Western Courier

Issue date: 4/30/08 Section: The Edge

Media Credit: Greg Rolf

The University Union Board treated students to three Chicago-based comedians on April 25 during a late-night show in the Murray Street Café.

The evening began with Ryan Budds, a young stand-up comedian and Western Illinois University senior. Commenting that 75 percent of the sparse audience was his friends, Budds proceeded into material much of the crowd could relate to. With humor making fun of guys in the gym, strip clubs and the late-night bar scene, Budds drew a solid response from a crowd that was familiar with him.

The biggest drawback of the friendly audience was a gathering of obnoxious students who seemed to think they were chatting with a friend instead of attending a show where not everyone knew who Budds was.

"It seems some of you have seen my show before," Budds commented when a girl finished his punch line for him.

Although charismatic and confident on stage, it was clear Budds is not a seasoned comic writer. The majority of his material was somewhat cliché, and seemed to come from the Dave Chappelle school of comedy, where ending a joke with "bitch" is used in lieu of a more creative punch line.

Budds' biggest selling point of the night was his easily relatable comedy. Dropping local bar names and material about the awkwardness of buying lube along with any other product kept the crowd focused and laughing.

The second comic of the night, Jay Harris, acted as somewhat of a foil to Budds. Youth was replaced with an older man who joked that he loved coming to places like Macomb because he is "trying really hard not to get discovered."

Harris told a variety of jokes, with his drug humor perhaps eliciting the largest response from the audience. As a middle-aged financial manager, his humor about coming to work high seemed curiously relatable to the Western audience.

Harris' performance style seemed to be a mixture of non sequitur lines he would expand on once the audience found one of them funny. Although some of his set was not the most polished, he was able to finish strong with musings about the ability to play porn on an iPod.

"Who works out to the sounds of porn?" Harris pondered, eliciting a powerful crowd response.

Rounding out the evening was the more intellectual humor of Dave Odd. Seemingly the most seasoned performer of the trio, he began his set with a reference to Michael Jackson's "Bad" - "an album which came out two years before any of you were born," Odd quipped.

Continued...

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