The thing about bragging is that if I ever dare do it, I can guarantee that I’ll soon get my comeuppance.
After the excitment of Temple, I did a show last night at a pizza restaurant in a strip mall on the outskirts of San Antonio. It went ok, but I knew from early on that the audience and I didn’t really care much for each other. They were attentive enough and there were some decent laughs but I felt more out of place there than in small-town Texas.
I’ve been told that I should write some Mexican jokes if I want to do better in South Texas. But I have no real point of reference – I’d never even met a Latino type person until I moved here. When I was a student in London, we had a Tex Mex restaurant – Break for the Border – nearby but it was mainly staffed by Irish. Not that any of us really noticed or cared. The extent of my culinary exploration was the Chimichanga – though swapping out the side of black beans for fries of course. But I suppose at least Mexicans and I have the ‘(il)legal alien’ thing in common.
The other prob last night was that I tend not to like playing places where you can see the whole crowd because I always focus on the person/people that aren’t laughing and get all bloody-minded about trying to get a smile out of them. In this case, it was a guy who looked like a very scary, non-gay version of the Mr Clean man. He wasn’t smiling like Mr Clean and he had a dark goatee beard. But he did have his arms very firmly folded. Perhaps I should have pointed out the similarity to him.
Anyway, it was just nice to be reminded that I’m nothing special when it comes to stand-up and I’d like to thank San Antonio’s north side for that.