Arvin Mitchell comes to Longwood

This story originally appeared in The Rotunda

The most recent comedian to visit Longwood is Arvin Mitchell, the former star of BET’s “Club Comic View” and Kevin Hart’s “One Mic Stand.” Just about all of the Student Union Ballroom was filled, and everyone who came seemed to love the show.

The key to Mitchell’s Friday night success was his ability to make even the most controversial of subjects funny. For example, he told a story of when he was in his apartment and he saw a man on his cell phone get hit by a car.

“He was walking down the street, talking on his phone, got hit by a car, he was still on the phone!”

He also gave a hilarious imitation of the pedestrian’s reaction to getting hit.

“I’m bleeding, man, this dude just hit me! Can you call 911, man? ‘K, thanks.”

He continued this exploration of touchy subjects by going into the allegations leveled at Bill Cosby.

“I was thinking about his voice, it kind of made him seem guilty. If you have a smooth voice, like a player, or a laid-back voice, like President Barack Obama, it’s easy to get a woman to come back to your room.”

He then did an excellent impression of the president:

“Uh, uh, Michelle? I’ve put Malia and Sasha to sleep, and I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m ready to get it on. I’m ready to get down with the get down. Let’s go to Air Force One and do our thing.”

He said that “If you had a voice like Bill Cosby, you just might have to persuade a woman with a pill.”

As an example, he did an impression of Bill Cosby trying to convince a woman to have sex with him.

He also talked about the time that he was in college back in 1991, the military recruiters came by, and being gay or a college student would exclude him from joining the armed forces. He then imitated a lisp and the flamboyance commonly associated with gay men.

Yet not all of Mitchell’s performance was controversial, and he was able to spread out the more controversial topics among ones that were much more PG. This pacing allowed him to embrace a wider range of topics, such as his experiences when flying. One of the stories he told about flying was when he noticed that a man who was with him on the plane did not wash his hands after leaving the bathroom.

He told the man to wash his hands, to which the man said, “Imma beat your ass!”

Mitchell replied with “Not with those nasty hands, you aren’t!”

Mitchell has been working in the standup comedy business since his sister first encouraged him to try it out.

“She kept telling me I should go get on stage and people at my job kept telling me the same thing, so I took a shot at it, and it worked out.”

Before working in comedy, he worked at Sam’s Membership Club as a maintenance man, and he also was the deliveryman, delivering tires. “I was just funny at work, and people kept telling me to take it to the stage,” he remarked.

His time on the stage at Longwood proved that they were right to point him to comedy.