I Came, I Performed, I Did OK

Greetings and welcome back to The Un-Zone, the only site on the Internet devoted to all things related to Un. It's time for one of those updates that make this site so wonderfully Un-esque.

As I stated earlier in my last post, I would give an update on how things went with the Open Mic thing at Stanford and Sons. The quick and easy version: It went pretty well. People laughed at my jokes and I used up all three minutes. The end. You now can leave.
But you all probably want something more than that. Well, here it is, in glorious technicolor detail. With some ramblings and tangents to other topics. Buckle up cause it might take a while of your time. As if you have anything better to do. If you did, you wouldn't be reading this blog, now would you?
I arrived there at 6:30, as I am a big stickler on being at places early. Nobody was there except the guy running the place and another relatively new guy at this. Just my luck. When 7:00 rolled around, nearly everyone was there (at least those who were going to perform). The pre-comedy meeting should have started by then, but then again, nothing ever starts on time. So I got to talk to a lady from Arkansas who became a Tibetan Buddhist and a guy who was perpetually drunk. I always seem to manage to meet the strangest yet nicest people around.
A quick tangent. Stanford and Sons is smoky. People smoke cigarettes like they're about to disappear the next day. And the booze flows. Real gritty place. It's not the nice spic and span places you find in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. Which makes it so declasse. God, I sound so weird right now. Anyways...
It's finally showtime and people are giving me advice. This crazy guy who has the nickname of Chicken and who starred in cinematic classics like XXX and Blackhawk Down. The dude is crazy and will do anything for a laugh. And did he make people laugh by bumping and grinding in front of a guy's face and pretending he was having sex with Bigfoot. Go figure. Some of the people were not so funny and some were funny. One girl had a lighter shaped like a penis. Strange. Real strange. Yadda yadda yadda. Blah blah blah.
It's my turn. So I go on stage and begin with the classic of: "I've got three minutes to make you laugh. Just like having sex. But with an extra two and a half minutes." After that, it went swimmingly well. At least so I thought and so did the rest of the audience.
Some comedy tips. At least stuff I've figured out. Jokes that are too cerebral (i.e. jokes about stuff like the Bhagavad Gita) are not funny. It is a subject that few people will understand. Jokes about sex, however, are pretty funny. You can't go wrong with them unless you're in Westburo Baptist Church. That's a different story. Making fun of yourself is a good thing as if you can laugh at yourself, people can laugh at you. If you do go into matters that are racist or even stereotypical, well, be careful. Some people get offended by that. If, however, you are making Asian jokes and you are Asian, well, that's different. You're making fun of yourself technically so the audience thinks it's cool to laugh. The use of the certain four letter words is fine. But using them over and over again in the same sentence like "I'm like what the is that is doing? Is that on crack?" gets tedious and therefore not as funny as you think it is. I do use profanity, but using it that much to "sound" funny, no. And finally, be yourself, plow on through, and have fun. That's the important thing. If you're confident and you're having fun, the audience will laugh sooner or later. Maybe it might be when you walk off stage because you stunk worse than a runover skunk in the middle of the highway during a summer day.
Yes, I made jokes about Asian stereotypes like eating dogs, having an Asian mother, and other stuff of that ilk. But I made it funny. I did, however, reached the time limit of three minutes. The emcee said that I did a damn good job for a first-timer at Open Mic. And he got into the act by thanking me for not doing three minutes of calculus jokes. Oddly enough, I could make three minutes worth of calculus jokes, but that's not funny. Unless you're a mathematician.
It was a fun, albeit way too smoky experience. I will have to wash my clothes thoroughly to get rid of the stench of cigarette smoke out of them. That's the only downside.

That's all for now.