Two minutes with Albert Im

photo / Kristin Hillery Albert Im 

That Other Paper’s Christine Acker chatted with local comic Albert Im after he performed at Punchline, a weekly stand-up comedy open mic at ColdTowne Theater.

That Other Paper So what’s your name?

Albert Im Albert Im. I-M, like Mary. Like im-mature.

TOP Ba-dum-chuh.

AI Actually, I’ve gotten a little bit of mileage out of that.

TOP I bet you have. So how did you start doing comedy?

AI I’d kinda thought about it growing up. I’d always thought it’d be something interesting to do but I grew up in Hawaii and there isn’t really like a huge stand-up comedy scene. I think just generally in Hawaii there weren’t really a lot of opportunities to explore those sorts of things so I kinda put that aside. And then I just decided maybe two months ago to get into it and decided to take a class over at Cap City.

TOP When did you come to Texas, or when did you leave Hawaii? What’s that story?

AI That story is I was in Hawaii up through high school and went to Chicago to go to school. I was there for about six or seven years. Then I moved out here. I’ve been in Austin for a little more than three years, I think.

TOP How did you hook up with ColdTowne and Punchline?

AI I actually saw a show here. I’ve been doing a little bit of acting and some stage stuff here and then some of my friends were checking out an improv show here so we all came out here together and then I noticed that they also did some stand-up acts and stuff like that. I just made a note of that so when I started doing open mics I just made sure I—

TOP Whoops! Time’s up.