If you were the 13-year-old captain of your gym class kickball team, lanky bespectacled Aaron Eisenberg probably wouldn’t be your first pick. But six years later, when you’re slaving over textbooks while he takes the stage at New York comedy clubs, the joke’s on you.

“I was not the most popular kid in middle school,” says Eisenberg, a Communication freshman. “I was a theater kid, I liked student government. I found my sense of humor, I think, by being made fun of by the other kids in middle school.”

Eisenberg, who trained with the Upright Citizens Brigade at the end of high school, has moved on from his years of awkwardness. After his first stand-up performance at an open mic night at Café Ambrosia, he landed a spot at New York comedy hotspot Carolines on Broadway.

The stand-up scene has been kind to Eisenberg, especially the embrace at Ambrosia. “It wasn’t one of those mortifying first times,” Eisenberg says. “That was probably one of my most tranquil and most respectful audiences that I’ll ever have.”

Eisenberg delivers well-rehearsed material with a quirky and awkward but conversational delivery, a la recent television shows Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office. His series of non sequiturs ranges from SkyMall to how fruit sounds like sexually-transmitted diseases. One setup goes, “I’m contemplating if you can be a triple threat if you can sing, dance, and have a gun…For me, little is more threatening than that—somebody that holds a pistol to your face and starts tapping ‘Hello Dolly!’”

While his friends were Facebooking, Eisenberg researched local open mic nights. Unable to juggle the Chicago scene with campus commitments, Eisenberg started looking closer to his hometown of Westfield, New Jersey. He contacted Carolines “on a whim,” and they agreed to give him six minutes of stage time at one of their well-known New Talent nights.

The 300-seat comedy club Carolines evokes “dimunitive Vegas grandeur,” according to New York Magazine, and has featured performances from the likes of Jon Stewart and Jerry Seinfeld. “It’s a big jump,” Eisenberg says.

But Eisenberg isn’t going to let the experience go to his head; His toughest audience is still in his living room. “I always love being able to make my parents laugh,” he says, “because then I really know that I’ve done something well. If I’ve made my parents laugh, that’s the real test for me.”