Stand up!

I enjoy going to stand up clubs and get a good laugh. I knew that there's a stand up club called Comedy Idiot in Helsinki in English, and they have shows usually on the last Thursday of every month. That was the case also in January, so I asked some foreign friends to go there with me. There was another Finnish with me, and also a girl from USA and a boy from Dominican Republic. We headed to Cafe Mascot in Kallio neighborhood and got quite nice seats close to the stage.

The show started around 9 pm and lasted 2,5 hours. There were several comedians, some of them Finnish and some from other countries, but they all performed in English. The foreign ones were Scottish, English and Swedish-Argentinian, and also the other host is from Canada. And like it quite often happens in stand up shows, you enjoy about some comedians more than the others. The Scottish guy Ray Zambino had a really strong Scottish accent, so every now and then it was quite hard for me to understand what he said. Some of the subjects that he talked about had also quite difficult vocabulary. That is maybe the reason what separates native speakers from the other English speakers, because they use more difficult words. Anyway, he was talking about the news that some researchers had succeeded to create human-pig embryos and were hoping to grow replacement organs for humans. After the show I needed to find the article and read it, here you can also read what The Huffington Post writes about it. New words that I learned are embryo and chimera, really useful, right?

The English comedian was Paul Westlake, he is an old man who has lived in Finland for tens of years already. He had some pretty funny viewpoints to Finnish people and Finland. I have seen him performing earlier too, so I knew some of his stories before.

My favorite comedian of the foreign ones was definitely Sven Fernandez, who is partly Swedish and partly Argentinian. He had so hilarious stories about categorizing people by their races. He had a story of his exchange year in USA, when he decided to mark himself as a black person to his dormitory's personal data form. He also told, that he's often questioned carefully at airports, because he has Swedish passport and looks like a terrorist!

All in all the evening was really fun, we all had a good laugh. When the show ended, we needed to hurry home to be able to wake up early in the morning to go to work and school. Maybe I will go to the club in February too, we'll see.

Hours studied: 3
Total hours so far: 3/71