By Hailey Heinz

By 6:55 p.m. Saturday night, students had already begun to cluster around the front of Blackman Auditorium. By 7:30 p.m. the line was out the door.

The crowd was gathering to see Jay Mohr, the comedian most recently known as the producer and host of “Last Comic Standing.”

Saturday’s performance, sponsored by Kappa Sigma and the Student Government Association (SGA), sold out five days before the event.

The enthusiasm was apparent in the crowd’s energy, and both Mohr and his opener, Bert Kreischer, received a warm welcome and plenty of laughs.

“What’s really great about standup is that the more famous you get, the less you have to work. You don’t have to win them over, because they’re ready,” Mohr said.

This certainly proved to be true for some students.

“I expected it to be hilarious and it was hilarious,” said Joe Schneider, a freshman engineering major.

Although Schneider was unfamiliar with Mohr’s comedy, he watched an episode of “Last Comic Standing” before purchasing his ticket, just to make sure it was worth his while. He decided it was. Kreischer, who tours with Mohr, warmed the crowd up with an act that often hovered on the edge of offensive. Although he got a lot of laughs, there were moments when his racially-charged material was almost uncomfortable.

“I thought he was an asshole,” said Jackie Stanley, a freshman pharmacy major. “Sometimes you can make fun of people and it’s okay, but he just sounded ignorant.”

Mohr also pushed the bounds of appropriate, most notably in a playful exchange with a deaf student in the audience. Both Mohr and Kreischer incorporated the on-stage interpreters into their acts, and at one point, Mohr asked the student how he became deaf, from birth or from an accident. There was an uncomfortable “Oh” from the crowd, and Mohr protested.

“Why ‘Oh’?” he said. “I’m asking him a question like a normal human being.”

Later, Mohr said he frequently questions audience reactions.

“That’s my new thing, why ‘Oh,'” he said.

Schneider said he felt the audience reacted negatively to the deaf banter because it went too far.

“It’s okay to make fun of pretty much anyone for a little while,” he said. “But after awhile, it’s just focusing way too much on it.”

Not all students felt this way. Tanya Lemon, a middler physical therapy major, said she enjoyed the fact that Mohr incorporated the interpreter and the deaf student into the show. “I didn’t think of that as being over the line,” Lemon said.

In fact, Lemon thought Mohr shed a positive light on the presence of an interpreter and the inclusion of deaf students.

Controversial jokes aside, most of the show was met with laughter. Mohr opened the show with a line tailored to his audience. “I was going to do 40 minutes, but since it’s Northeastern, I’ll do 50. Why do in four years what you could do in five?”

Some segments were fairly clean, such as the merits of dogs versus cats, but most dealt with less innocent topics like drugs, alcohol and pornography.

He ended the show with his trademark imitation of Christopher Walken, although he later admitted that he really doesn’t enjoy that bit anymore.

“I don’t want to do Walken all the time, because I’m sick of it. It’s like giving myself a hit,” Mohr said. “But I have to remember that there’s people who have never seen it, and there’s going to be someone out in the parking lot saying, ‘What happened? I thought he did Walken.'”

There were very few disappointed students filing out of Blackman Auditorium, and John Guilfoil, SGA vice president for administration and public relations and a member of Kappa Sigma, deemed the evening a success.

“It seems like this just goes to show how successful student programming can be,” he said, pointing to the popularity of the tickets. “We probably could have sold another 500 of them.”

This is the second year that SGA and Kappa Sigma have hosted a comedian. Last year, they brought Jim Bruer to Blackman. With two years of sold-out shows, scheduling comedic acts will probably continue for years to come, Guilfoil said.

“I’m sure this will be a long-standing tradition,” Guilfoil said.