SUBOG hosts Ryan Hamilton in the Student Union on Nov. 13, 2017. He recently came out with a Netflix special called “Happy Face”. (Charlotte Lao/The Daily Campus)
Last night SUBOG hosted Ryan Hamilton in the Student Union. Hamilton is a rising comedian who recently came out with a Netflix special called “Happy Face.” He kept the audience laughing for the entire hour and a half through a performance of several hilarious, relatable jokes.
Hamilton addressed the audience very casually, often in the manner of someone having a regular conversation. At one point in the night, he paused and told the audience he could hear them perfectly. To prove his point, he stepped away from the microphone stand and continued talking in a completely normal voice. He laughed at the way they all fell silent, saying “this is terrible,” before swinging back over to his mic and exclaiming, “and this is a show!”
Hamilton told the audience about his ordeal over quitting the gym. He called the gym in a desperate attempt to quit, but to no avail. The employee informed him that he could not quit over the phone, but that there were two other ways that he could quit. The first was to go there in person and have a meeting with a member of the staff. The second option was to send a letter detailing why he wanted to quit. Furious, Hamilton went to the nearest CVS and bought a package of 50 envelopes, figuring that the other 49 would be for future generations to quit their gyms with. To get to this CVS, he incidentally walked passed his gym.
He looked the audience dead on, and stated, “If someone makes you write a letter in this modern age, they’re bullying you.”
Oddly enough, a large percent of his jokes were about hot air balloons, or as he calls them, “a tiny wicker basket in the sky attached to a flame thrower.”
His hot air balloon jokes are actually so extensive that he was approached by an angry pair of hot air balloonists at a show once. He said that his first thought when this happened was that he was finally one of those edgy comedians pushing boundaries and talking about subjects that no one else would.
Throughout the show, Hamilton allowed his act to be influenced by the audience. When a trio of girls moved seats towards the beginning, he asked them why they felt the need to move. One of them claimed that the people in front of them had “weird laughs.” Hamilton stepped back, joking that he felt as if he were “running negotiations between two Middle Eastern countries.”
Third-semester business student Michael Crudele later said, “One female student’s vocal disdain for another student’s laugh was the funniest part of the show.”
Hamilton also accepted a copy of the Daily Campus from an audience member and went page by page analyzing the headers. The audience couldn’t stop laughing as he turned every article into a hilarious bit.
One of his most well-received jokes was the story about the time he went to Disney World alone. He had been there for a show and afterwards had gone around pretending that he had lost his group. When he tried to go on a roller coaster, the worker forced him to declare that he was alone, and then placed him in a large car by himself. He joked that they didn’t want his sad state to taint the other rider’s time. Afterwards, they tried to charge him the usual exorbitant price for the picture of him riding alone, with six strangers having the time of their lives in the car ahead of him.
First semester elementary education and English major, Sanya Kayfus, said that the funniest part of the show was “his facial expressions and talking about being alone.” She turned to one of her friends, and declared that her “face hurt” from laughing so hard.
The way all his jokes came across as universal left the audience in stitches, as they all found themselves in his shoes — in whatever weird situation those shoes had ended up in.
Rebecca Maher is a campus correspondent for The Daily Campus. She can be reached via email at rebecca.maher@uconn.edu.