Curry connects with MCA crowd> Comic keeps college audience laughing with wide-ranging performance

Comedian Mark Curry knew he was in unfamiliar territory Friday night.

“I just came up here to scare some white people,” Curry told the crowd of 600 at the Maine Center for the Arts. “`You should be playing, shouldn’t you?”‘

Curry, whose appearance was part of the University of Maine’s Black History Month celebration, got started late, as his flight was delayed. Before the 6-foot-6 comic hit the stage, Dr. James Varner, adviser to the sponsoring African-American Association, gave a brief talk on a new human-rights coalition forming at the university.

As his luggage was missing, Curry ended up wearing a white T-shirt and black slacks. That somehow seemed appropriate, as the black comic and the white audience shared some laughs at racist attitudes.

He related an in-flight experience: “I sat down in first class, and this woman grabbed her purse and held it tight. Damn, what did she think I was going to do? Grab it and run to the back of the plane? Jump out at 30,000 feet?”

Curry spoke about fired employees returning to shoot their bosses: “It’s mostly white males that go back to shoot their bosses. Not that black people don’t want to. They just get pulled over first.”

He’s also looking forward to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, when the marathon will be run partially through Forsyth County, home of the Ku Klux Klan. “Black men running with numbers on their backs. They won’t know what to do. `Escaped prisoners. Get me my shotgun.”‘

But while racism was a central theme of Curry’s, he showed his versatility by fielding requests for topics from the audience. Children, parents, movies, Catholic school, sex — he attempted them all, and kept the audience roaring.

The concert got ragged toward the end, as the crowd failed to provide topics that really sparked Curry. So he went back to coming up with his own ideas.

The “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper” star knows that some topics are universal. For example, Captain Crunch: “Captain Crunch is the bomb cereal. Kids go to school wired. They’re like little junkies at the bus stop.”

Another universal concern is calling in sick to work: “I think I got what Dave’s got. What, cancer? I’ll be in. After I go to the gym.”

After asking an audience member about hunting in Maine, Curry told about hunting in his old neighborhood in Oakland, Calif.: “My uncles, who were pimps, took me hunting. We went in a ’73 El Dorado and used Uzis.”

Curry was a very physical comedian, who used all parts of his body to get a laugh. Not all of his material clicked with the MCA audience — a bit on Mexican gangs’ whistle signals fell flat — but Curry connected on a frequent basis. He successfully bridged the gap between the ‘hood and a central Maine university town.