Ashamed and embarrassed, I slouch further down in my seat, praying and hoping that this was all just a bad dream and that I would wake up soon. But, alas it was no dream. It was just the realization that Northeastern sucks.

This was supposed to be one of the university’s major events of the year. Darryl Hammond from Saturday Night Live, headlining the annual Winter Weekend in front of a thousand plus students in a packed Blackman Auditorium. This was supposed to make Kevin Spacey’s appearance last month look like a kindergarten dance recital. But this year, that was hardly the case.

I would say there were about 200 students there at most. Now I’m no math major, but the tell tale sign was when they curtained off the rest of the auditorium starting in the eighth row. OK, whatever, it would be a quaint, intimate show. No complaints here.

But as the show worn on, I realized why no one came: Darryl Hammond sucks. Sure he might be funny on SNL but when it comes to stand-up comedy I’d rather watch Margaret Cho.

To add insult to injury, he looked like he was either drunk or was on something, or as he put it, “I think I had a little too much Sudafed.” That’s great. So here we have a drunken Darryl Hammond, dressed in all black with his hair slicked back looking like Hannibal Lechter, performing in front of 200 students. Then as if things couldn’t get any worse, he slips up and calls us Northwestern instead of Northeastern. It’s bad enough that we go to Northeastern instead of Northwestern, but now we have a washed up, middle of the road comedian reminding us of how pathetic we are.

As restless students started shifting in their seats, wondering what they did to deserve this torture, Darryl turns to his bread and butter: impersonations. I felt like standing up and screaming, “How about you impersonate a good comedian.”

All in all, he was so bad that he actually made Colin Quinn look good. And I thought I would never say that. To sum up the night, one just had to look at the ovation Hammond received at the end of the show. Students clapped not out of appreciation, but out of joy that it was finally over. Fittingly, when three students on the far right side of the auditorium tried to stand up and start a standing ovation, everyone else just looked at them and eventually they sat back down.

Darryl Hammond embarrassed himself and Northeastern with his performance. We should all be ashamed that a major university in the heart of Boston can only draw a drunken SNL has been and never will be, as the headliner of one of their signature programs. If that’s not motivation to log onto myneu.neu.edu and vote to raise the student activities fee, then I don’t know what is. Vote yes and make sure that no one ever calls us Northwestern again.

– Craig Shames is a middler political science major and President of Class Council.