Most of the seats at TakeOut Comedy, a small basement space on Elgin Street, are empty. At the high point of the night, there are 17 people in the audience, and they’re mostly amateur stand-up comedians waiting for five minutes on stage to test their material. It’s open mic night, and, as you might expect, the quality of talent varies wildly. This is the grassroots of Hong Kong’s still-fledgling comedy scene.

Sex – porn and cum in particular – is a popular topic. “I have a dream... that one day my dreams won’t be wet,” goes one attempt. Another man resorts to reading out an ‘enlarge your penis’ spam message. A different would-be comic nervously flips through pages of his notebook, before giving up hope: “I’ve lost the page – that’s all I’ve got tonight! Thank you!” Actually, that gets one of the biggest laughs of the night.

All the way through, 42-year-old Pete Grella is sitting in a dark second row off to the side of the stage, shaking his caffeinated left leg back and forward like a speedy metronome. As his turn in the spotlight approaches, he uses the light from his cellphone to read his notes.

Once onstage, the newbie joke-teller transforms into a man of confidence, using his large frame to peer down at the audience and deliver punchy one-liners that he’s considering for the international comedy fest. Not all of them work – a rambling bit about the image on an ultrasound looking like raisin bread is met with dead silence – but others elicit belly laughs. Or at least hearty chuckles.

“I was in China recently,” Grella says at the start of one story, before explaining: “China’s one of the dancers at the strip club I go to.”

Not bad for a man who took his first run at comedy in early August.

“Because I am new, I don’t have pre-set expectations,” says Grella of his participation in the festival. “I’m not expected to do well, so I don’t have to carry this heavy burden.”

Grella, general manager of an IT firm, arrived in Hong Kong from New York City three and a half years ago. He’d never done comedy but decided to give improv a try after seeing the Whose Line Is It Anyway? cast perform here earlier this year. He then took TakeOut Comedy founder Jami Gong’s stand-up workshop and progressed to the solo stage. It’s been a speedy indoctrination process from there, and now Grella finds himself performing most weekends at the club.

“People come to our shows, they want to laugh, so they are more forgiving,” he says, explaining the high he gets from performing to audiences who are willing to cut a rookie a little slack.

Back at the club, he is clearly enjoying himself. Though he started the night bleary-eyed from a difficult day in the office, he shouts encouragement to his friends as they take the stage, and he’s always one of the first to laugh – loudly – when presented with the opportunity to do so.

Tomorrow he’ll go back to another difficult day at the IT firm – but at least he knows a little light relief is never far away.

Hamish McKenzie

Read our profiles:

The rookie: Pete Grella

The leng-mui: Matina Leung

The breakout: Vivek Mahbubani