I bought two tickets to see Aziz Ansari when he comes to the Punchline in SF in January. Woo hoo!! He's pretty funny. In Sept. we got to see Patton Oswald at Cobbs, it was great. Patton had a whole bunch of new material, and then he riffed on the audience. He was pretty quick on his feet.

The guy who went before Patton kinda bombed, at least with the 8pm crowd (he's some guy who does an impression of car lot ballons). He was more of a soCal humor guy while everyone who had come to see Patton at the 8pm showing were more into nerd humor (they loved Patton's bit about the iPhone). I thought that maybe the guy who does the balloon impression (which didn't even go over that well with the crowd, it was his last bit and really, people politely laughed) needed some "know your audience" pointers. (a) It was 8pm, (b) a lot of 30 somethings, (c) in SF, who were (d) going to see Patton Oswald. This equals nerdish individuals, probably well educated, who are not drunk and are expecting a particular sort of nerd/highly sarcastic (especially about pop culture) humor (I bet the 10pm showing was a younger audience who were probably slightly inebriated). The local guy who was the MC knew this and killed with a lot of self deprecating humor. When this opener guy figured out he wasn't doing so well, he started flailing and trying to riff on stuff, "hey, Redwood City, what kind of lame name is that..." stuff. Poor guy, at the end he was just like "f--- it" and did his famous bit, and we politely clapped, but even the balloon impression didn't go down that well. We were pretty impressed by Patton's ability to riff on the audience without really insulting anyone. He found two female wedding parties in the audience who were doing this event as their night out before the wedding, and did a fun comparison of the more rowdier party (calling them drunk pixies) to the other group. He even got them to pony up their wedding plans and his drawing of the comparisons had the audience in stitches.

Aziz seems to definetly be more in the nerd humor category. I saw some online clips of him and some of the human giant guys doing dramatic readings of their hate mail (with commentary) and a clip of his bit where he wanted the first google link to pop up for him was that "Aziz Ansari is a bad ass!"

Hubby loves Human Giant. I like a lot of their skits (especially the ones that riffed on Superman II or going back in time for the sole purpose of getting some Pepsi clear) but some are a miss for me (the baby talent agency ones). We both liked when they took over MTV and keep wondering when the show will come on again.

Anyways, I hope the tickets come in the mail with no delays and that I manage to not lose the tickets before the show.

Tags: aziz ansari, human giant, patton oswlad