On Thursday night, the Student Association Programming Board (SAPB) presented Jaboukie Young-White and Pat Regan for its annual spring comedy show. The Mandela Room was full of students ready to laugh, and Young-White and Regan most definitely delivered.
Young-White, a comedian born to Jamaican immigrants in Harvey, Illinois, got his start in his high school’s speech and theatre program before participating in an improv group called The Titanic Players at DePaul University. From there, he went on to pursue comedy. Since 2018, he has written for “Big Mouth” and “American Vandal” and was a correspondent on “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” until 2021. He’s stacked with movie credits — “C’mon C’mon” most recently — writing credits, late-night appearances, television roles and countless open mic appearances. Regan has a similarly impressive lineup of credits: he wrote for “Hacks,” appeared in season four of the acclaimed “Search Party” and has participated in multiple comedy festivals. Both comedians were equally hilarious and ensured that the night was a great one.
Regan opened with a bang, starting with a story about how he was exhausted from printing out a paper that morning — “It’s easier to get a gun in that country than it is to print something out!” — and made the entire crowd laugh with stories about his phone thinking he’s straight, receiving mean comments on Comedy Central’s Instagram account, a “temp gay receptionist” job he had for a realty firm and a dozen other stories and bits that started the event in high spirits. At one point in Regan’s set, an audience member called for him to go to student-favorite club Aqua Nightclub.
“Okay, I think that I will not go to Aqua [Nightclub],” Regan said. “But I want you to go to Aqua [Nightclub] and I want you to have the absolute time of your life and I want you to dance like no one’s watching, if that makes sense.”
Regan finished his set with a story about how, while bedridden, he came up with a cheesy teen movie plot about a bedridden popular girl falling in love with a nerd, which was met with cheers and applause at the predictable teenage rom-com ending.
Following Regan, Young-White took the stage and told the audience he had some notes on Binghamton University, namely with the amount of green on campus.
“It actually feels almost gang-level, the amount of green you guys have,” Young-White said. “It feels kind of dangerous a little bit.”
Young-White’s set was hilariously outstanding, as well. He opened by asking the crowd about majors and poking fun at business students, so he already had everyone laughing. Young-White kept up the show’s energy and ensured that not a moment of it dragged with his top-notch delivery, jokes and hilarious stories.
The show concluded with Regan and Young-White taking the stage together to have a casual Q&A, where, among other things, they gave advice on getting started in comedy, told the crowd about their wildest nightmares and talked about Twitter in relation to their careers.
Young-White has a huge Twitter following, and it’s partially what launched him into the public eye. Some attendees of the show were familiar with his Twitter and decided to go because of that, like Bella Martinez, a senior majoring in business administration.
“I had heard of [Young-White] on Twitter,” Martinez said on why she decided to come to the show.
It’s no surprise that someone well acquainted with Young-White’s Twitter would want to see him live — he’s known for his jokes there, too, like the time he changed his display name to “FBI” and tweeted, “Just because we killed MLK doesn’t mean we can’t miss him.”
Young-White’s humor is also a little dark. At the end of his set, he told a story about a time he was the victim of an attempted robbery. He was in Chicago waiting for a friend to pick him up and two men came up to him and threatened him with guns, demanding him to give them his phone. After one pretended to pull a gun out and revealed a fist, Young-White figured that there was no gun. At the end of it all, the robbers ended up giving him his phone back and he left, which was met with cheers and laughter from the audience.
“And then I was talking to my mom a week later, and she was like … ‘Remember the thing at the train that happened last week?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And she was like, ‘So there was a guy at the train who got robbed, they asked for his phone, he didn’t give them the phone, they shot him in the face, point-blank range, killed him,’” Young-White said, which was met with stunned silence from the audience. He let the crowd sit in it for a few moments, and then said, “And … the moral of the story is learn from your mistakes! Try and try again!”
The show ended with Regan and Young-White fielding a question about comedians they look up to.
“Bo Burnham is really tall, so I would say [I look up] to him,” Young-White said.
Regan and Young-White got serious and said that most of the comedians they used to look up to are now considered peers, which is an inspiring message in itself. Maybe aspiring comedians in the audience will become peers with Regan and Young-White someday. For now, they can be content with the memory of a hilarious show courtesy of Pat Regan and Jaboukie Young-White.