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last night realized a long time dream for me. i finally got to see russell peters live. ok, so maybe the dream wasn’t that long lived since i just found out about russell peters about a year ago, but since watching his clip, i’ve been a huge fan on the lookout for opportunities to catch him live and see new material from him. when i got the email about the comedy jam @ the leadership development conference last month i jumped at the chance to see him live. it helped that there were a ton of other great comedians lined up for that night too. katie and i decided to go all out and get the nice seats in the inner bowl.

Carlos Mencia, D.L. Hughley, Tracy Morgan, Gabriel Iglesias, Pablo Francisco, Russell Peters, Willie Barcena, Lisa Lampanelli, Steve Trevino, Brad Williams all performed. the biggest shocker was lisa lampanelli, this italian-from-the-bronx motherly comedian with one of the foulest mouths i’ve heard. i appreciated her ability to pull off racial humor as an older white woman and i think it was pretty jarring but funny for a lot of people watching. tracy morgan was pretty good, reusing some material from when i went to see him at santa clara. d.l. hughley was pretty funny too. i was impressed with his delivery and he touched on some good topics.

russell peters was right near the end of the show and he came out sporting a white blazer, a pink shirt and some white shoes. he looked a little funny like that, but i gotta give him props for trying a different look. his pace was slower than the comedians before him, and a lot of the other comedians had already played the race card pretty hard, so i was a little leery of what material he was going to come out with. he started off with jokes about the differences between south asians and middle easterners, which was pretty funny, and then went on to some of the differences between the east asian groups. it was “educational humor” to some extent, but pretty good and well received. he ended his stint with the “somebody gonna get a hurt real bad” story and people were laughing a lot. overall about 1/3 old material and 2/3 new material. i was pretty satisfied, but there was this nagging sense of self-awareness during a lot of his routine. i kept looking around to see if people were enjoying his jokes and i think it has to do with my preoccupation with acceptance of south asian american “stuff” by non-south asian americans. by “stuff”, i’m talking about literature, movies, comedy, people, etc etc. i think more than anything else, by the end of his routine, i felt relieved.

mencia was the headliner and the closer for the show. when everything was said and done, the show lasted 4.5 hours. yes, FOUR AND A HALF HOURS. i definitely feel like i got my money’s worth. mencia was pretty awesome, if not a bit controversial. i appreciated his “forward” thinking about how slow and stupid people can crash a party. and he’s not even talking about people who really aren’t smart, more about people who choose to be stupid and uninformed or just lack plain common sense. i loved his critique of one of the tourist tsunami victims. he describes the guy filming the extremeley low tide, a tide so low that the water has receded for miles back into the ocean. then he stopped and a few people in the audience started laughing. common sense sort of tells you that if all that water disappears in a low tide… it’s going to come back in a high tide at some point, but he just railed the tourist for his stupidity. he did a little bit of the same for the new orleans victims, which i thought was a little off color but i have my own thoughts on why things went downhill so quickly there. michael eric dyson put it best when he said something to the effect of how difficult it was for people ot leave the area when they didn’t have cars and the public transportation infrastructure just stopped. anyway back to the show….

over 20,000 people showed up for the comedy jam, which was pretty impressive. more impressive was my maneuvering to get out of shoreline in less than 10 minutes! when i was there last time for kmel summer jam, we were stuck in terrible traffic and it took us like 45 minutes to get out. all in all, the show rocked, i wish i had dinner before i got there, and i’m looking forward to russell peters’ new tv show on the WB next spring =)