Mike Birbiglia has been performing comedy for about a decade now, and his professionalism was evident on Saturday night.

Especially when you compare it with the relative inexperience of the show's openers.

Birbiglia opened his act by evaluating a copy of Friday's Daily Collegian, critiquing the vagueness of the headlines and the specificity of the group pictured in the feature photo (the Asian American Christian Fellowship's Skit Team). This was obviously pretty fresh material, and Birbiglia made it known right away that he could make light of anything.

After making his natural comedic ability known from the outset, Birbiglia tried to convince the audience that he wasn't all that funny.

First, he said he wasn't the class clown, adding that all the "funny kid" in school had to do was walk into class, call someone fat, call someone gay and then make his exit.

Then he told a story about when he was moving a mattress into his apartment, and someone else in the building held the door for him.

"I know you're not a rapist," Birbiglia said, impersonating the woman holding the door, "because a rapist wouldn't have a bed like that."

"What I should have said was nothing," Birbiglia went on, this time reflecting on the situation in retrospect. "But what I did say was, 'You'd be surprised.' "

At the end of a meandering set during which Birbiglia couldn't finish a joke without first going on a half dozen different tangents, he told a long, involved story about how his sleepwalking led him to jump out of the second-story window of a La Quinta in Walla Walla, Washington.

It was appropriate that the story ended with his getting his wounds sewn up by a doctor because he had the audience in stitches the entire time.

When he first took the stage, Birbiglia had some trouble with his microphone, which prompted him to (somewhat) facetiously say of the openers, "Why couldn't theirs have been off?"

It probably isn't fair to measure the comparatively green supporting acts by the bar set by a seasoned performer like Birbiglia. Opener Brandon Gulya even had to check his set list a few times to remember which jokes to tell. Hopefully, the other comics took the opportunity to learn from a professional. Gulya, for example, who channeled Mitch Hedberg's lack of segues, also seemed to lack, you know, punchlines. Tim Portnoy, who told a lengthy story about an angry farmer that might have gone over well in someone's living room, probably could have used a little embellishment. Mike Skurko, probably the funniest of the openers, took a little while to get going. Overall, it was about as much as you could expect from what were ostensibly unknown comics, but Birbiglia's set was good enough to make me forget the already unmemorable rest of the night.