After seven years of performing stand-up comedy, I experienced the strangest comedy club event so far in my career at the Velveeta Room open mike on March 5.

Now, open mikes are for trying out new material, and I had a bit I was working on. It still needed work, and I had not committed it to memory, but I had written it out longhand in my notebook:

I met a United States senator, and this is what he said:

These are trying times, but America has lived through difficult times before. We have been through a Great Depression, a Civil War, and we won World War II.

And I thought, he's right. Mexico has not persevered through these. Neither has Canada. And you know who else? Me. You. Everyone currently in power. Our generation did not win World War II. We're not the Greatest Generation, we're the Facebook generation. We made "Deal or No Deal" a hit.

My grandfather once saw a poster of an old man in a top hat saying, "I Want You!" And my grandfather said, "Well, then I'm going to join up and fight." You and I wouldn't have that reaction, because we were taught to fear sexual predators.

Ask anyone from my generation, "Who won the last battle fought on American soil?" What do they say? Do they say, "The Japanese, at Pearl Harbor?" No, they say, "Blu-ray." I know, still Japanese, kinda creepy.

And I know what you're thinking: "Dan, the Japanese occupied some Alleutian islands in Alaska for a brief time, so technically, by driving them out, the U.S. won." But I say that browsing for facts on your iPhone in a comedy club doesn't make you a better American. I think it makes you a bit of a douchebag.

That was the bit. I'm not saying it was strong; it definitely wasn't. But I was working some stuff out. And certainly it wasn't offensive. Right?

After performing it to a lackluster crowd, I went straight to the bar and ordered a drink. A sleight man taps me on the shoulder and demands, "What did I do?!!"

In a comedy club, I absolutely positively cannot tell when someone is joking. After a tense minute or two, I figured out that he was not.

First of all, he was an Asian-American. Perhaps he didn't like the lines directed at the Japanese, right? True. But as luck would have it, he also received a text message in the middle of my set, and was responding to it when I described people with iPhones in comedy clubs as "douchebags".

I explained to him that stage lights prevented me from seeing anybody, let alone his phone, and that I had written all this out beforehand, and that I'm not good enough to write an entire routine to insult a particular unlucky member of the audience on the spot. He didn't believe me. But I was lucky -- I showed him the entire routine written out longhand in my notebook. That calmed him down some.

I offered to buy the poor guy a drink, but he had to leave (and may have been under 21). And once again, I marvel at the enigma of what people consider to be offensive.