There are right and wrong ways to do stand-up comedy. It's important to engage the audience, hit topics that they find familiar and funny, and avoid material that they've either heard before or will find unappealing. Unfortunately, Sunday night's performance by comedian Max Lance demonstrated just how necessary it is to stick to this formula for a successful night of humor. Stand-up comedian Josh Gondelman '07 opened the show in the Shapiro Campus Center Theater. He presented a self-conscious, Woody Allen-esque shtick to the sparsely-populated audience, eliciting a few chuckles. After a pleasant bit about teaching children Spanish, he yielded to Max Lance, the ostensible "star of the show."

Lance seemed young and exuberant as he took the stage. Prior appearances on The John McEnroe Show and In the Mix only boded well for his potential. Any hopes for an inventive routine, however, were dashed when he started by commenting on the many buildings with Jewish names on campus, and the large percentage of Jewish students who go to Brandeis. "I'm a Jew too," he protested when the audience fell silent. "I'm allowed to say this."

Realizing he needed some fresh material, Lance shifted to describing his life as a college dropout living with his parents. He hit his stride discussing alcohol and drugs on campus, as well as excuses to stay at his girlfriends' houses (so he wouldn't have to return to his mortifying home life). An anecdote about giving Ritalin to pets was especially hilarious, and he had the audience in stitches with the punch line, "Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be outrun by your own pet turtle?"

Sadly, he returned to mediocrity soon after this short bout of genius. The jokes grew steadily more off-color, including racial epithets, handicap jokes and yet more self-conscious jabs at Jews. While all of these veins of humor can be funny and relatively innocuous if done correctly, his interaction with the score of audience members made them worse. He prefaced each one by telling everyone something offensive was coming up, a tactic that ruined the shock value of the humor.

His jokes gradually shifted back to his own life, focusing on his many roommates and sexual escapades. Here the humor improved slightly, as college students could better relate to and appreciate the casual vulgarity of these themes. Still, the show ended abruptly and unpleasantly with a Holocaust gag, leaving the few remaining listeners unsure whether to applaud or wince. Lance had the potential to inject some professional comedy into the Brandeis scene, and did for a short time when he focused on his own silly life. For the most part, however, he gave the audience nothing more than recycled material and pointlessly offensive jibes.