Damn You Rooster T Feathers!

Well I headlined at Rooster T Feathers Comedy Club in Sunnyvale, CA. For those who don't know about Rooster's, it's a very nice club in Silicon Valley that caters to the Silicon Valley type, ie white and Indian. This is perhaps one of the hardest clubs I've ever performed at. For some reason, I do decent to well there, however, I don't KILL. I hate not being able to KILL at a place. And I can't figure the audience out. They will laugh at stupid stuff and other comedians who are ok, but when I go up there they act like I'm going to rob them. I don't want to call the audience stupid, but they should know that I would only rob them in the parking lot, not in the actual club where I'm trying to get work at.

I hate not being able to figure an audience out. Usually you can feel them out and know if they want clean, dirty, political, sexual, racial, etc type of humor. Well I decided that since it was a white audience to try and be clean with as little sexual humor and cussing as possible. Other comedians before me did well and were alot more dirty than I was. So I'm on stage and my first bit, which is one of my very best bits because it always does well, it's like one of my aces in my deck of cards, well it doesn't do very well. I tend to tell stories that unfold and have punchlines throughout. This place decides to wait till the very last punchline before deciding whether they will laugh or stare at you and make you feel like kicking them. This is hard when you do long bits, because you rely on the laughter to build up to the end and keep momentum going. Silence is not a very good confidence booster on stage.

Luckily, I get them going pretty well with my college material, weight bits, and disney and internet gangs. The racial jokes for the most part do well, except for when I do a bit referring to white people being more likely to have incest, which I totally understand. I do it more for my benefit then theirs.

What sucks the most is that I don't think the owner of the club stayed for any if not the first few minutes of my set. I did this set in order for her to see me perform live and decide whether to book me or not. If she only saw my bomb the first joke, then I'm done there. I didn't see her after my set so I went home with my tail inbetween my legs (I have a really long butt). I figure if she emails me and wants to book me then cool, and if not, then oh well. This club's crowd may not be the crowd for me. They seem to enjoy more of the, how should I put it, "White" comedians like Gary Shandling. I think the only non-white comedian picture they had on the wall was Margeret Cho.

So I bid farewell to Rooster T Feathers and it's cracker-fest. I guess I'll stick to the clubs that have that certain element I like to call minorities. Actually, what gets me is that I usually do very well in front of white people. Its just THESE white people who get don't get me :( Maybe I should write more puns and analogy's for jokes so they can be pleased.

Actually I think I'm going to start focusing on my acting more than my comedy. At least for now while I'm in the bay area. For comedy I will do showcases to keep fresh and competitions and festivals. As far as getting booked, my main booker doesnt seem to want to book me anymore seeing as how I haven't heard from him in 2 months and can't get him to take or return my phone calls or emails. Oh well, it's his loss...right? *sniff* Please take me back booker. Well acting is paying more than comedy ever will right now, so I'm happy as long as I got something good going on. If you read this, sorry it wasn't very funny, I just felt like venting and I was trying to not cuss in case my mom reads it or something.

I got a pimple

Well today I wanted to talk about a couple of things: how my commercial shoot went and how my comedy show went last night.

For some reason, my body likes to mess with me.  I think it's self-destructive, because whenever I get a big gig something happens.  When I did my PlaysStation 2 commercial, the night before I started to lose my voice.  I barely made it through the shoot with the little bit of voice I had.  I had that deep, sexy voice, it was sexy except for every 2 minutes when I had to make that ugly clearing your throat noise.  So I get booked on Friday for this Battlefront commercial that shoots on Monday.  And out of nowhere this gigantic pimple erupts onto the side of my nose.  This is my self-destructive body going to work, because I never get pimples on my nose, and never that big.  This thing looked like a colony had formed.  When I get pimples it's where my facial hair grows as a result of ingrown hairs.  So I am freaking out because I can picture myself showing up and they look at my pimple and are like, yeah, we can't use you in the commercial with that thing on your face.  But the shoot takes place at this ILM studio which is owned by LucasArts and does the special effects and art for hundreds of movies including Star Wars.  So I'm thinking that they can CGI it off my face or make it turn into an ewok or something.  Fortunately, this was a big time shoot, so they had a professional make-up artist there who went to work on it and miraculously made it disappear under 20 coats of makeup.  So the pimple was handled.

