Michael Palascak is moving up the ranks in Comedy Central's Open Mic Fight. He sucker-punched the competition in Chicago and will continue his battle in LA. Here's his profile on the Comedy Central website. Michael checked in with the Bastion and gave us the scoop:

I was made aware of the contest via Comedy Central's website and various emails from comedians. The contest has a couple rounds. First, everyone submits a 7 minute clip, then they pick 8 people from each region to compete, then they pick one person to move on from each of the 9 regions to go to LA and 3 second place people (voted on via internet) and then in LA they pick 3 finalists who are voted on by internet people. The winner gets a spot on a Comedy Central Stand-up show, a tour date, and $10,000 dollars. The other two get $5,000. All of this is probably explained better on their website. Go there and vote for Hannibal in August!

I have limited computer capability so I had my friend help me download my clip to Comedy Central's website to submit. Unfortunately, instead of downloading my stand-up he downloaded 10 seconds of moon footage from his independent film. It was just footage of the moon--not very representative of my stand-up comedy... so I put a package together and sent it out via regular mail to them. I was afraid they wouldn't watch it, so I attached a cover letter saying how I really enjoyed their television channel, especially the Colbert Report and that movie where the kid waits outside of that girl from Felicity's house all summer, I think it's called "8 Days a Week."

In regards to the material I chose...I really wasn't exactly sure how to approach it. One of my friends, Tommy Johnagin, said to just try and put together as set with as many laughs as possible. So i went to a lot of open mics and just tried out my set different ways in front of as many different crowds as possible. And then I went back and listened to my sets, and picked the jokes that I seemed to really enjoy doing and my stuff about living at home.

The whole chicago region was a lot of fun. There were so many really good comedians in it. Hannibal, Sean Flannery, Kumail, Reggie Reg and some from out of state, Sherif Hedayat, Ryan Singer--from Dayton, had a really good set, also Demetrius Nicodemus. and it was really cool meeting them. And a lot of my family were able to come see it, so that was pretty cool.

The next step is to go to LA and try and do really well.

What do I hope this will do for me? Focus a lot on something I like to do. Like I think it's really easy for me to get distracted and work on other things. Having the contest date will allow me to focus even more on stand-up and that should be fun.

- Elizabeth McQuern