Ask John Caparulo why he got into stand-up comedy, and he’ll tell you it was because once he finished college, he realized he did not care about schoolwork as much as he should have.
Caparulo, perhaps best known for his appearances as a regular panelist on the E! talk show “Chelsea Lately,” performed Monday in Heritage Hall as a part of the Student Programming Association’s April Fool’s Comedy Month, which was kicked off by Lewis Black on March 29.
“This is weird,” Caparulo began. “I don’t come to a lot of colleges. I don’t get invited.”
Though the comedian only managed to fill roughly half the seats, he proved to have a devoted fanbase with a crowd that began forming outside the hall as early as 7:30 p.m.
According to SPA Entertainment Chairwoman Lindsay Scher, the organization decided to bring Caparulo to the Penn State campus after watching a video of his performance at the 2006 Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, which has attracted more than 1.4 million views on YouTube.
During the show, Caparulo, himself a graduate of Kent State University, discussed an eclectic series of topics including his upcoming nuptials to his longtime girlfriend and his harrowing visits to Las Vegas.
“It sounded cool when I was younger,” he said of his early impressions of Sin City, where he performed the previous night.
However, he went on to explain that everything from poker losses to awkward conversations with strippers ruined the experience.
While some audience members may have found it hard to relate to such stories, Caparulo was nevertheless able to offer some words of wisdom for the entire crowd.
“My advice is once you get out of college, get new friends [because] they never grow up,” he joked, adding that the antics of his “weekend-warrior”-type friends who go to the gym everyday and take part in deer hunting are often too much for him.
One audience member, Will Abrego, was humorously singled out by Caparulo when the comedian compared Abrego’s generously proportioned physique to his own.
“I used to watch his specials back on Comedy Central,” Abrego (junior-finance) said. “I thought I’d be kind of an easy target sitting up front like that, but it was cool [how] he got to relate to me. He was really cool about it.”
