The Student Association Programming Board (SAPB) brought Broski Nation to Binghamton University when social media sensation turned comedian Brittany Broski visited the Anderson Center Tuesday evening for the University’s annual spring comedy show.

In typical 2000s-era internet fashion, Broski went viral after posting a video drinking kombucha for the first time, a meme she is now desperate to leave behind as she ventures into more versatile formats of comedy. Since 2019, Broski has accumulated a cult following of almost 10 million on TikTok and YouTube combined, where she primarily hosts two different series entitled the “The Broski Report” and “Royal Court.”

Chelsea Lum, the chair of SAPB’s comedy committee and a senior majoring in accounting, and Natalie Pan, the vice chair of the comedy committee and a junior majoring in philosophy, politics and law, explained how they came to the decision to recruit Broski for the event.

“When it came time to think about the comedian for the spring semester, we sat down with our vice president of programming (VPP), Sydney Ferreira, [a senior majoring in anthropology], and started brainstorming a list of comedians to bring,” Lum and Pan wrote in an email. “We settled on [Broski] because we had heard her name being thrown around a lot by other students, and we loved her content.”

In keeping with their “by students, for students” mantra, SAPB had distributed a survey to the student body earlier this semester to gauge interest in future events. According to Ferreira, Broski received the most votes for the comedy category by a “milestone,” solidifying the committee’s decision to reach out to her team.

When Broski walked out onto stage before a sold-out auditorium of around 1,200 people, she was greeted with frenzied applause as well as immediate demands from the audience to “address the Hozier rumors.”

“Just walk me through this real quick,” Broski said. “You think that from an interview I did five months ago, he’s releasing music that he wrote two years ago? I need everybody to take a deep breath. It’s going to be OK.”

After denying any speculation that she inspired Hozier’s hit single “Too Sweet,” Broski began by participating in a Q&A session moderated by Lum and Pan. During the majority of the hour-long show, she responded to a combination of questions about her career and experiences prepared by SAPB and submitted by students.

“I was a miserable, post-college grad,” Broski said, when asked about her reaction to overnight fame and success. “And now, I’m on Trixie Mattel’s hitlist. And now, I am blacklisted from TSA. Dreams are possible.”

Broski explained that her videos are intended to recreate the atmosphere of a casual FaceTime conversation with a friend, shifting away from what she said is the “sensationalized Mr. Beast, Jake Paul” style of content.

“I never really wanted to do this,” Broski said. “This was kind of an accident — everything has been an accident. I’ve talked to arguably millions of people the way I would talk to my inner circle of friends, and I think that it’s a beautiful intersection — crossroads of culture right now.”

She continued to touch upon light-hearted topics like food recommendations in her home state of Texas and any suggestions for her five-year-old self, which included “Cocomelon,” “Bluey” and “Hey Bear” sensory videos of dancing fruit. Most of her responses, integrated with her authentic sense of humor, elicited rounds of laughter from the audience.

However, Broski also spoke about more far-reaching issues like understanding the gravity of her platform as a creator and how the internet has influenced her own self-perception and expression.

As a teenager who once hid all her interests behind a pseudonymous Tumblr account, Broski described how she has grown to openly embrace what she likes without living for the expectations of others, particularly men and the male gaze, marking her “return to proud, unashamed girlhood.”

“I’m almost 30 years old, and I still read fan fiction,” Broski said, to which the audience cheered in support. “I see we have some authors over here, maybe.”

When meeting celebrities like Beyoncé and Harry Styles who comprise what Broski described as “a conglomerate of all the things you love, and all the people you love,” she struggled to vocalize her admiration to her longtime idols who she perceives as the embodiment of values like love, grace and kindness.

“How do you look at someone like that and be like, ‘love you,’” Broski said, making a heart with her hands. “’[I love you]. I have a tattoo for you.’ Like, that feels so miniscule to what they actually represent. So I don’t know, it’s hard to put into words.”

For the remainder of the show, Broski hosted an interactive game of jeopardy featuring trivia themed around her content where four randomly selected audience members could compete to win a t-shirt from her new merch line.

Among the contestants was Jason Anglum, a senior double-majoring in history and physics. Anglum expressed his excitement at the opportunity to participate in the Jeopardy game.

“It was one of those moments where you know it won’t be you … but it was,” Anglum wrote in an email. “So I couldn’t believe it. I screamed and ran down the aisle and the stairs, I probably kicked some people. I was shaking and my legs felt so weak. I thought ‘there’s no way this is actually happening.’”

As contestants selected one of five niche categories including “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “Broski Nation,” Broski would read out questions ranging in difficulty from “What is Hozier’s full name?” to “What art history movement was characterized by the artist showing themes of individualism, emotion and imagination?”

“I feel like Caesar Flickerman,” Broski said, referring to the host of “The Hunger Games.”

While Broski first insisted on a no-cheating policy, the audience enthusiastically shouted out answers to the contestants and erupted into cheers whenever one of the students answered correctly. By the end of the game, Anglum was leading the scoreboard by a significant margin and would walk away victorious.

“Being on stage was surreal because I’ve seen her in videos so much, [so] she felt so familiar yet unreal at the same time,” Anglum wrote. “I was sitting 10 feet from her and thinking, ‘this can’t possibly be the same person I just cried laughing at as she flirted with AI on YouTube.’”

For fans like Anglum, getting to know Broski at a more personal level was exactly what SAPB had envisioned when planning the event. Lum and Pan said that students’ reaction was “wonderful to watch and worth all the time and effort” the team had invested.

“We hope that the show [provided] an outlet for the audience during an otherwise busy semester, and for them to meet an amazing content creator in a closer setting like this,” they wrote.