Whew! A couple things.
Comedy shows are not geared towards people that are "easily offended" (I prefer to think of myself as sensitive and attentive to issues that I care about, but yeah, in the context of this room full of un-ironical plaid shirts and uses of the phrase "wicked pisser", I am for sure easily offended).
With that being said, I laughed a lot! I was impressed with the caliber of talent, and thank goodness, because I am at a loss to think of anything more painful than a long evening of bad stand-up comedy.
FEMINIST BONUS POINTS: Five out of the eleven competitors were women and they all drew many laughs, one male comedian managed to make several joyful references to his wife without painting her as a horrible nag, and the outright typical asshole misogynist stand-up comics drew no laughs at all.
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(By the way, my friend was awesome. Anthony Scibelli. Check him out here.)
But I did notice a theme in every single commediennes' act: weight. All stand-up comics want to endear themselves to the audience, and every single woman minus one started out by saying that they've lost this much weight, for claps. (That's another thing: many of the men endear themselves by saying, "look here, I'm just as much of an asshole and loser as you if not more, isn't that hilarious?" and the women have to work the sexy, desirable choose-one-cutsie shopaholic ditz-or-dark jaded "other" woman-hating "good" commedienne. I voted the shit out of the one comic who didn't fit into either of those, PLUS she wasn't wearing a bra, rock on, you hippie.)
I was the most disappointed by the first female competitor, a born-and-bred Boston Italian who manages a plus-size clothing store during the day. Even though she makes a couple positive comments about her own weight (self-aware that a sexy fat girl can't be empirically sexy but just a fetish), she spent her act screaming at her fat patrons: that they don't deserve nice fashion, that their bodies are disgusting, and somehow they shouldn't care about being able to purchase work out clothes because they probably don't want to do that anyway.
The explosive audience reaction was the most disturbing to me. Regardless of her own contradictory views, she has to sell herself to the audience AND make them laugh, and clearly making fun of fat people is a surefire sell. The audience laughter was unrestrained. Of course it was uncomfortable for the fat woman to be cracking fat jokes, but she was giving the audience her permission to hate on fat people.
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