The stage's four spotlights shine on him, making it easier to see if Edwin Li is breaking into a nervous sweat, but he's showing no traces of the jitters. His conservative looking attire--dressy grey sweater and collared shirt--draws a striking counterpoint to his silly humor, and makes his funniness more surprising. After five minutes of working the crowd, he gets off stage and the audience roars with "woo's!" and claps so loud that the room seems like it's vibrating.

Li is one of eight student comedians from SF State who competed on April 7th at Café Du Nord in San Francisco for the chance to win the title of funniest college student in America. Rooftop Comedy, an organization of comedians that is dedicated to spreading comedy around the globe, organized the competition, and traveled to thirty-two different colleges around the country in search of the eight funniest comedians from each school.

The Rooftop's National College Comedy Competition has several rounds of eliminations that last until June of this year, and all the teams are aiming to get the chance to compete in Aspen, Colorado for the national finals. West Coast comedians begin the competition by taking on other West Coast schools, and then, later compete against East Coast colleges.

Of the twelve people who auditioned for the SF State team in February, only the chosen eight went up against the UC Santa Cruz team at Café Du Nord.

Li, an Asian American studies major at SF State, started performing stand-up when he was sixteen. The now twenty-three-year-old has a childish, adolescent sense of humor, which he describes as being: "like a little kid trying to be funny." But he also comes off as being very clever by adding details about current events in his routines and poking fun at racial stereotypes. Much of the material he uses on stage comes from the free writing he tries to do everyday in his journal. No stranger to the stage, he's performed at various comedy clubs around the Bay Area and once in Las Vegas.

Although he's competing, he's not a big fan of comedy competitions because "funniness" is subjective he says. "Just because one crowd doesn't think you're funny, doesn't mean another crowd won't think so."

Another comedian on the SF State team is twenty-eight-year-old Josef Anolin, a senior majoring in Asian American studies. He's been doing stand-up comedy since 2007, and credits Bindlestiff Studio, a San Francisco-based venue that mentors budding Filipino artists, for his growing comedy skills. He describes his humor as "silly storytelling and observational," and says he enjoys stand-up because he loves making people laugh, and enjoys the challenge of being funny in front of different types of crowds.

"For the competition, I want to win, straight up. I'm prepping by trying to work harder than the other guy or gal and to have as much fun doing it as possible," Anolin says.

Twenty-five-year-old Jackson McBrayer, the team's captain, is also competing tonight. He's been the host of the open mic comedy shows at The Depot on campus every Tuesday evenings for a year and a half now, and has performed at a handful of comedy clubs, such as Punchline and Brainwash Café. The open mic nights on campus have been serving as practice time for the whole team for the past couple of weeks leading up to the competition against UC Santa Cruz.

The night of the competition was electric, and before it all began, the SF State competitors were psyching themselves up for the show to begin.

"I'm going into competition, thinking we're going to win, because if you don't think that way, then what's the point," McBrayer says.

The competition tonight is organized so that one comedian from SF State and UC Santa Cruz go up one after the other. They have only five minutes on stage to say as many jokes as they can, and to make sure they are remembered when voting time comes after the show.

The crowd is feisty, and doles out some unsupportive "boo's." But overall, there's a good mix of SF State and UCSC supporters, and cheers for both teams sound almost equally loud.

After hearing a little bit of singing, some embarrassing and intimate moments, stories about drugs, and other things you wouldn't tell your parents about, it's finally time to vote. Little white slips of paper are being passed around to cast votes for the top three people that made them laugh out loud the hardest.

Comedians anxiously wait, and audience members mingle around waiting for the final results of who will make it to the next round. After a long twenty minutes, the host starts off with the SF State winners, and announces Edwin Li, Josef Anolin, Marc Abrigo, and Owen Morris, alongside the other four winners from UCSC.

"I feel happy that those few weeks of prepping paid off," Anolin says. He points out that the competition is not over yet, and that it will be two more weeks until they know if they will perform again.

The next step of the competition is to go online on Rooftop's website and watch the videos of the winners and vote again online. The school that accumulates the most votes online will compete on stage against either UC Berkeley or Stanford.

Anolin and Li are already using the social networking site, Facebook, to post web links and announcements to help advertise the competition and to get people to vote.

Li doesn't have a "vote for me, vote me!" attitude and says," It doesn't matter who they vote for, as long as it's someone from SF State."