Laughs were handed out at Rainbow Room

Jul 16 2010

Last Friday night, Candy Bar @ The Rainbow Room had a comedy night featuring
Brandon James Mason.

It was a night of laughs, which began with open mic. Mason performed for an intimate audience. However, it was unfortunate that the audience did not really seem as lively as Mason deserved.

People really missed out on a real opportunity to take in Mason's sometimes crude, but always hilarious, comedy. The hilarity was not always in the words that Mason spoke, but rather in his timing.

"[My favourite part of my routine] is when people are laughing days afterward, when they see what I was talking about," Mason said. "Like, they laugh at the show or whatever, but it's not really as funny as it will be in a couple of days when it actually happens to them or when they see something that I joke about and go, 'oh my god.'"

Mason joked about the "inventions" that you make when you're high only to find out in the end that they're already invented. "Okay, what if when you're hot and you don't want to wear pants, you could wear like...butt pants?" Brandon mused.

He also joked with a woman in the front row about age. He said that he had once felt racist when he saw an Asian man rear-end another Asian man. The most off-hand joke, however, was one about sponsoring a child through World Vision. He told us that he was encouraged to send pictures and letters to his sponsor child, and "every night at dinner time he took a picture of [his] dinner and sent it to the child... no, of breakfast because it's the most important meal of the day." He then added that he had told the joke not for laughs but to create a sunken feeling in people's stomachs.

Mason ended his set with a joke about having "the talk" with his girlfriend, "as everyone will," about how many people each of them has slept with and the dilemma between whether you lie about the number, or if you really lie. He and his girlfriend at the time had wrote down each of their totals, he had found out that he was "lucky number seven." She was revolted, to say the least, when she found out that she was number 16. The pun being that he had realized she had read his number upside down.

"My words of inspiration for aspiring comedians would be to just keep playing shows, no matter what, whether the audience is dry or if you have a roaring crowd. Try the same material because different crowds react differently," he added.

Sitting in the audience, I couldn't help but laugh at all of Mason's jokes. Although they were crude, it truly was observational humour of everyday things that people sometimes choose to ignore.

The crowd favourites included the anecdotes of high inventions, pocket dialling and the talk.

Mason will be MCing at Charlie Murphy's comedy show at the Port Theatre in
Nanaimo on Sept. 17. To learn more about Brandon James Mason, go to his
Myspace page www.myspace.com/growupbrandon or look for his channel on
Youtube entitled GrowUpBrandon.