It seems as though Jim Norton makes a fool of himself no matter what the situation.

He has been embarrassed in front of the likes of 50 Cent, Tiger Woods, Kiss and Larry Flynt, and Norton has come up with the solution to his problems.

‘Do you ever open your mouth and wish you had a gun to stick in it?’ he asked.

Norton, along with Keith Robinson and Robert Kelly, performed his own flavor of stand-up comedy on Saturday night in the Schine Underground. The three comedians appear regularly on Comedy Central’s ‘Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn’ but broke away from the show’s normal format to appear solo on stage.

Norton’s embarrassing moments ranged beyond celebrity encounters. He said he has difficulty meeting women because of his self-described tube-sock complexion and ugly fat head.

‘I went on a date with a beautiful girl who had the breath of an open grave,’ he said. ‘I was like, ‘Is she smuggling used diapers in there?’ I can’t believe I slept with her twice. Sometimes you have to put your face on the pillow and take one for your resum.’

‘It was awesome,’ said Brett Spurrier, a graduate student in engineering. ‘The last guy (Norton) was very smooth and funny.’

Robinson took the stage prior to Norton and ridiculed audience members such as ‘tight shirt boy’ and ‘Jesus.’ He then moved on to his least favorite group of people: the homeless, especially the man who had inhabited the lobby of his apartment building.

‘There’s no worse smell than a wet bum,’ he said. ‘It’s the same smell as 40 bums. Even when he wasn’t there, he was there.’

Robinson also took offense to the lack of freedom of speech people feel today. He said it is impossible to mess with people because everyone is so politically correct.

‘I have a 10-year-old son,’ he said, ‘and because of political correctness, he’ll never know the joy of calling anybody retarded.’

Robinson’s son, Keith Jr., was one of his favorite topics. He described a situation in which he caught his son, age five, in the bathroom with toothpaste on his penis.

‘Little boys are perverts,’ Robinson said. ‘You can’t leave them alone by themselves for more than 30 seconds. But you have to know how to survive. I teach my son how to roll: big Keith, little Keith.’

While Norton’s portion of the show focused mainly on his personal debacles, Kelly centered his act around his relationship complaints, politics and the dangers of Central New York.

‘This is the most depressing town,’ Kelly said. ‘I almost hung myself yesterday at Starbucks. It’s like you’re in the boonies, but you can still get mugged. I would never live here, because you can look outside and see no lights. That means something lives out there that doesn’t need lights.’

Kelly said that he wishes he could be a kid again, when the only time he watched the news was to see if he was getting a day off of school.

‘I’m an American,’ he said. ‘I just want to wake up and take a nap. I don’t want to worry about what’s going on in other countries.’

Kelly made a point of interacting with audience members; he joked with an overweight man and several couples, telling one man to get in control of his girlfriend. He also described his own relationships, saying that once a man has been in a relationship with a woman for a while, he loses his manhood.

‘I dated this girl who made me play punch-buggy with her,’ he said. ‘She always used to win because she played while we were driving. So one day I just drove into the dealership and beat the crap out of her: Punch-buggy blue, punch-buggy yellow!’

‘I think it was a tie between Robert Kelly and Jim Norton for my favorite,’ said Deirdre Merrigan, a sophomore advertising design major. ‘Both of them were really good.’

Published on April 18, 2004 at 12:00 pm