Now the shoot was great, and the people from the ad agency and crew were awesome.  It is amazing to see the crew create completely different sets between shots.  Every scene was shot on a greenscreen so that they can add us into the actual Star Wars movie.  The commercial is to show how realistic the game is to the movie and as a result you feel like you in the movie, so it has 6 of us normal people running in scenes from the movie.  There will be 2 commercials made from the shoot and I'll either be running through snow after a stormtrooper or shooting in a jungle at some ewoks.  It was some oscarworthy performances I must say.  So it was a 12 hour shoot which means overtime and some extra cha-ching.  I hate when actors talk about how they have 15 hour days on sets, etc and how its a lot of work.  I did a 12 hour day and did probably 30 minutes of work at the beginning of the day and 10 minutes of work at the end of the day.  In between I chilled and read magazines, took naps, played videogames, read the bible and the koran and then did a comparison essay, so much was accomplished.  I love acting and would probably prefer to act than do comedy full-time.  The money is a lot better and you get treated like a king as opposed to shit in comedy rooms. 

Now last night I performed at the Avalon Club in Santa Clara as part of a comedy competition.  This was the second and last week of the "Pre-Finals" stage.  Yeah, have you ever heard of a competition with "PREFINALS".  I haven't till now.  The competition seems to have lasted about 6 months so it is good to finally be at the end.  I killed that night and will be going to court later this month for first degree...hehehehehe...no.  But I did do very well and placed first out of the five people selected to advance to the finals which will take place this upcoming Tuesday.  Hopefully I win, because otherwise I'd be a loser.  Plus the prize is $1,500 and thats a lot of pokemon cards I can buy with that kind of scratch.  Scratch?  I sound like I'm from the 50's.  So, seeing as how the competition has been dragged out so long, I think that if I win the finals then they'll probably make me advance to the post finals or something. 

Well tonight I will be headlining a showcase at Rooster T Feathers in Sunnyvale.  I'm looking forward to it, because if I want to get booked there then I need to do well.  When I sent the owner my tape she said that it wasn't very funny and she didn't hear many laughs.  Which is crazy, because I personally dubbed in a laugh track.  (It's hard to get an audience to come and watch you perform in your living room.)  So once again I will have to jump through some hoops like the good little comedian I am and prove myself to people, club by club.  With my luck there will be only 5 people in the audience and they'll be the waitresses wondering where the hell they went wrong in life to end up serving at a empty club on a wed night.  I'll let you know how it goes...

Star Wars: Battlefront

This is great.  I finally have a blogger thing.  Now all you people out there can really get to know me deeper than what you can get from my website.  The first thing I want to talk about is my new commercial that I landed.  It's for Star Wars: Battlefront, which I hear is a new videogame that will be coming out on PC, XBOX and PS2.  I'm excited because it's a national commercial that will be played on Cable, Network and in foreign markets.  Plus it's a funny commercial, which hopefully will mean more airtime and MONEY!  This is my second national commercial in the past 2 months.  My last commercial was for PS2 Online.  The videogame industry is being very generous to me lately, which works for me since I've spent hundreds of dollars on videogames and PS2 stuff.  So it's time I got my money back.

The audition for the commercial was great.  I showed up and read the sides and it said that one of the characters was obviously out-of-shape, which is PC for obviously fat.  I knew my chances of getting the commercial just went up 50%.  Usually when I audition for stuff, I try and look as thin as possible, wearing loose shirts and blankets, etc.  Having lost 50 pounds in the past year (Thank you ATKINS), I was worried that I would come across as too anorexic on camera with my 260+ pound body.  So when I read the script I tore off my lose shirt and auditioned in my thin, belly hugging undershirt.  And in auditions they make you do a profile shots where you face the camera then turn to the left and then the right, very similar to a prison line-up where they make you do your profiles.  I don't know if they make everyone do this at an audition or if they did this especially for me to make me feel more at home.  But as I did my profiles, I made sure to try and stick out my stomach to appear as much as Buddha as possible.  Apparantly it worked because I landed the role later that week.

The only bad part is that I was suppose to go down to LA and perform at the Conga Room the same day as the commercial shoot (which is Monday, July 26th).  The show is for consideration to be in this new documentary on latino stand up comedians, called "standUP".  Unfortunately, I had to cancel.  Hopefully I can reschedule for the following Monday.

Well this is my first Blog.  I like this.  I will try and post stuff alot and hopefully someone will eventually read it.