying French in high school and college, yet not being able to say much more than “My name is…” and “How are you?” and of how he sounded “half Dutch, half sassy black woman” when he forced someone out of a cab in Amsterdam.

A topic audience members appeared to really enjoy was the segment in which Meyers described the “one thing that girls don’t to better than guys: take pictures as a group.”

The first problem, he explained, is that “you have to get the same picture with all of their cameras.”

“One day, God-willing, technology will get to the point where we can email our pictures to each other,” Meyers said.

But picture uploads aren’t the only thing Meyers uses his screen for.

As an adult, Meyers believes his technology-deprived childhood helped develop such a strong work ethic in his generation — he said he had to work hard to obtain porn as an adolescent.

“We couldn’t, like, just Google ‘boobs,’” he said.

He explained how his parents caught his 12-year-old cousin with “what can only be described as copious amounts of pornography.”

“The computer stopped working,” he said.

To some, a comedy routine would not be complete without mention of the Catholic church or politics, both of which he touched on, and on the fast-approaching basketball game against Indiana University: “Good luck tomorrow.”

One student sitting in the audience was Richard Cruz, who laughed the entire night. The senior physical education major loved how energetic and relatable Meyers was with a college crowd.

“He reacts with us,” said Cruz. “It was just a good time.”

Cruz feels it is important to bring a prominent comedian such as Meyers to a college campus.

“It just brightens up a whole campus, you know?” said Cruz. “We have so much to do. Right now it’s midterm week and we’re just getting killed — it’s a good time to laugh and have fun.”

Later in the evening, during a quick moment of silence, a female audience member shouted, “Will you marry me?”

Meyers responded, “Has that worked for anyone?”

All laughed.

The performing arts co-director for UU, Billy Ceskavich, said people really seem to enjoy stand-up comedy.

“Overall, his satire is really relatable to college students,” said Ceskavich, a junior information technology and political science major. “As you can see, he’s really good at relating with a young audience.”

Published on March 28, 2013 at 12:25 am

Contact Allie: ajcaren@syr.edu