But it actually lifted me past the nerves and just into pure excitement.
“You’re in a filled stadium, with an electric energy that was felt all throughout my body, which probably put steroids on my nerves.Let alone people flying in from all over the world.” “My college homecoming at Temple University, I don’t even think the homecoming queen attended the homecoming reception.It said, ‘No, the entire stadium at the University of Florida is filled.’ ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said. Or in a section.’ And I was sent the update. “They told me it’s a stadium, and I thought, ‘Oh, it’s part of a stadium.It was such a rarity to have to be offered something that only the best had been at and done before.” Courtesy Craig Shoemaker’s Instagram account. Interlude: ‘It’s So Eclectic, These Shows’īackstage photo at Gator Growl 1996 of Craig Shoemaker, student show producer Adam Hall, and Richard Jeni.Our phone interview is presented as edited for length and clarity. I was a University of Florida student in the stands for the 1996 Gator Growl, and our conversation in January 2021 marked nearly twenty-five years since that performance. Craig wraps up the conversation by wondering about the future of audiences’ ability to experience stand-up comedy and our post-pandemic impulses to assemble for gatherings at all.Ĭraig was 37 at the 1996 Growl, and he performed at the 1999 Growl about ten days before his 41st birthday.
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In actuality, that year was one of the final few times that a Gator Growl in the UF football stadium attracted a full capacity audience. He acted shocked about this, as though he assumed it was a tradition that had continued uninterrupted since 1999. It was during the course of this call that Craig learned that the Gator Growl stand-up comedy era – of comics performing to crowds of 75,000 people – had long ago faded away. He tips his hat in admiration for fellow comics, including legendary female performers.
His account is comprehensive in a way far beyond the other interviews conducted of more than one hundred people for this project about “The World’s Largest Student-Run College Pep Rally.” Craig drops master-level knowledge about performing comedy.
His recollections include being recruited to appear, trying to puzzle together what kind of show it would be, and how it turned into not just one of the top experiences of his career but of his life. Over the course of nearly two hours in phone interviews, Craig shared with me incredibly detailed memories of his 1996 Gator Growl appearance. Of the more than sixty comedians who performed at Gator Growl, Craig is one of four comics who appeared multiple times (in his case, 19, firmly in the heyday of when the spectacle drew more than 70,000 paying audience members inside the University of Florida football stadium).
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Author’s Introduction: ‘It’s So Eclectic, These Shows’Ĭraig Shoemaker, adored by audiences for his stage persona of “The Lovemaster,” has been a long-time professional stand-up comedy virtuoso who started hitting stages in the 1980s. Want to know what it was like to perform stand-up comedy in a packed college football stadium? Check out the Gator Growl Comedians Oral History Series. The Gator Growl pep rally at the University of Florida became a history of stand-up comedy unlike any other. The author with Craig Shoemaker, backstage during his two Saturday night shows at the Raleigh Improv in Cary, North Carolina, on June 26, 2021.
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