Hope is one thing, but winning is quite another ¿ as Bermudian Jonathan Young found out last week when he swept aside the challenges of nine other contestants to capture the $1,075 prize in the new 'Fresh Faces of Comedy' competition. In the tight confines of Bootsie's Comedy Club, on what was possibly the world's smallest stage, Mr. Young launched his three-minute routine as to the manner born.

Which, in fact, he was in a sense, having spent some years doing stand-up comedy in London, England prior to returning home to Bermuda. Clearly, the international judges - Alonzo Bodden, past winner of NBC's 'Last Comic Standing', and Bruce Hills, CEO of Just for Laughs - in their professional judgment saw something in his performance that the others lacked, hence the relative swiftness with which he was declared the winner.

As part of his prize, Mr. Young also performed part of his routine on a real stage at the Fairmont Southampton Resort before the opening night audience of 'Just for Laughs'.

Mr. Young is an Oxford University graduate who studied philosophy, politics and economics and now teaches E-Commerce at the Bermuda College. He first became interested in stand-up comedy when, as teenagers, he and his twin brother William regularly attended performances at The Comedy Club in the Emporium Building on Front Street.

Although he says his twin is the real comedian, and describes him as "uniquely funny", William doesn't like getting up on stage. Jonathan, on the other hand, has no such inhibitions. His introduction to stand-up comedy came during an open mic night at university. "Oxford has a troupe called the Oxford Revue, for which I successfully tried out. It went well, and I was hooked from the first laugh," he remembers. So much so, in fact, that upon graduating from the prestigious British university, Mr. Young spent several years doing stand-up comedy in London, until work permit issues meant he had to stop and "get a real job".

From one year after he returned home five years ago, until the opportunity arose to compete in last week's new 'Fresh Faces' competition, Mr. Young set stand-up comedy aside as he pursued his teaching career. In fact, it was a friend who e-mailed him details of the 'Fresh Faces' competition which rekindled the spark of getting back into comedy - something he had just been discussing with his wife, Elizabeth. "That was Karma, big time, so I signed up and had a great time," he says of his decision.

The material Mr. Young chose for the competition was a compilation of selected material from his larger repertoire, and he is the first to agree that a segment of it was "base". While defending his overall presentation, he admits that it was prepared with a different audience in mind. "You choose your material for your audience, I tried to have one base, one surreal and one quasi-political joke (in the routine). I have hung out with the bar flies at Bootsie's, and my set was aimed at the people I had met there. Two of the jokes were based on how much one enjoyed certain activities.

''Yes, there is a line between (comedy and going too far), but that night I deliberately put in only two jokes which would hopefully play to the base level. The sex-based material was not especially graphic or about unnatural acts, but about embarrassing mistakes. The rest of the act was clean."

While the audience went along with whatever was being offered (and every contestant included sex-related material, some of it quite tasteless, in his or her routine), and the audience laughed at it all, Mr. Young concedes that, in general, "a lot of laughter comes from nervousness".

"A lot of racial and sex jokes make people laugh because they are uncomfortable, but given the diversity of the crowd, and the demographics, the audience was very generous (in its response), and it was beautiful."

As with actors, part of a stand-up comedian's success is knowing his or her lines, and Mr. Young spent many hours rehearsing his routine so that it would not only flow well but also resonate with the crowd.

"I knew my material, and since I had done those jokes before I knew they worked, and where the laughs would come hopefully, so it was a matter of running through it and making it look spontaneous as far as possible. A routine takes a long time to hone, and a three-minute set is no time at all, so you have to make sure there are a couple of guaranteed laughs in there on which you can hang your self-esteem. I was lucky, I judged it for a different crowd, and they went for it anyway."

Like his fellow contestants, Mr. Young was "hopeful" he would win, and says that when he did he was "very, very, very happy". Certainly, the experience has inspired him "to try and get back into stand-up comedy", and he has also written a sitcom which he hopes to have made into a TV sitcom in London. "I don't think comedy is necessarily my future, but I never want it not to be part of my life. There is nothing more infectious, delightful and awesome than making someone laugh, because it is a universal good."

Meanwhile, the Bermuda College lecturer reveals that, as a first-time father-to-be, the prize money is a welcome boost as he and his wife prepare for the birth of their child.