By Jeanine Budd
BJ Novak, best known as Ryan on NBC’s “The Office,” performed for a full house at Blackman Auditorium last night. With plenty of laughs echoing throughout the hall, Novak and opener Dan Mintz received a standing ovation from the 1,000 in attendance at the end of the night.
The event, which was put on by Kappa Sigma, began around 8 p.m. and finished around 11 p.m. An autograph and photograph session with Novak followed.
“It went very well,” said Shawn Wolfgang, a senior communication studies major and the event coordinator. “Everybody got laughs and it was nice to have a feel-good event like this.”
The opening punchline came in a joke Novak didn’t even come up with himself. Novak said while he was searching around Boston’s Craigslist after his six-hour flight from Los Angeles, he found an ad posted by a 23-year-old male college student looking for a female date to Novak’s show.
Novak asked the couple to identify themselves at the show, and they happened to be sitting up front. When asked to reveal how she won the heart of the young bachelor, the lucky lady replied, “No comment,” giving Novak’s joke more than enough fuel.
While most students had never seen Novak perform stand-up before, his routine seemed to impress them.
“I’m a huge ‘Office’ fan, but I didn’t know what to expect from his stand-up,” said Dave Freeston, a middler music industry major. “I really liked how he opened with the Craigslist joke. It really set the tone for the rest of the night and it was really original.”
Before the show, The News staff was alerted by Novak’s management that no photographs were to be taken after the first five minutes of the performance. Somewhere around the five-minute mark, Novak told the audience that every picture taken of a person also steals a piece of that person’s soul.
“So, you know celebrities like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, they must not have – oh my God,” said Novak before he paused and contemplatively stared out at the laughing audience.
One of the longer jokes of the night was Novak’s “Wikipedia Brown,” where he read from his new children’ s book about Sally, Joey and Wikipedia Brown’s quest to find Joey’s bicycle. It turns into an unsolved mystery, however, when Wikipedia Brown keeps distracting the trio from their original intent with interesting but useless factoids.
“‘Wikipedia Brown’ was my favorite joke of the night,” said Novak’s father, Bill Novak, who watched his son perform live for the first time. “It was great to see him and it was a mind-blowing evening. It’s also great to be able to see people be enthusiastic at the show and afterward and really mean it.”
B.J. Novak, a Newton native, said he was nervous to perform in front of his father.
“I’ve performed very little stand-up in Boston,” he said. “But I knew that my dad likes the one-line jokes. At the end, I could hear him laughing from the stage, which made me wonder why I never heard him before.”
Novak said his “Popeye” joke is his favorite. In the joke, he explained to the audience how Popeye is a genius: he flaunts his muscles and owns a restaurant chain that doesn’t sell spinach, nor anything of the like.
“Popeye wants you to stay weak,” said Novak with a stern eye to the audience.
“It’s a good observation told in a weird way, with unique phrasing,” Novak said about the joke. “I think that combination is what makes it a really good joke.”
Andrew McConnell, a freshman international affairs major, said Novak’s Harvard education shows through in his stand-up.
“His performance was intelligent and witty and subtle, as well as outrageous,” he said.
Novak ended the night with a joke aimed at Northeastern students, who he said are intelligent, but – like many other college students – still enjoy a good dirty joke. He told the audience that in honor of great literary figures like Edgar Allen Poe, “There is no such thing as a romantic period.”
