Gig 5a: Comedysportz Intermediate Showcase @ Comedy Store, Manchester – 25th June 2011

So, you’ll see that this post is labelled as “Gig 5a” instead of “Gig 6″. I wasn’t sure whether it should get a whole new number since it wasn’t technically a stand up performance and was only semi-public. I settled on the addition of an “a” as I wanted to write about it and it was a comedy performance.

You can see that this unnecessary attention to the nomenclature of blog posts demonstrates the perfect level of mental illness that makes me perfect for the world of comedy.

Yesterday marked the end of my second 8-week stint of comedy improv workshops with Comedysportz. For the uninitiated, improv = improvisation = making stuff up. Hopefully it is funny, too. When I’ve told people that I’ve been doing it, many of them have been horrified at the prospect of having to get up in front of people and make stuff up. I love it, any excuse to act daft. They can probably speak to people in a social situation, though, so it’s swings and roundabouts, really.

Anyway, at the end of every intermediate course there is a ‘showcase’ show in which the people on the intermediate course showcase their newly-acquired skills in a show. And that’s the thing that I was a part of. Obviously. There was an audience made up of friends of the players, the members of the foundation course and some seemingly random randoms.

The players were split up into 3 teams – two teams of four and one of three – as Comedysportz is competitive improv. We played a number of games from the head-to-head “Top That”, the step-forward game “World’s Worst” and a number of scene games. The scenes I was involved with were “can’t remember what it was called but we had to assume a dumb character and answer questions from the audience as that character” – it was possibly called Dumbbell Races – and Shopkeeper – where we had to ask a shopkeeper for an unusual item without actually directly mentioning anything to do with the product. They would make sense if you watched them.

Wow, this post really sucks. Sorry about that. I hope I’m better at improv than I am at writing about it. The point is that I had a blast, and everyone in the group did really well. Performing improv is really liberating and so is really enjoyable. As well as being hilarious. If you fancy giving it a go, why not sign up for a workshop here

So, I’m going. I’m so unhappy with how this post went, but it’s getting published anyway. Deal with it.