Michelle Wolf began her set by taking about restrooms.
The designs of the restrooms for females and males were different and this was unfair, she said. Women had cubicles for their privacy, but men had to “pee standing while facing a wall.”
“I feel bad that men can’t sit while they pee. You have to know what your intention is like, ‘I’m going in to poop,’ but women can just go and poop without even meaning to,” Wolf said as the audience laughed.
The comedian performed live for a crowd of more than 400 students and families as part of Ohio University’s Campus Involvement Center’s Convo Comedy Night on Friday.
Wolf, a writer and contributor for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, tackled large social issues during the set, such as anti-transgender bathroom bills, arguments against birth control and environmentalism, among others.
Audrey Mullen, a freshman studying integrated media studies, said she had never heard of Wolf before the performance, but she liked how Wolf openly talked about sensitive topics and “thought she was hilarious.”
“I really liked the joke about periods,” Mullen said. “How, if men had periods, there would be a solution hands down.”
Mullen said she would probably check out more of Wolf’s sets after tonight.
During the show, Wolf also described her stand-up comedy as a “d--- pic.”
“You send it to one person and they don’t want to see it, and it just stays there on their phones,” she joked.
After watching Wolf’s appearances on The Daily Show, Edwin Quarcoo, a graduate student studying Spanish and Latin American studies, was excited to see her perform in front of a live audience.
Watching Wolf perform live was a whole new experience, he said.
“It’s definitely different, because in The Daily Show, you just see a few minutes of her, and (watching her live for) an hour and a half is definitely different,” Quarcoo said.
Quarcoo appreciated how Wolf’s style of comedy tackled serious social problems while presenting the topic in a way that is entertaining but accurate.
“That’s why I watch The Daily Show — because the news is too serious for me,” he said. “I like to hear things from many perspectives, and it’s great to hear (about social issues) because the truth is in there, but it still makes you laugh.”
After the show, Wolf said she delivers her own point of view on these highly discussed topics in her sets by making them “silly and fun.”
“My first priority is to make people laugh,” she said. “If they get something out of it, great. But I’m not trying to change the world.”
