Learning to Laugh

The emcee came on stage hopping around. He did a small choreographed dance. I was impressed by his synchronized movement. He danced, and shirked his body about to an inner cacophony. After a few moments he took the mike and began to regale the audience with his humor, mainly making jokes about Manny Pacquaio, how filipinos work in airports, and filipino height. I kept an open mouth grin marked on my face as his words flowed out.

I'd come down with two friends to see the filipino King's of Comedy at the Improv in San Jose. Having never been to a comedy club before I joined my filipino friends in the night out. The club demanded a minimum of two items from the menu (the water was almost as much as the beer; 5.75) and the ticket price was twenty dollars for the slightly over 2 hour event.

The first two comedians were the best of the five. The later funny men were stoned which may have impacted their ability to entertain the crowd. The first comedian of the night was a flamboyant gay filipino. He talked about his shoes for a while, getting ice cream eaten out of his ass, and an awkward ending. The second comedian did a dancing bit and some funny stuff on the microphone. One of the later comedians was pulled off the stage because he wasn't that funny. He was also wearing a shirt that said "Neenja Turtles." Perhaps a correlation?

I've had limited experience with stand up comedy. I don't watch much of it on television and have never gone out to a club to see it, sans saturday. I have had a brief acquaintance with it when my identical twin brother took a stand up comedy class at his liberal lefty shit college, as if the cost of his tuition wasn't enough of a laugh. For three weeks he called me up and told me jokes he'd found on the internet. Most of the jokes revolved around rednecks and tic tacs in his butt. I found myself embarrassed to look like him, specifically when he went to the corner pharmacy and asked for mint flavored suppositories.



The repeated punch lines I think went to my head, demanding pugilism.