Jack FM contest at Parlor

I was racking my brain trying to figure out how to put together a "clean" 3 minute set for the Jack FM contest. I planned to dedicate some part of the afternoon to it, but then i took a 4 hour nap. Got to the venue and worked on a list of jokes, solidified it, and then found out that their idea of "clean" was just no F-bombs or other dirty words. Decided to save the fisting jokes anyway, and did Wutang (abridged) / I see fists / amish scifi / jews for jesus / circumcised mormons / naughty republican. Thats a lot of jewish material. I was up 31st, and was in and out of the room, trying to nail down and remember my jokes and segues in the proper order. Because of this, I didnt really get to see too many of the other comics, but from what I saw, nobody was getting great crowd reaction. Then I went up there and killed it.

I really like the lighting at parlor. The stage is lit enough to put the focus on the comedian and see him/her clearly, but its also possible to see the people in the audience from the stage. I love being able to see people react to the jokes; its so much more like being funny in real life, and you feed off of that energy.

Other comics have been telling me this (especially Billy): you start off nice and clean and friendly and self-effacing and you build up good will. Then at the end you hit them with the dirtier stuff and they dont feel bad about it because they already like you. Thats how it went tonight. I added a couple nice elements to pre-existing jokes. On the circumcising mormons I added: Id just drive around with a shovel, looking at those "Im a mormon" signs, thinking "yeah, youre a mormon now. Wait till I get to you". On naughty republican, the line "how whitebread do you need to be before I look like a rebellious sexual choice?" always gets a big laugh, so I added: "thanks for agreeing that im sexually uninteresting". Very much a Myq Kaplan style tag.

I had two people come up to me to compliment me on my tuesday Jai Thai set, which I didnt even think was very good. I debuted the pinata joke, which got very little response, but im pretty sure that joke is a winner and im going to keep working on it.