In this talk we will present experimental results on the measure of the orientation fluctuations of the director of a liquid crystal close to the Fr\'eedericksz transition, which is a second order transition driven by an electric field. We show that near the critical value of the field the spatially averaged order parameter has a generalized Gumbel distribution instead of a Gaussian one. The latter is recovered away from the critical point. We also show that after a quench at the critical point the system presents aging properties like those observed in spin glasses.