After many students waited in line for more than an hour just to get into “Dew the Rec,” it probably would have been more fun sitting in the dorms watching Comedy Central.

The “Dew the Rec” show started terribly and although it recovered somewhat, it went on for far, far too long.

Opening the show was the winner of the “Veishea Thinks I’m Funny” contest, Hiawatha Rutland. Rutland began with a few moderately successful jokes and then began to get extremely flustered when the crowd was not responding. Rutland asked the crowd several times “What can I do to entertain you?” It got so bad that at one point during his act, he sat in a chair and did nothing but drink a bottle of water for several minutes.

The worst part of this almost painful-to-watch performance was when Rutland began turning on the crowd with a series of unfunny and offensive comments, including one in which Rutland claimed everybody in Iowa had sex with goats. In Rutland’s defense, it was certainly not easy for an amateur to do comedy in front of thousands of people, but his attacks on the crowd were uncalled for, and his act contained enough offensive material to anger almost anyone.

Mark “Mr. Cooper” Curry was the second act and was a vast improvement. Curry had about an hour of prepared material, covering topics from sex, drinking and the war in Iraq, that was funny but not hysterical.

Although he only had about an hour of prepared material, he was on stage for nearly two hours.

After his prepared routine, Curry took topics from the audience and talked for a minute or so about each one. This portion of the set was completely unnecessary and dragged down an otherwise decent performance.

Finally, around 11 p.m., Horatio Sanz took the stage.

Sanz did not do a typical stand-up set, but actually brought many other improv actors in for a series of skits and monologues with topics taken from the crowd.

Sanz and company started off slowly, and by this point people seemed to be fed up with the event. There was literally a constant stream of people leaving 10 minutes into his performance. The skits did actually get funny after the sluggish start, but it was too late — the majority of the people were already gone.

“Dew the Rec” finally ground to a halt around midnight. The extreme length of the event would have made it difficult to enjoy even if the comedians were all outstanding. The fact that the comedians were not all outstanding just made it feel a lot like three hours of your life you would never get back.