Madeline Kuhns is a journalism senior and Mustang News opinion columnist. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
Hundreds of students excitedly waited outside of the Performing Arts Center for their face-to-face experience with Sal Vulcano, the stand-up comedian most well-known for his work on Impractical Jokers, podcasts and improv shows. Whether students were bandwagoning off their friends or were actually aware of the comedian’s stardom was unclear.
Vulcano was pitted against a tough crowd: hundreds of students who only knew him as an Impractical Joker or simply a meme. To be completely honest, standing in line, I realized I was one of those people, too. But with an hour of time to fill, Vulcano would have to quickly show he could do more than wear bright red lipstick and trip over a pizza.
I was starstruck at the thought of seeing someone I had grown up watching on television and YouTube. Halfway through the performance, I remembered how many times I had watched a late-night episode of Impractical Jokers with my friends. I wondered if some of the laughter was simply contagious, or if Vulcano actually had the audience going.
Vulcano came out strong with impromptu reactions and jokes based on his “fat head” meme, which was littered across the audience. Students waved posters and t-shirts with a bad photograph of the comedian that had recently gone viral without explanation.
Vulcano’s address of the crowd’s obsession with the photo had me rolling in my seat. “Why do you worship my fat head?” Vulcano asked repeatedly. Most audience answers fit well with my own explanation: I’m not really sure why it’s so funny, it just is.
Someone in the audience yelled back, “It gives the ugly guys hope,” to which Vulcano responded, “That photo makes ugly guys look like Brad Pitt.” Vulcano certainly could have been sour about his face as a meme, but he rolled with it. The way he wasn’t ashamed to laugh at himself stood out to me.
The first few minutes of Vulcano’s set turned into a Q-and-A with the audience. Asking the audience about their majors turned into long-winded first-year complaints. Within a few minutes, he was calling on students to hear their dining hall and dorm horror stories without needing to add much of his own commentary.
Summed up smartly by Vulcano, “It’s town hall in here now.”
A bit of friendly trolling on some of Cal Poly’s non-traditional majors, such as wine and viticulture and media innovation, went on a bit too long, but I can understand his confusion from an outside perspective. While some of the college of agriculture’s majors aren’t necessarily the most well-known, “brewer” and “grower” aren’t actual majors as Vulcano thought.
One of my favorite things about Vulcano’s performance is the way that he fed into the audience. After many students expressed their horrific experiences living in the Redbricks dorms, he began comparing the situation to the streets. “So Redbricks are gangsta,” he described my first-year dorms in a way I hadn’t considered before, but totally agreed with.
While Vulcano’s opener struggled getting the college crowd on his crude jokes, Vulcano handled them well. A set about Vulcano’s experience with different nurses’ language in the delivery room pushed the boundaries. I will note that hearing Vulcano say “p—y lips” was a bit uncomfortable, but to his defense, hearing a nurse talk about my newborn son’s b—s so casually would get a reaction out of me, too.
The set was well-timed with the audience’s attention span and focus issues, which Vulcano expressed dealing with himself. I found his ADHD bit the most relatable, where he went over the phrases that loop through his brain on the regular. One of these was a line out of a Notorious B.I.G. song. “These are the things I think of,” he repeated.
His ending bit, which was both heartfelt and hilarious, described Vulcano’s irrational fears of being murdered at home without his wife as his “false sense of security.” He captured the feeling that a lot of us feel in late-night wonderings, like “what would I do if an intruder came in?”
The first option for protection was ordering a machete from Amazon, which I found very fitting of Vulcano’s character. Hearing the reasoning behind choosing a scary-looking weapon over something more useful only made the joke funnier. The next best option, according to Sal’s wife, was a boomerang.
The celebrity-factor may have been a large factor for the one-minute sellout, but Vulcano got the audience rowdy and giggling. Any comedian that ASI hires next will have to be up to date on the newest trends and specific humor of Cal Poly students. A flaming of President Armstrong or a kick to our obsession with St. Patrick’s day would receive more chuckling.