Last night, jokesmith Andrew Kennedy did comedy while standing up at an 8 p.m. free show in the HUB Auditorium. Kennedy has been voted into Comedy Central’s top 20 comedians two years in a row. He showed why he deserved to be in such a redundant list to a crowd of Penn State students.

Kennedy opened the show with familiar quips about the construction/orange cone emporium on I-80 and our drunken anthropomorphic cheerleader. The set covered a wide variety of topics including Kennedy’s childhood and racial background (half English half Colombian), the colorful characters that people vote to lead our great nation, the economy, and Governator Schwarzenegger. In between more general topics, he responded to comments (of varying sassiness levels) by audience members.

Kennedy moved from self disparaging commentary to topics college students could more easily relate to. This included drinking heavily, sex with random strangers, drinking heavily, showing up baked to comedy shows, drinking heavily, and acting out Inglourious Basterds at the drug store. Or as Penn Staters refer to it: Tuesday.

The show itself was more than worth the nothing I paid to see it. Kennedy was energetic in front of what was definitely a smaller crowd than he was used to. He playfully shamed people arriving fashionably late and worked the outbursts of the crowd into the routine. The biggest hit of the show was Kennedy’s impressions of his gentlemanly British father and Christopher Walken receiving a cavity search. It makes even less sense in context, I assure you.

Kennedy started slow as he tried to get in sync with the crowd and figure out how much profanity the SPA staff would let him get away with. After the ball got rolling, the laughs were frequent and the show was a great way to spend an hour. Here’s a taste of some material used at last night’s show from an earlier show Kennedy did at the Gotham Comedy Club: