"The College Show." It has a generic ring to it, and conjures up certain images in a juggler's mind. First and foremost, of course, is comedy. The college show is always funny because, well, college students like to laugh. When you play to college students, you have to make them laugh.

 

Bill Fry "Comedy in the Air" showed during a recent North Carolina appearance why he's so popular on college campuses. Appearing in a crowded, small, very low-ceilinged room at Lenoir Rhyne College, he kept the audience yucking and guffawing for a full hour.

 

You might not call it an artistic juggling show, but there's certainly an art to successfully entertaining an audience weaned on MTV and sitcoms. Fry keeps them enraptured with manic comedy, rattling off one-liners and yanking sight gags in rapid-fire succession out of a packed suitcase. The cornier it got, the more the audience loved to hate it. How about an introduction to a box routine where he talked about his      favorite two Williams ­ Shakespeare and Fields - who said, "All the world's a small liberal arts college in the South and if you aren't wasted the day is!"

 

But in between those bits of belt­level humor, the show contains some routines whose development has obviously cost Fry a great deal of mental energy. Following its sophomoric in­troduction, his box routine turned into a group of visual puns set to a Shakespeare-inspired original poem.

 

The "Eight Days of Christmas" routine takes a lot of on-stage energy, as Fry dons a Santa cap and gets the audience to sing along with the familiar tune as he juggles: a chicken in a pear tree, two canes a-spinning, three sharp objects, four fruits a flying, five gold rings (a natural for jugglers) , six scarves a soaring and a 7-Up can. The eighth day disappeared somewhere!

 

Other material in his deep bag of tricks included juggling clubs off of various parts of his body called out by audience members, and presidential imitations with three ball tricks. Reagan does shoulder throws from the right and falls asleep on stage, Nixon does fake shoulder throws and Gerald Ford takes a pratfall while trying to do a shoulder throw.

 

Fry is a very talented technical juggler, as well as a likeable stage persona. Another high point of the show was a very skilled top hat routine, set only to the "oohs" and "aahs" of the two halves of the previously divided and coached audience.

 

He involved audience volunteers throughout the show. In one routine, he stood on his head and juggled scarves upside down as a member of the audience held his legs in the air.

 

He got a lot of time and comedy out of passing clubs with three volunteers, explaining that he missed the team juggling he enjoyed as an original member of the defunct team Gravity's Last Stand.

 

Fry is well-known in the college market as a long-time member of the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA). He had booked 15 shows in the spring and said he had a good start on the fall. In between, he was looking forward to returning to his home in Charleston, S.C., for its annual Spoleto Festival. Fry acts as street performing coordinator for the Piccolo Spoleto part of the event. For a month each summer, up to a dozen performing friends from around the country descend on his house for communal living, socializing and street work. Fry and several others regularly perform on the streets each year as the Oddballs.