Bernie McGrenahan is the most media covered speaker in alcohol awareness. Below are newspaper articles (transcribed to be viewable online) about Bernie and the impact that Happy Hour has on students.

L.A. Daily News
TUESDAY, AUGUST 29

College kids drink in comic’s sobering act

By Dennis McCarthy

The Most important comedian in the country today locked the front door to his Sherman Oaks apartment late last week and headed out into the heartland again to save some young lives.
Standing up on a stage making college kids laugh at 30 colleges in 35 days.

Then talking taking the last 20 minutes of each show to make them stop and think.
No one knows for sure how many lives Bernie McGrenahan has saved on his “Beware of the Binge” Comedy tour, but college officials who have invited him to their campuses for Alcohol Awareness Week activities say then know there have been many.

“Many college students participate in excessive, binge drinking, and I know that Bernie reached a lot of them here,” save Angie Vosters, ideas and issues coordinator at St. Norbert College in DePere, Wis.

“They left his show realizing that they need to change their drinking and partying habits. They were engrossed by his strong and unforgettable message.”

Similar accolades come from colleges as North Central in Naperville, Ill., and Lakeland College is Sheboygan, Wis., and as large as Georgia Tech and the University of North Carolina.

Bernie made their students laugh, officials say, and then made them think. He didn’t preach about alcohol abuse. He just told it like it is.

Binge drinking is a killer. Alcohol is the No. 1 factor in homicides, suicides and traffic crashes involving those 16 to 25, according to the Center for Alcohol and Drug Prevention.

It’s involved in 80 percent of all date rapes and 90 percent of all campus violence. More than 56 percent of all male students and 40 percent of all female students admit to binge drinking: five or more drinks for a man, and four or more for a woman, at one sitting.
Bernie gives them numbers. Then he gives them something no other comedian in the country can give them: his own harrowing story.

He was home cooking pasta the night the college kid died.

Twenty-two shots of booze in 1.5 hours, the guy on the news was saying. His frat brothers poured him into bed, the worst thing they could have done. The kid never woke up.

“They showed the kid’s picture on TV, and I saw my brother’s face,” Bernie said. “Then, I saw my own.”
Even the alcohol-related death of his own younger brother, Scott, at 19, years earlier hadn’t stopped Bernie from continuing to bring-drink his own life away.

There were a few more wasted years with three arrests for driving under the influence of alcohol, six months in country jail and the tearful intervention of his family.

Now, 11 years of sobriety later, Bernie’s a popular comedian who has opened in Las Vegas for Rodney Dangerfield, Mariah Carey, The Four Tops, and Kenny Loggins.

And he was home on night a couple of years ago cooking pasta when the news came on about a kid drinking himself to death at a frat party.

“I knew I had to get out there and talk to them,” said Bernie, who hopes to enlarge his “Beware of the Binge” tour from 30 to 40 colleges a year to 150 by enlisting corporate sponsors.
“I knew the mind games these kids were playing because I played them myself,” he said. “I felt I could reach them through my comedy and my own story.

It’s all there in the last 20 minutes of his act – when the students aren’t laughing anymore.

When they’re thinking about how is must feel to get in a fight with you kid brother one night, then go to a bar for a few drinks to cool down – only to return home a few hours later and find he put a shotgun to his chest and ended his life.

“Bernie captivated our students with his life experience involving binge drinking and its effects,” said Lori Mommaerts, director of student activities at Lakeland College.

“He had them in tears from laughter, then from his own personal tragedy.”

Last week, it was time again for the most important comedian in the country to hit the road and reach 20,000 to 30,000 more colleges kids who think they can handle binge drinking.

They can’t, and Bernie McGrenahan is going to make them laugh until they cry to prove it.