The drunken debauchery of scheming Ivy-leaguers and girls, girls, girls in the timeless poetry of Jay-Z, inspired 23-year-old Aaron Karo to start off his comedic career in the fall of ’97 as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. Now as a member of the “real world,” Karo, in the same fashion as Candace Bushnell, has published a hilarious book comprised of all his monthly columns from four years of college, titled “Ruminations on College Life.”
- Paul Wong
“People ask me where the title “Ruminations” came from and honestly I don’t know. I don’t even think I knew what that word meant back then. Some people probably don’t know what it means now,” said Karo.
Karo’s comedic etchings mix the hard edge, raunchy humor of Chris Rock with the offbeat rantings about nothing that Jerry Seinfeld was best known for.
“If I had to sum the book up I’d say imagine Seinfeld as a frat boy,” he added.
His tales journey from the freshman dorms through his frat house, stopping to contemplate how to do laundry, how to get a girl in bed and how to funnel as many beers in one go as was humanly possible. And yes, he did stop in academic buildings for a laugh and some education along the way.
“The book’s about my best friends and what happened to us in college, anything was fair game,” said Karo.
Partying all-night and sleeping all day was the collegiate regiment that Karo, adopted in his first days as an undergraduate in the Wharton School of Business.
But come Sunday nights when most undergrads attempted to sleep in order to re-enact the previous week’s boozing and occasional attending of classes, Karo lay awake. His body no longer able to cope with normal sleeping patterns and the past week’s mayhem still running through his head, he decided to write it all down in an e-mail and send it to his high school friends.
His friends proceeded to forward these wild antics to their friends and so on. The phenomenon known to his devoted fans as the “Karo Effect,” snowballed into “Ruminations on College Life,” so Karo created a website, www.aaronkaro.com, as a forum for all his emails and now has a readership of over 11,000 people worldwide. With a fan base spanning the age gap, from kids in high school, to college students in the Midwest, to alumni living vicariously through him, Karo’s comedic ingenue has continued to intrigue people.
Karo’s parents “blindly financed (his) excessive drinking habits,” he states in the opening pages of “Ruminations,” and all those beers and drunken stuppours just might be paying off. Graduating in the spring of 2001, Karo ventured the chaos of Wall Street, but has now decided to devote his life full time to a career in show business.
From L.A., where Karo is pursuing his dream of making “Ruminations” into a television show or a feature film, he added, “You know, I had four years of material and I thought maybe I could do something with it.”
Unlike other books about college, Karo doesn’t sugar-coat the reality of the pressure cooker-get drunk fast and cheap and hook up combo that comprises college. He tells it like it is, beer goggles and all.