Prizes flew through the air along with the laughter when comedian Mo Rocca brought his unique brand of humor to a crowd of more than 1,000 at the Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium last night.
Rocca, a satirical correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, started the night off spouting facts about the bobcat, while wearing a mask depicting the animal. He also brought his pumpkin-shaped trick-or-treat basket along with him and threw its contents to the audience.
The lecture, sponsored by the University Program Council, went in a few different directions, with Rocca touching on some of his media appearances such as VH1's I Love the 80s.
The atmosphere in Mem Aud was surprisingly intimate because of Rocca's conversational style of performance.
He told how he came to be a fake news reporter beginning with a trip to San Francisco at age 11. He visited Alcatraz and decided people in prison are different, and that he wanted to be different too.
A tangent on his habit of visiting presidential gravesites was accompanied by slides of Rocca and various others at locations such as Marion, Ohio, home of President Warren Harding.
Rocca then discussed his time on The Daily Show and showed various clips, including an undercover report on cheerleaders in which he implied that they treated Mountain Dew like a performance-enhancing drug and pointed out the illegal use of glitter. Rocca said that clip illustrated an aspect of the media Daily Show correspondents mock.
'Creating danger out of nothing' is a pretty easy target
Rocca said.
He also included a clip of an appearance he made on The O'Reilly Factor, when he debated about a lingerie-clad Barbie doll and a pregnant Midge doll with an opponent sent by God.
Rocca closed the lecture with time for questions from the audience, and by bringing an audience member onstage to play a banana ring toss game, in which Rocca stood with an inflated banana between his legs and gave the audience member the chance to win his bobcat mask by getting the rings on the banana.
Ashley Garmany, an Ohio University freshman with an undecided major in College of Arts and Sciences, said she knew Mo Rocca from The Daily Show.
I liked how he performed she said. He kept the audience's attention with his use of props and Power Point presentation.
Lee Freedman, public relations director of UPC said Rocca catered to the audience's wants and needs.
What's great about OU is that it is a liberal campus and it's great that people like Mo Rocca; people that have mixed views can come here and be accepted and really be loved Freedman said.
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Mo Rocca performs for a packed house yesterday at Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium. Rocca, a Harvard graduate, is a correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show and can also be seen on the VH1's I Love the 80s.
