An evening with John Oliver

We shed our proud-townie status for a couple hours last Friday and headed over to campus -- pardon me, "Grounds" -- to hear Daily Show correspondent and real-live British person John Oliver deliver a fine set of stand-up (happily, we were not the oldest people in the room; a fair number of other grownups attended too).

Now, writing about a comedy performance and trying to impart just how funny the guy was is probably an exercise in futility. Even if I had perfect recall or had surreptitiously taped the show, transcribing his bit about how he updated the Wikipedia entries for several political figures ("Sen. Richard Lugar could have been the greatest swimmer in Olympic history but for the fact that he's soluble in water") wouldn't come across quite as funny on the screen.

Nor could I do justice to his story about the moment that he realized he would be a comic, and not an athlete (it involved a 400-meter race, a cool breeze and a flap on the front of his shorts) . Because you still couldn't have seen the look on his face as he recounted the horrible tale, coming off like Harry Potter's hangdog older brother.

And I really don't know how to describe his partner-in-comedy Andy Zaltzman, with whom he hosts a podcast for The Times of London and did a show for BBC Radio called The Department.

What I can tell you, though, that if John Oliver comes to your town, you should go see him. Dude was really, really funny.