With her Mickey Mouse T-shirt, pizza socks and wonderfully bright pink hair, Jessica Williams doesn’t exactly look like a serious person.

The 27-year-old comedian wasn’t much older than the audience at Student Entertainment Events’ Fall Lecture this past Thursday, but her performance in the partially-full Colony Ballroom in Stamp Student Union easily flirted between her own youthfulness and the worldly wisdom of someone who’s experienced a lot.

And she has: Since joining The Daily Show straight out of college, Williams has acted in films, been on TV and started a popular podcast. But in many ways, she’s not that different from the students at the schools she visits.

“Even though I’m 27, I feel like I have the maturity of someone who’s in college, like all I want to do is just like play The Sims,” she said in an interview before the show. “So I love connecting and relating and talking to college students. I feel like college is such a really important time. I feel like college students are learning a lot about who they want to be … they’re exploring different ideas and concepts.”

[Check out our interview with Williams above on the first installment of The Dive Extra, a mini segment of our new podcast.]

Even though it was billed as a lecture, the first hour of Williams’ act was largely standup comedy — and good standup comedy at that. She joked about everything from weird hotel employees to her grandmother (“My grandma was lit as fuck”).

But as laugh-out-loud funny as the material was, Williams was most in her element when discussing two things: her family and politics.

The most serious portion of her act focused on identity — something that, for Williams, is directly tied to family.

“Am I the wrong type of black woman?” she remembers asking as a teenager, torn between her family, church and race. But not every mention of family was so heavy — she also fondly remembered her mom’s guidance and one liners.

“That’s right! You came from my coochie!” her mom quipped upon hearing her daughter would be on The Daily Show.

Of course, years of experience working with the Best F#@king News Team Ever have made Williams a sharp, cutting satirist — and the 2016 election gave her a perfect target.

“I don’t think anyone really could have predicted the absolute mayhem that this election is … just the spirit around it, the animosity that’s been built up …” she said in the interview. “And a part of me wonders why it’s happening — is this because we had a black president for eight years in the White House? Is this sort of the blowback we get?”

In the last half of the show, Williams talked about her work on The Daily Show and played a clip from it — a segment when she satirized stop-and-frisk in New York by taking it to Wall Street. And while the crowd laughed loudly at her deadpan performance on the show, Williams mostly stood off to the side and watched it without much expression.

Because, as the rest of her performance showed — Jessica Williams takes being funny very seriously.