The line to the Great Hall of the Memorial Union was jam packed with excited fans Friday night. Eager students waited hours to get a good seat to watch actor Josh Peck and hypnotist Brian Imbus perform at the final ISU AfterDark event.

Immediately after Student Union Board workers welcomed Josh Peck to the stage, screams and standing ovations flourished throughout the audience. Peck seemed surprised and as happy as the crowd to be there.

Peck opened up to the audience right away by addressing “the elephant in the room.”

“We all have our awkward teenage years,” Peck said. “But my awkward teenage years are on reruns.”

The crowd erupted with applause and hollers as they know he is talking about the role he is best known for, Josh on Nickelodeon’s “Drake & Josh.”

Peck quickly segued into talking about what first got him into the acting and comedy world at the young age of thirteen.

“I got into comedy when I was little ‘cause I was fat,” Peck said. Laughter came from all over the audience. “I always tried to get ahead of the joke and make fun of myself first. This lead me to audition for a lot of Nickelodeon shows.”

Peck delved further into what got him started as a child actor by talking about how ‘“The Amanda Show” creator, Dan Schneider, saw how Peck and Drake Bell interacted with each other on the show.

“Dan Schneider said, ‘Hey you see those two idiots? Those two are your next show.’ And six months later we were filming “Drake & Josh.”

Peck went on to talk about his YouTube channel where he has almost three million subscribers.

“To be able to think of something, upload it immediately, and give it to you guys is powerful,” Peck said. “So, like, why not give it a shot?”

Peck gave more parting advice to any prospective actors and YouTube stars out in the audience.

“If anyone here dreams of making your own content, you can literally upload something immediately,” Peck said. “Now’s the time to create.”

In true Cyclone fashion, Peck expressed some Iowa State pride in his last moments on stage.

“I will punch out a Hawkeye any time,” Peck said. “Yo, I’ll go from Beardshear to Curtiss right now.” Peck was referring to the “challenge” where students run naked from Curtiss to Beardshear at midnight before the Campanile stops ringing.

Preceding Peck was hypnotist Brian Imbus.

Imbus started off his show strongly by asking everyone to hold their left hand out, palm-up, and their right hand out in a fist. He instructed everyone to close their eyes and picture he is putting more and more weights in their left hands, then to picture there is a string slowly plucking up your right fist. Using only the verbal commands, everyone in the audience was surprised to find that their hands were extremely far apart.

Imbus then proceeded to pull 18 volunteers up on stage from the audience. He quickly lulled them, and a select few in the audience, into a deep relaxed state before he began giving them commands.

Imbus told those in the relaxed state they are world famous DJs about to perform in front of a crowd of thousands. And like he said, after counting to three, everyone on stage and some in the audience, sprang to life from their deep sleep, miming as though they were turning disks as a DJ to DJ Snake’s intense “Turn Down for What,” causing huge bouts of laughter from those not hypnotized in the audience.

Imbus’s show only got better from there as he made those on stage do a variety of embarrassing and funny acts.

Ranging from pretending to be an FBI agent to making the students believe they were watching a pornographic movie of their parents, Imbus never failed to entertain.  

In an interview with Imbus, he stated how he first got into hypnotism at a young age.

“I saw my first show when I was a sophomore in high school,” Imbus said. “That’s where my interest started to be sparked.”

Imbus has hypnotized many students over the course of his twenty-year-long career; one of his favorite memories nearly caused him serious injury. 

“I would say when I had performed a show at a college in Iowa and I was doing a bit where I made guys on stage believe they were nine months pregnant,” Imbus said. “After they gave birth that they were very proud of their baby. After I snapped my fingers, one of the guys on stage believed I was the one that stole his baby. He was a 350 [pound] linebacker who tackled me on stage.”

Imbus further went on to give advice to the skeptics out there that don’t believe in hypnotism.

“The naysayers,” Imbus said. “You have them every show. And I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I say ‘just watch the show and see for yourself.'”

“I don’t remember anything,” said Carolyn Martin, freshman in psychology, and one of the students hypnotized by Imbus. “I felt like I was sleeping the whole time.”

“I felt like I knew that I was moving,” said Malerie Reitzler, sophomore in industrial design, another student hypnotized at the show. “But waking up on stage was confusing.”

The next ISU AfterDark event will be August 30, 2019 during the Fall semester.