Me and Fourth Place...

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I competed in an Open Mic Competition yesterday. It wen't pretty well. Considering that I got fourth place in the Standup Competition (a long story that does not need to bear repeating), I really should not have made it to this competition. But, since the third place winner could not make it due to a conflict, I got to take his place in this little bit.
To make a long story short, I do my comedy routine. Considering how not-so-well other times have gone (like forgetting punchlines and jokes), I do quite well. But then again, the guy who plays the piano and sings songs about stalkers and bad dates is coming up next and he will kill the crowd in a good way. Compared against him, my performance would be a bad night. The best joke of the night is this one involving world peace and M&M candy:

This world is messed up. I think the world should be like a bag of M&M’s. They represent the world, as it should be. Different colors on the outside, same center in the inside. They exist together, making a delicious mix. Brown ones: African-Americans and Hispanics. Red ones: Native Americans. Yellow ones: Asians. And the white...there aren’t any white M&M’s. No
wonder why things work so well. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Could you imagine the situation if there were white M&M’s? The same crap that has happened before. They would enslave the brown M&M’s. Then they would steal space from the red ones. Finally, they would blame the yellow ones for taking away all of the jobs.

It's nice to make jokes that poke fun of serious issues with a politically incorrect and irreverent sense of humor. One of the poetry slam people talked about race, but in a more emotional and more eloquently stated manner. I just do the jokes.
During the intermission while the judges are tallying the scores, the judges allow audience members/participants to hit the mikes again. So I decide to entertain the crowd with some impressions. This went over very well. It seems like that people do not expect an Asian to do Sammy Davis Junior in an eerily similar manner. I probably should have tossed in the Woody Allen bit about adoption, but that might have been a little too much. I should try that next time. Maybe. I think. I guess.
To make a potentially long story short, I get fourth place. One place away from getting a gift certificate that can be used to buy things in Downtown Lawrence. Fourth place. So close, and yet so far. Which, oddly enough, whenever I do these competitions, is the ranking I get every time. There must be a strangely perverse reason for this. Not that I am complaining or anything, but why fourth? It may be due to a certain lack of smoothness in delivery, but why fourth?
Oh well. This is the way things are in the world. I can't complain about this. All that matters is that I did a good job and can be proud in what kind of work I have done.
Then again, if I did get something higher than fourth place, like third, second, or even first, I might consider that a larger fluke. And I might wonder what sick sense of humor God has in these things. The philosophy I shall leave for others to worry about.
I guess that I shall have to work on the jokes and the delivery. There's the spring semester contest and I need to do better. Get funnier jokes. Work on delivery. Maybe I can get third place. Or I could just get another fourth place. This might be a repeating cycle.

That's all for now.