Katz’s High Brow, Low Brow Humor

Louis Katz, a comedian out of Los Angeles, visited UConn Thursday evening to broaden people’s horizons about their narrow minds. Providing a library of evidence about the fallacies of the typical human being, Katz managed to endorse wholeheartedly guilty laughter from all attendees. Katz didn’t leave a screw unscrewed as he circumnavigated all possible talking points, ranging from political solutions, to personal opinions on fruit classification, to exploiting your weaknesses, to painstaking self-humiliation.

Katz managed to bring the house down at the Student Union theatre. In a preview of what was to come to Nick Briges, the Comedy Chairman of SUBOG said that Katz has been featured in specials on Comedy Central and that he was polite on TV compared to his live acts. Even early on, the positivity lived up to its word. At the start of the show the crowd was enthused at a coarse, yet refined playlist of jokes. Whenever he played the crude humor card (which sadly never fails to draw laughs), it would usually be followed by a chivalrous motive, or a politically correct justification. When commenting on his tour to Europe, he described the American reputation that is broadly held: that Americans have a high level of ignorance about foreign culture and traditions. But Katz justifiably expresses that “it is our tradition to be ignorant to your traditions.” Poking fun at all facets of society, he managed to excite the crowd quite a bit, interacting with much of the crowd and even throwing jokes at photographers. In the middle of the show, a condom landed on stage as a form of praise. Throughout the show, Katz managed to bring out the adolescent laughter in everyone, but remained classy in the process. Glenn Murphy, a 1st-semester student majoring in electrical engineering, described the show as “pleasingly raunchy.”
Thanks to SUBOG and everyone involved, UConn was able to benefit from a hilarious show. Speaking prior to the show, Briges said that the benefits of SUBOG efforts to provide entertainment to students, “keep people engaged and enhance people’s experiences at UConn. And I think this is one form of entertainment that’s great to do that.”
Student’s reactions post-show were overwhelmingly positive. Edwin Casillas, a junior studying chemistry, noted, “Although I enjoyed the show, it often very blunt and harsh, and if you don’t like that kind of style it might not be for you.” But others said they had a great time. Both comments compliment Katz’s performance. After the show, Katz said that “[he] had a great time…college crowds aren’t usually the best because there’s still usually a substantial lack of cynicism, but this turned out to be awesome, really fun.”