Apologies for my lack of blogging over the past month. I have come prepared with a solid excuse though. In the four weeks since my tenure as the Evening Standard's media correspondent began, I have been ricocheting between parties, lunches, awards ceremonies, film screenings and channel launches - all of which are turned into stories, which take time to write and eat into my precious blogging time!

In terms of sheer quantity of events, we are right in the midst of the busy season which comes just before the 'Christmas lull'. One of the highlights of the busy season came after an invite to the American Embassy on Grosvenor Square. Watching a comedian impersonate George Bush and his questionable pronunciation of the word terrorist (he says 'terrace') inside Uncle Sam's London fortress is surreal. It was also a hilarious night.

The unlikely gig was part of the Allah Made Me Funny tour, which featured American stand-up comics Azhar Usman, Preacher Moss and Mohammed Amer. The audience for the evening consisted of various Muslim activists, Imams and Mosque-wallahs who sat alongside embassy staff and diplomats. The Muslim community is not one noted for its sense of humour (due to the fact that 90% of all Muslims shown on TV are depicted as humourless fundamentalists) but these comedians were fantastic, as were the people in the audience - many of whom greeted each other by joking; 'how did they let you in here?'. Brilliant.

My favourite comedian of the trio has to be Azhar Usman This portly 31 year-old from Chicago had the audience rolling in the aisles. One of his best gags?
"I'm really excited to be in Europe. Totally different vibe over here than America. I walk down the street in America, I get dirty looks for being a Muslim. So sometimes it's kind of nice to be hated just for being an American."

And another cracker was: "People are real nice to me on planes..once it safely lands. They just lean over and smile, and they're like, 'Ha, ha, ha, ha (waves hi).' I'm just waiting for a real honest passenger at the end of the flight, like, 'Excuse me, sir, I thought you were going to kill us. Sorry about that.'"

A great night and bravo to the embassy's Cultural Attache Michael Masey for arranging it along with British Asian events supremo Waleed Jahangir. Michael is also arranging a screening at the embassy for the film The Kite Runner in the coming weeks - but surely he should now focus is efforts on getting the Allah Made Me Funny guys into the White House to entertain Dubya himself.