Does this part ring true for anybody who has been to the show recently?
I would think that by now Drew would know which jokes are going to play well to the audience.
Heavy on pot jokes. Some landed and some didn't. A lot of his schtick is wandering around the stage and calling on audience members at random and asking about their lives, and then making jokes based off of that. A couple times he starts talking to somebody who under pressure doesn't know how to respond, and he said, "Can you be honest with me? Are you high right now?" Got a laugh. One of his most frequent jokes is to mime smoking a joint when playing a "baked" character and give an obviously ridiculous analysis of what a contestant's told him, he did that about two or three times every break.
Probably should mention the first impression I got from him during the first break really caught me off guard. A rocket scientist (who we met in line) won a car in the first game. During the break Drew built off of that mentioning he was really into the show Strange Angel on CBS All Access, and he wandered off talking about how the show was about a brilliant rocket scientist who fell in the world of the occult and followed Aleister Crowley and performed sex magic rituals and other stuff.
Like, we've been in line for three hours with people who are absolutely thrilled to be here. We watched George Gray's hype video. We had a dance party as soon as we got in the studio. Everyone's full of adrenaline, we just saw five of us people get called down and one of the guys we met in line just got to come on down and is going home with a car. This is a dream come true to be here, could we maybe not talk about Aleister Crowley right this moment? It's kind of a buzzkill.
There was one moment where he called on a Canadian audience member who mentioned he was working in the US. Drew retorted jokingly, "All right, so what job did you take from a hardworking American?" George chimed in, "Build the wall! Build the wall!" I laughed. I could see why some wouldn't.
Overall most of the jokes got a good response. He's a comedian. He takes risks, they don't always pan out, but I'd say upwards of 75% landed. I particularly like effort he makes to spotlight individual contestants and members of the audience. That's when he got his best jibes in, and I felt like I knew the contestants so much better in the studio than I do on the show. We really were rooting for one another, it felt like an enormous family of 300 people, and Drew really felt like he was on "our" side. I really got the vibe he wants to stick it to the man, meet people from all over, and give away as much of CBS' stuff as he can.