Chicago-based comedian T. Murph, in collaboration with the Campus Activities Board (CAB), presented a night of laughs and surprises for University of New Hampshire (UNH) students on Friday, October 26 in the Memorial Union Strafford Room at 9 p.m.
The comedian – best known for his performances in Comedy Central’s “New York Comedy Festival” and the TBS “Just For Laughs” festival, among many other credits – touched upon humorous and relatable aspects of college life, as well as his perspectives on various other topics on a stage he thought was less of a stage than merely “13 coffee tables put together.”
Throughout his UNH performance, Murph showcased considerable fascination for the events occurring in Durham. As he was arriving on campus, an event in the “fishbowl” lawn caught his attention; once it was revealed that it was the Fall Festival of Freedom held by Turning Point USA, he confused it for an event featuring cows and “churning,” or the process utilized in producing butter, a realization that reminded him of a time he visited the farm where his father was raised. Murph, more familiar with the daily bustle of city life than the more pastoral nature of farm life, told the audience that he “can’t mess around” because he “found real quick [that] nature is real.”
“A lot of people don’t experience nature until they go to college; nature is real, and nature won’t play with your ass,” Murph said. “Like, when you go to college, you realize… squirrels in college towns are like pigeons in the city. Like, they don’t move! Like, you’re walking to class, you got to be like, ‘s***, my bad, dog,’ and you got to step over them…and they won’t move!”
Murph also recalled attempting to investigate a coop while a rooster attacked his thigh and attempting to save ants and sympathizing with their plight against the human foot (“What if people just walked into your house and started stepping on your ass?”). He also retold the time he encountered a deer in the wild for the first time at college in Chicago; or, more precisely, a male buck with antlers.
“When you have never encountered a deer, a deer can scare the hell out of you,” he warned the crowd. “I’m walking out of my friend’s dorm room at 1 a.m., and I walk outside, and it was a deer there, but it wasn’t like a doe there; it was, like, a buck. And it had the antlers… I started talking to the deer like he was one of the guys in the hood, like, ‘Hey, dog, it ain’t even like that, bro! You can put the antlers up, dog!’”
The weather itself added another shade of inconvenience into the comedian’s quickly expanding list of complaints, with one being the drastic changes in temperatures between Atlanta, Georgia – where the sun and warm temperatures (80 degrees Fahrenheit, per Murphy) reign supreme – and a far less-than-desirable “six degrees” when he arrived in the Granite State, calling Durham “real cold as hell.”
Later in his show, Murph criticized current fashion trends (“we’re fighting outside, it’s not happening, because you don’t even know what goes along with wearing a romper”), recalled his less-than-proud memories as a student and one-time football player in high school and the differences between males and females in how they express themselves. Or, in other words, why women are not afraid to refer to their friends as their “b****.”
In speaking of his past and future as a comedian, Murph – whose full name is Guerterrius Jackson – explained holding parts in shows such as NBC’s “Chicago Fire” and Comedy Central’s “Key and Peele,” among others. He also told The New Hampshire that it was an open mic years ago near Ocean City, Maryland that inspired him to continue down his path as a comedian, mainly due to the encouragement of the audience.
“I didn’t do well, but the room was so supportive that I figured, if this is bad comedy, I can deal with this,” Murph said. “Just getting up there, seeing it’s not nearly as scary or as bad as I thought it was going to be was enough
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Comedian T. Murph gives UNH the ol’ college try
November 1, 2018
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