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Student Entertainment was faced with a classic problem — one of the biggest rising comedians was coming to campus, and there was nowhere to put him.
They stuck him in the gym, and the rest was history.
Aziz Ansari, who stars in the NBC series “Parks and Recreation” and the recent movie “30 Minutes or Less,” was looking to add a show at a Northeast school, so Student Entertainment pounced on the opportunity and brought him to Orono.
The only roadblock was the lack of venue, since the usual facilities that would host this sort of thing were not available. Luckily, the New Balance Student Recreation Center was free and capable of housing an Ansari-sized crowd.
According to Vice President of Student Entertainment Joseph “Pat” Nabozny, the space was capable of holding about 1,200 people.
The stage was set up in front of the glass wall of the floor hockey room, which was covered by curtains. A similar setup was used when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the school during her presidential run in 2008.
After an hour or so of listening to LCD Soundsystem on the speakers, the music faded and “stage manager Bob Zamboni,” who sounded strikingly like Ansari, made a few announcements from backstage, including a request that members of the audience not rush the stage and “whip their d–ks out,” citing a prior incident where it happened.
“Nothing shuts down a Sugar Ray show faster than somebody whippin’ his d–k out,” said “Zamboni.”
Before Ansari took the stage, comedian Joe Mande kicked off the evening with a half-hour set. Some NBA fans may have recognized Mande as the guy who scared Orlando Magic guard Gilbert Arenas away from Twitter after arguing with him using the service.
Mande had a funny set that warmed the crowd up, talking about “foodies,” the first humans to drink milk from a cow and getting robbed in Dominos while he was high.
Shortly after Mande was done, Ansari emerged from behind a curtain smartly dressed in a classy suit, possessing much of the fashion savvy of his “Parks and Recreation” character, Tom Haverford.
Before the jokes, Ansari made a semi-formal-sounding announcement that he does not like being photographed. Knowing the audience would take pictures regardless of what he told them, he allowed them to take pictures of him for about a minute, during which he struck various poses suggesting he was in mid-joke.
Most of Ansari’s material dealt with relationships and byproducts of them, which is a mine forever harvested by just about every comic to ever step on stage. Still, Ansari was able to make it his own with hilarious material.
Ansari griped about how parents often want him to hold their baby, a practice he doesn’t understand. He said despite his best efforts to be careful, he would likely drop the kid, much like he does his iPhone.
According to Ansari, the difference between dropping a baby and his phone is that he isn’t “going to drop a baby and lose all my contacts.”
Ansari also talked about his dislike of the MTV show, “My Super Sweet 16,” or at least the girls on it.
“Could someone impregnate that girl and ruin her life, please?” Ansari said. He went on to say if that did happen, they could then appear on the show “16 and Pregnant.”
It seems that Ansari spends a good deal of time thinking about things that don’t typically cross the average person’s mind, questioning the mundane and exploring traditional human practices.
About babysitting, he said while most parents will trust a stranger with their child for two hours, there is not way they’d do the same with a sandwich. He then concluded a sandwich must be better than a baby.
He also dissected the institution of marriage, saying that if it didn’t already exist, somebody who tried to institute the demands that come with it would be considered strange.
“I want to hang out with you until one of us dies. Put this ring on your finger so people know we have an arrangement,” Ansari said.
He used marriage to transition into his bits about online dating and meeting girls, saying there are things people do online that would not be permissible in the real world, like directly requesting “intimate encounters” from strangers.
Ansari dissected stereotypes, but not ones set by society so much as ones he has come up with himself. He said guys wearing backwards baseball hats and button-up shirts as well as girls who loudly yell “woo” are equivalently bad people. He then presented what he views as one of the most under-recognized stereotypes that is blatantly clear to him.
“Black dudes are blown away by magic tricks,” he said.
Ansari told the story about the time he was in the same restaurant as rapper 50 Cent and heard him say “one of the greatest things 50 Cent could say.” Upon getting a glass of grapefruit soda from the waiter, he asked, “Why isn’t this purple?”
“That’s when I realized 50 Cent didn’t know what a grapefruit was!” Ansari said.
To close out the evening, Ansari told another tale about his cousin Harris, the subject of his most famous bit. Harris had asked Ansari to proofread his college essay, which was so ridiculous, Ansari had a copy of it with him and read it aloud.
The essay was titled “All The Small Things,” and in it, he talked about his thumbs, how volunteering at a hospital “sucked,” gauging how busy a hospital is by how quickly and often nurses give him cookies, and how he “couldn’t text movie times or order cheese biscuits at Red Lobster” if he didn’t know how to read.
Despite a UMaine hockey game taking place on campus on the same night, Ansari fans filled the New Balance Student Recreation Center. The queue outside the building before the show was a testament to how highly anticipated the show was.
The laughter echoing through the gym proved all anticipation was just.
Bangor Daily News