APAture 2008; Laugh On

On Tuesday Night, I went to Laugh On one of APAture’s 10 day events on Capp Street. I've never been to a comedy show, so honestly, I didn't know what to expect from it. The beginning of the night was a bit slow, after the first performance I wasn’t too impressed. The jokes the first performer made were not appealing to me. To be honest, they actually made me feel a bit uncomfortable for many of the jokes he made were sexual jokes. I was afraid the whole night was going to be like this, but the next performance was better than the first. The next performance was a group performance. They did an improv based on information they collected from an audience member. This performance caught my attention because Irene had told us that we were going to do an improv performance in class based on the information we read in our hyphen magazines and the whole time I was thinking… how on earth do they do it? There is no way I could ever pull something like that off. Performing in front of a class is hard enough, but to improv a performance… we’ll see how that goes. But seriously, I give them props for begin able to perform like that because it is something I definitely can not do. The next act was from a half Vietnamese half Jewish guy. This guy got the audience on the edge of their seats wanting to hear more. And the last performer, an Indian guy, just took the night away.

It’s sad but true, that most of the jokes that we find funny are stereotypical or racist jokes. It’s only funny because most of what we joke about is true. By laughing about it, it does not necessarily mean that we agree with it, but its reality and it is happening in our lives today. By making a joke about the issue doesn’t mean that we don’t care about it either, it just makes us realize that if we all understand the joke and understand the meaning behind the joke why don’t we do something about the issue?

I really enjoyed the last two performances; their jokes were incorporated into Asian American culture that we are well aware of. We laugh because we know it’s true.