last night's gig

A Hump-Day Dose of Michael Ian Black

Michael Ian Black, indie superstar.Photo: Getty Images

Stella vet and frequent VH1 talking head Michael Ian Black is in town preparing to record his first comedy album, and he stopped by the UCB Theater last night to test out some material. He started off strong: “Look at you guys. What a young, attractive … overwhelmingly white audience you are! It’s wonderful to finally see white people doing stuff together.”

From that point on, Black got a riotous reception from the packed-in crowd, as he went about deftly singling out every audience member who so much as twitched wrong. There was the girl who got up to grab a beer (“I’m glad she’s gone. I was cool with it, but I could see she was bumming you guys out. Total bitch.”), the ugly guy (“aaaa … I’m just saying it because he’s not attractive, that’s all I meant.”) and the girl who left New Orleans the day before Katrina (“I bet you were in the World Trade Center on September 10, too. I read about you online.”). And that was just the beginning.

“As an American, your odds of getting killed by a terrorist are the same odds as getting hit by a meteor. I had no idea my odds of getting killed by a meteor were so high! That almost makes it seem likely.”

“The upside to terrorism is this: When I used to be waiting in the airport, I would be bored out of my mind. Now I play a game. The game is called ‘Guess the terrorist.’ I see some of you have played this game too. Gotta be honest though, I always pick the Pakistani guy. I’m that kind of guy. I root for the Yankees, and I always pick the Pakistani guy to be the terrorist.”

“So I went and did my act (at the New Orleans House of Blues) and the crowd there was terrible. They were really drunk and rowdy and shouting things and afterwards a girl came up to me, ‘I’m sorry, I hope you don’t hate Nawlins.’ And I said, ‘No, nobody could hate New Orleans … Except God.’”

“I hated getting on the school bus, which I had to take through my senior year in 1988. So you know what? I didn’t fucking love the eighties. For me they were a disaster.”

“I heard a statistic that 25 percent of all girls have one homosexual experience when they’re in college and that’s not true for guys. It’s 85 percent of guys … Girls, you know how horny we are all the time. You also know that most of the time, you won’t have sex with us. Who do you think we’re having sex with when you say no? Each other.”
—Michael Gsovski

A Hump-Day Dose of Michael Ian Black