Dirty talk: Silent Bob gets vocal at Mershon

Kevin Smith sure knows how to make the most of something small. In his first foray as a director with 1994’s “Clerks,” he cobbled together a movie using a shoestring budget and his workplace as its scenery. From this humble start, Smith crafted an incredibly successful writing/directing career, most recently bearing last October’s “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.” As an actor, Smith first took the simple mime-like role of Silent Bob in “Clerks” with little to no dialogue. Since then, he’s nailed down supporting parts in “Daredevil”, “Live Free or Die Hard”, “Southland Tales” and TV’s “Law & Order”. As a speaker, Smith was given a room of enthusiastic OSU students in Mershon Auditorium last Thursday. By the end of the night, he had managed to turn out all kinds of embarrassing stories from both audience members and himself, creating enormous and often uncomfortable laughter for the rest of the room in the process.

For the uninitiated, Smith’s on-stage appearances are anecdotal stand-up comedy wrapped in a guise of an open-ended Q&A with the crowd. Two mics are typically set up in-between aisles of seats, and Smith switches between fielding questions from the two, answering anything anyone throws at him. Three DVDs of these Q&A sessions have been released so far (the most recent is “Kevin Smith: Sold Out – A Threevening with Kevin Smith”), and these shows tend to get very profane and very revealing very fast.

As soon as Smith took the stage soon after 8 PM, he began the evening with a self-aware “Good morning” (apparently, his week had been pretty grueling). He then immediately took notice of the ASL Interpreter standing on the side of the stage and began asking her to sign inappropriate things, quickly creating one of the running jokes of the night. The first question Smith fielded was a good indicator of what kind of material he was best at discussing. An audience member asked a question about a character’s identity in a “Battlestar Galactica” storyline. Smith took on the question entirely seriously, and answered it in detail.

Things soon began to grow less docile. One inquiring participant spilled his guts to Smith about recently breaking up with his fiancée, with the purchase of a rice cooker apparently serving as a key point of contention in their relationship. Another asked a question and then handed Smith a map to his dorm, offering Smith to get high with him (the director was intrigued by this offer). Somebody else told a story about walking in on his deeply religious father smoking a joint, eating 20 White Castle hamburgers and watching Smith’s “Dogma” simultaneously–a story he had never told anyone before. A fourth guy somehow ended up revealing that he once kissed the male student that asked the original question about “Battlestar Galactica.” All of these odd details of the students coming out and then elaborated provided much material for Smith to work with through the evening.

However, Smith was certainly more than willing to share a lot about himself as well. In unnerving detail, he told stories about his current sex life (it’s going pretty well), one of his earliest sexual experiences (involving his partner being disgusted by his body’s actions), how he recently broke a toilet in an L.A. video store (he was extremely overweight at the time), how many times he has seen actor Jason Mewes’ genitalia (“more [times] than [his] own”) and how his break-up with actress Joey Lauren Adams went (she wanted to date Vince Vaughn instead). It should also be noted that he leapt into renditions of the “Family Ties” theme song and A-Ha’s ’80s hit “Take on Me” at varying points.

In terms of news regarding his upcoming projects, Smith didn’t offer any info that a die-hard fan would have not heard before. The two projects he is currently working on are “Red State” (a horror movie about ultra-conservatives) and “Ranger Danger and the Danger Rangers” (a big-budget sci-fi movie). He’s also deep into a “Batman” mini-series for DC Comics (a snippet of a day in the life of Smith: “I wake up, get really fuckin’ baked and write “Batman comics”.). Issue #2 is currently on the racks, and the series will be completely published within the next month or two.

When all was done, the Smith experience was both incredibly profane and incredibly funny. Smith’s literal “tell all” approach to comedy/Q&As takes a lot of moxie, and there’s some kind of intangible comfort to be found in a major Hollywood player getting on-stage to spill his guts, and then leaving two-and-a-half hours later as someone everyone knows a little too intimately.