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Thursday, March 28, 2024
The Observer

Justine Marino at Legends

justine-graphic-WEB
Keri O'Mara
Keri O'Mara
Justine Marino and the Humor Artists performed at Legends on Saturday night just before Hip Hop Night was cancelled due to a power outage.

The Humor Artists were on first, performing their improv games for the audience. They started off with “Four Corners,” in which four of the performers take prompts in pairs from the audience and rotate when called for a new prompt.

The next game they played was “Replay.” Three of the artists performed a scene based on an adjective and noun provided by the audience (“Slippery Finland”) and then were asked to replay it using different emotions and then again with a different genre. During the emotions section, we learned “constipation” was an emotion, at least at a Humor Artists’ show.

The highlight of their performance was perhaps the “Dating Game." One of the artists leaves the stage while three others are assigned (1) a celebrity, (2) a strange job and (3) a strange habit/belief. The three contestants were Paris Hilton, a male prostitute and a communist. At the end of the game, the first artist was asked to guess who/what the three contestants were (she was spot on with Paris Hilton, guessed the male prostitute after a few more hints and took a little while with the communist).

The Humor Artists introduced Justine Marino as a game of “45-minute monologue” and left the stage for her bit. She was complimentary of her opening act and talked a little bit about her own beginnings in improv before going into the main part of her set.

A couple of themes recurred during her monologue. The first was her strong desire to learn either the shmoney dance or the nay-nay dance. It was kindled by her knowledge that Hip Hop Night was to follow her show, and she wanted one of the audience members to show her how to do it. One of the students in the back claimed to know it (or his friends claimed he did) but there never was an answer on how to perform the shmoney.

One of the best bits of the show was her discussion of the different ways guys and girls get ready for a night out. She imitated guys and girls performing the different stereotypical things they do to get ready and reflected on how strange the opposites were. Perhaps the best bit was her parody of girls talking about a night out the way guys are often depicted to do.

She commented a few times on the oddities of Notre Dame and specifically parietals. Marino asked the audience if we went out, hooked up and then went home alone or if car hook-ups were still a thing at Notre Dame. This led into a couple of stories from her own experience at an all-girls Catholic high school.

Her show also included bits about what it means to be basic, what your tour guide at Universal Studios is actually thinking and how 90s television shows are still relevant today.

The audience for her show was small, and at times, it was clear that her bits would work better with a larger crowd. She tried to engage the audience members, calling out a few members for texting and posing for the camerawoman.

For those who missed it, Justine Marino is featured in Jenny McCarthy’s “Dirty Sexy Funny” on Netflix and has a couple videos available online at justinemarino.com.