Gig 5b: Quizzilingus @ The Bowling Green, Chorlton – 30th June 2011

From time to time, I make a guest appearance at Vic’s quiz, performing the “experimental round”.

Obviously, asking some questions at a pub quiz isn’t quite stand up, but the experimental round isn’t your normal pub quiz. Past efforts included the impressions round, in which I did an impression of one person while saying a famous quote from somebody else. I’m really not great at impressions, but that was the joke. Even so, it did get pretty painful as I attempted to give people half a chance of getting it right. One week, 90% of the contestants thought my Christopher Walken impression was Borat. This was annoying because I thought it was one of my better voices.

More often I have done Guess The Punchline, where I tell the set up to a ‘joke’ – that I’ve made up – and the answer is the punchline. You can read some examples, here.

This week I appeared in character as “Barry Garlow – Britain’s Number 1 Gary Barlow impersonator and Take That themed pub quiz host.”. All the questions were, unsurprisingly, Take That related, but with my own twist. It seemed to go well, in that half the people thought it was funny and half were totally baffled. Perfect.

Doing the quiz has been very much a kind of proto-stand up for me; a chance to get on the microphone and perform some nonsense that I’d prepared. This week tied in particularly well as it related really closely to some character material I’ve been working on, and it gave me a much better idea of how that would work.

P.s.

Quizzilingus is a great quiz – free to enter, first prize is a meal for two and £15 of booze. Get involved if you’re in the area. Only Vic is away for a while, so I don’t know for sure what’s going to happen with it.