Our Santex Team Member, Andy Palacios, tells us about his experience doing Stand Up perfomances.
- Why and how did you come up with the idea of doing stand-up?
I am always saying silly things, and many friends asked me to do or dedicate myself to putting together monologues of the stories that I told them. It was very common in my previous jobs to tell my colleagues something that had happened to me on the weekend and it made everyone laugh. Someone always says to me “Please Andy, dedicate yourself to this…leave the IT world!”. This tells me two things, either I am a very good humorist or I am a very bad QA hahaha.
- What is humor to you?
Humor means so much to me. I find it really difficult to relate with someone without humor between us. But beyond that, it seems very important to me to be able to face difficult moments with humor. I’ve always said that no matter how difficult or ugly some moment in your life is, it will always become a good anecdote.
- Which are your favourite topics for the stand up shows?
Usually, I talk about things that happen to me, or that I see in my day to day life. Also I talk about things that happen to people that are close to me. Some people tell me an anecdote and in the show I exaggerate it or invent details which are a little more unusual.
What I don’t like is being rude, although sometimes I use it, it’s only so that the language sounds natural like when I talk to my friends. Also, I don’t like to attack anyone, I only try to talk about things that could happen to any of us.
- Do you remember how your first show went? How did it go?
It was recent, in February…so I remember it really well! It was at the end of a Stand Up workshop that I did. The idea was that at the end of that workshop we would go to a bar and do the show. I was really excited, but never afraid or nervous. I visualized that nothing bad would come of it. The truth is that the experience exceeded my expectations.
- What are the best and worst things that have happened to you on stage?
The best thing was the surprise I had when I realized that there were people who enjoyed what I was doing. The truth is that I still have very little experience to have had something really bad happen to me. The only thing I can say is that is very difficult to perform the show when half of the public is distracted and talks or makes noises.
- Do you admire a comedian? Who and why?
Although I’ve seen very few live shows, I really like Fernando Sanjiao, Sebastian Weinraich, Luciano Mellera, Fernanda Mettili from Argentina. The best international performers are Aziz Ansari, Dane Cook, Iliza Shlesinger, among others.
