With noticeably different comedic styles, the girls of Saturday Night Live, also known as Kate McKinnon and Vanessa Bayer, had a full house laughing with tears Wednesday in Goldstein Auditorium.
After opening act Nick Vatterott [11], McKinnon [12] marched out onto the stage to Britney Spears’ “Work B--," and subsequently grinded on the mic stand.
Peppy, energetic and totally unfiltered, the Long Island native started her routine by telling the audience about her day leading up to the show. First, she put together a “trendy” outfit because all her friends warned her she’d have to “impress” the Long Islanders in the audience. The outfit featured the gray, washed-out lavender and denim, about which McKinnon said, “I’m so excited to be in a city where the sky is the color of my outfit.”
McKinnon also said she spotted someone (for a second time) trying to pass through security at LaGuardia Airport with a sewing machine. And She received an Amber Alert for the first time. “I thought it was some new terrorist designation between yellow and orange,” she said. “I Googled it and I was like, 'oh, thank God -– it’s just a young girl that's disappeared, I’m fine.'”
McKinnon told the audience about her time in college, too. “I was a stud in college,” she said. “My nickname was ‘Goes to Indian buffets by herself.’” She then told a story of how she accidentally (still unclear) pooped on the floor of her single dorm room during her freshman year. She had been hanging around with a long shirt and no pants or underwear on, was hunched over her laptop (standing) responding to emails, “and then I heard just a soft kind of like – a thud,” she said. “And it was not a full poop, it was the size of like a blueberry, but there it was,” she went on. The audience roared with laughter. “There was the before time, when I don't poop on the floor, and then there was the after time, when I do poop on the floor, and the before time was dead and can never be visited again,” she said.
McKinnon also offered satirical advice to the audience. She recently attended her sister’s college graduation and found many of the graduates’ senior thesises entertaining. So, she put together a “Thes-is A List” which featured thesis statements she’d pursue if she were to return for post-graduate education. Such ideas included: “All For One and One For Shawl,” “Twelve Years a Douche: Jaden Smith as Scientology’s Answer to Rebecca Black” and “Pouty with a Chance of Wheatballs: Gluten Allergy as Socially Acceptable Form of Pervasive Whining.” McKinnon frolicked around the stage in lyrical dance as she read the titles aloud. “If you want a copy of that beautiful song, I don't know what it is, so you can’t have it,” she said.
She concluded by talking about how a “little, old homeless lady” grabbed her boob walking on the sidewalk of New York City, and by setting to rest the “elephant in the room” that she’s neither Peruvian nor Korean but, in fact, white.
McKinnon’s pal Vanessa Bayer [13] greeted the audience by saying her father went to SU and, “It’s so great to be at a college because college is, like, the best time in the world.”
When in college, Bayer didn't know what she wanted to do with her life. She started as a biology major and thought it would lead to a career as a biologist who had her own show on TV. She eventually switched to communications. “It is a great way to go,” she said. “If you’re not a communications major, just switch -– it’s so easy,” she said as she joked about a class she took called “theory of, like, some bulls-- advertising.”
Bayer, goofy and innocent as she spoke and giggled, talked about living in Chicago after college, and of the different jobs –- including working at an advertising agency and teaching drama at a children’s overnight camp -– she held before her days of SNL began. One of the most common questions people ask her, Bayer said, is if she is recognized in public. “The short answer is: no,” she said. However, “They’ll come up and they’ll be like, ‘Miley.’ ” Bayer is widely known for her recurring character as Miley Cyrus on SNL.
The show ended with improvisation between the two comedians as they interviewed two audience members on stage, and a “Shabbat Shalom.”
