Yoshi's Island

We went to the Monday comedy show at Westwood Brewing Company last night. Predictably, as with any collection of amatuer stand-up comedians, most were terrible. There was one girl in particular - she was heavy and all her jokes were about being a fat girl - whose set was actually the exact opposite of funny. You felt bad listening to her and afterwards, the whole scene was decidedly depressing.

That's when you know you have no future in stand-up comedy.

I mean, all her material was bad one-liners, which isn't a good start, but I do think that women have to be more careful with self-depreciating humor than men. A fat guy can make fat jokes at his own expense all day, but I think we as a society have more sympathy for the fat girls (probably because we all know it's harder on the self-esteem to be a fat girl than a fat guy).

I'm not saying a fat girl can't make fat jokes. Many do. I'm just saying it helps, for a girl, to have a steely, no-bullshit, confidant attitude to pull it off. (Like, oh I don't know...Roseanne). This girl seemed sensitive about her weight, like comedy was a good way for her to work out these personal issues, and it kind of wasn't really keeping with the mood.

But one comic was pure unadulterated genius. Seriously. You won't be seeing him on television any time soon, because not a single one of his jokes is reproducable in any advertising-supporting medium. He is the single filthiest comic I have ever heard.

His name is Yoshi and he's an unassuming Japanese guy. But his jokes are all deplorable, every last single one. They are highly misogynistic, including riffs on binding women's feet and constant references to beating, raping or killing women. (For example, after a joke about having sex with a handicapped women, Yoshi motions that he would, following intercourse, "kick the bitch down the stairs.")

Granted, these descriptions do not sound funny. They sound horrifying. I know...I agree...When my roommates first saw Yoshi several months ago and told me about him, I doubted their story. Either (1) he was not as crude as they intimated or (2) he wasn't funny.

But he's far more crude than they intimated and he's still funny.

Why is this? I don't think everything crude or deplorable is funny inherently. If you said, "I like having sex with crippled girls and then kicking them down staircases," I wouldn't laugh. But when Yoshi said it, I feared I might have a stroke from laughing so hard.

Delivery and having a good, charismatic persona are so important is stand-up. So much more important than material. Yoshi's oddball style makes the set work, and his genuine enthusiasm for stories about mothers dropping Down Syndrome-afflicted babies off of bridges comes through with every joke.

I mean, good material is important, trust me. We saw a guy do like five jokes in a row where the set-up of the joke was inaccurate. Like, "did you guys ever notice that all Mexicans ride thsoe oversized, old-timey bicycles?" Or, "You know what's weird? France invading Switzerland."

There was a guy in the crowd correcting him every time, too. Like, "I just went down to Santa Monica Pier. It never gets crowded there."

"Yes, it DOES" the heckler would respond.

"I get a lot of parking tickets..."

"No way!"