When reminiscing about their experiences in college to friends
and family, many men are not averse to exaggerating their
accomplishments, and it seems as though everyone was the “Big
Man On Campus” during his collegiate career.
Comedian Mike Birbiglia, however, is one of the few to openly
refute this common claim.
“In college, I wasn’t the guy who could hook people
up with drugs or fake IDs, but I always had a friend who had a
friend who had a friend who could,” he said. “I
wasn’t entirely the underdog, but I wasn’t the
“˜Big Man On Campus’ either. So, I thought, “˜Does
that make me the “Medium Man On
Campus?”'”
Birbiglia will be performing at UCLA on Sunday night as part of
his aptly named Medium Man On Campus comedy tour, presented by
Comedy Central. The show begins at 8 p.m. in Ackerman Grand
Ballroom, and admission is free to all members of the UCLA
community, courtesy of the Campus Events Commission.
The tour has been visiting colleges around the country since
mid-February. Birbiglia wanted to perform for college students, who
are some of the biggest fans of comedy but by-and-large cannot
visit comedy clubs because many students are under 21 years old.
Comedy Central, which had been talking to Birbiglia about projects
at the time, was receptive to the idea and the Medium Man On Campus
tour was born.
“One of the things I’ve been able to do (on this
tour) is relate stories about my own college experience,”
said Birbiglia, who graduated from Georgetown University just four
years ago. “Since the majority of Americans didn’t
actually go to college, my material about things like my first
roommate and my first college girlfriend sometimes ends up being
lost on people.”
Beyond talking about his everyman experiences in college,
Birbiglia’s act deals with other topics to which college
students can relate. Birbiglia isn’t hesitant to bringing up
issues such as awkwardness in everyday situations, his white-bread
upbringing as a “cracker” and his opinions on President
Bush.
College campuses, which tend to be more liberal than other
venues, are prime places for Birbiglia to make analogies about the
president, one of which compares him to the hypothetical guy in the
neighborhood who gets invited to every barbecue because he’s
fun and always starts a game of whiffle ball. But when the
neighborhood decides to put this guy, whom Birbiglia calls
“Whiffle Ball Tony,” in charge of all neighborhood
affairs, he starts throwing hamburgers at helpless neighbors who
don’t even have any hamburgers to throw back.
“People in some parts of the country take it personally
when I talk about the president, saying things like, “˜He
could be here, you know,'” Birbiglia said. “Of
course, they assume that he’ll get the jokes and analogies
I’m making, but he won’t. And that’s why
we’re all going to die.”
Birbiglia’s act also talks about the awkwardness with
which not just college students, but much of the adult population
at large, deal on an everyday basis. Birbiglia said he not only has
a habit of getting himself involved in situations that would make
almost anyone uneasy, but he also has a knack for unintentionally
making these situations even more awkward.
One such moment, he recalled, occurred when he was moving into a
new apartment and trying to get a bed inside. A woman down the hall
opened one of the doors for him and remarked that she wasn’t
worried about him moving in because, in her words, “A rapist
wouldn’t buy a bed like (yours).” His response:
“You’d be surprised.”
“You really can’t follow something like that
up,” he said.
Ravi Dehar, a third-year English student and director of the
speakers series for the Campus Events Commission, hopes that the
Medium Man On Campus tour will be the first of many comedy shows
that the commission will bring to UCLA’s campus.
“It seems like in the past there hasn’t been any
student group that programs comedy, which is a big part of other
universities but tends to be shied away from at UCLA because we are
so close to some of the biggest comedy clubs,” Dehar said.
“Since we are so close, however, we should try to exploit the
fact that we live in Los Angeles, the city of entertainment, both
this year and in the future.”
For Birbiglia, being able to perform live comedy is the
culmination of one of his childhood dreams (the others being a
rapping career and owning a pizza parlor where third graders could
hang out).
More than his own personal dream, however, Birbiglia feels that
in light of sensitivity about the recent wave of FCC policing of
airwaves, live comedy has become even more special.
“That’s what is great about stand-up ““
you’re just a person on stage talking to a group of people,
and nothing is off-limits, which is one of the reasons why I do
it,” he said. “Live stand-up comedy is the last truly
unrestricted art form.”