On Nov. 7, 2024, Comedian Trevor Wallace performed a stand-up comedy show put on by the University of Maine student government. Wallace, who has been popular since the days of Vine, put on a raunchy show that engaged with the audience, occasionally derailing completely as a result of the overwhelming engagement. Wallace played most of it off gracefully, often firing back at audience members. The worst on the receiving end of it were members of Alpha Tau Omega as Wallace added digs at them into his set after they interrupted him. This landed incredibly well with the audience and is definitely his strength.
“The show was great! Trevor was hilarious,” said audience member Carter Hickey.
On the flip side, Wallace often would claim the audience was too “tense.” As a stand-up comedian, you are expected to make a crowd less tense. Typically the opener for late-night shows are stand ups for this purpose. It would often kill what was otherwise a great joke from him when he’d stop and say that the crowd was tense, which detracted from the momentum he had with jokes, shying away from following through on bits. Clearly, the audience was eager for his jokes too with how often they would interrupt him. At times, he wouldn’t wait for his jokes to land which ultimately made his act less effective.
Wallace clearly did not put effort into researching his audience despite this being his first show at the University. This did, however, unintentionally help him at several points in the show as he would get huge crowd pops when he talked about Subarus and asked if weed was legal. With all of his shortcomings, he knew how to cleverly react to the audience with quick quips. The show was incredibly raunchy, with a few edgier jokes revolving around drugs or drunk driving, which I will say was definitely a fine line he was walking. Often making himself the butt of the jokes he was telling made a great example of how to do dark humor. There were some moments in the show I did feel uncomfortable with, but he did it the way comedy is supposed to be done, by creating humor out of these risky subjects. But at the same time, this is when he would get the most nervous so sometimes he wouldn’t let them sit and would just blame the audience for being tense.
Wallace also didn’t receive favorable audience reactions from a few jokes, the most obvious one being when he made an offhand remark about him joining a sorority and poked fun at Maine for being transgender inclusive. This was just off putting in his relatively safer, self-deprecating style. The comments felt as if they weren’t even from the set. Since he moved on so quickly to get back on track, you can assume this was the case. If he hadn’t moved on so fast, I definitely would have left right then and there.
This was probably where his nervousness came from because he was definitely more nervous the rest of the show. Rightfully so, because he bombed with that joke in particular. You can tell he isn’t trying to be offensive in his comedy, often making himself the absurd one, but he most certainly had missed the mark. You could tell this too because of his story about a hard-of-hearing Uber driver, where he perfectly told the joke. However, he definitely was super nervous from the poor comment earlier, which didn’t ruin the show but killed some of the zing from it.
Overall, Wallace’s set definitely had more highlights than lowlights, which is definitely due to him being flexible with the crowd. He was a good comedian that the audience was 100% enjoying for most of the show despite his few bad jokes. It for sure helped him be honest with the crowd and not try to be super cool, but just a normal guy, despite him calling himself a “beta male”.
