On Apr. 8, Scott Rogowsky himself, the “quiz master” of popular app HQ, graced the University with his presence for a live comedy and quiz show. Within this hour and a half at the Union, Scott cracked some jokes, asked some tough questions and received some rather, uh, aggressive questions from the audience.
Much of his comedy routine was targeted at the Jewish community at the University, using material that spoke to the college-aged crowd. One of his first jokes was about his mother attending an all-female college known as “Beaver College,” exclaiming, “Did (she) go to college before the creation of vagina slang?!” Moving from there, he joked about the implications of rooting for Moe Wagner, a “white, Aryan-looking German,” and that the best part of being in a Jewish fraternity is that they “don’t believe in hell week.”
After the brief comedy routine, 15 audience members were called via a raffle to compete on three teams: self-titled as The Bananas, Team Reggie and The Skullfuckers. Just like on HQ, the first round of questions were appallingly simple — the answer to the first three questions was “The University of Michigan.” But from there, questions slowly increased in difficulty, and members of the teams began to be booted off the stage.
After the quiz segment, the audience was invited to walk up to a handful of microphones in the aisles to ask Mr. Rogowsky some questions, which varied in ridiculousness. When asked about his college experience, Scott commented that he studied Political Science because he “went to Johns Hopkins, and that’s a hard school. And poli sci isn’t hard,” to some uncomfortable laughter from the audience. Following this incident, a girl went up to the microphone and essentially begged him to follow her on any form of social media, and after a barrage of declinations, he resorted with a “go fuck yourself” to erupting applause.
But the true highlight of the Q&A was a duo wearing matching tee shirts with Scott’s face printed on the front. After barely uttering a response to the shirts, one of them exclaimed into the microphone, “He’s talking to us!” before asking him to do a backflip. At this point in the evening, the audience struggled to decide whether laughter or outright incredulity was the correct response to what was happening.
A night of comedy, quizzes and sometimes horror, Scott Rogowsky’s live comedy show was certainly one of the most memorable to be held at the University. And if you still can’t get enough of Scott, you can often catch him hosting HQ live on the app at 3:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. every day of the week.