Stuff I Watched: Show Me The Funny – Week 2
July 26, 2011 2 Comments
It was with some trepidation that I went into the second episode of Show Me The Funny – I wanted it to be so much better than last week but had little faith that it would be. On the plus side, the guest judge this week was Bob Mortimer, so it couldn’t be all bad.
The theme this time around was “perform for some soliders”. It begged the question why they didn’t get squaddie’s favourite Jim Davidson as the guest judge. Hmmm, maybe that question answered itself. The gimmick was that the comics were split into teams of three and the “winning” team – those who most impressed the soldiers at a series of army training tasks – got to choose the running order of the gig. I forgot to mention this last week as the justification for performing the tasks.
The tasks were utterly pointless and it just seemed like they were taking part in another reality show. What relevance did any of it have to the comedy? I guess that if they managed to get some material from the experience, you could sort of see the point, but we see so little of the actual stand up that it’s hard to judge.
To be honest, I fast forwarded through some of it because I want to learn about creating comedy not running around in a field. There was brief section about writing the week’s material but this lasted for about 30 seconds for all 9 acts. Really disappointing.
They showed very little of the actual stand up sets again – around 90 seconds maximum for any comedian. For some acts – like least-experienced comic Ellie Taylor – we got to see one or two lines, so it’s really difficult to judge how they really did. Anyway, the “bottom two” were Prince Abdi – who did another terrible accent and a baffling anecdote - and Cole Parker- who has pissed off some of the soldiers and so was barracked from the onset (pun intended). The two chosen for praise Dan Mitchell – who did manage to use the week’s experiences as the basis for his set – and Rudi Lickwood – who actually got criticised for laziness in his praise (?).
Prince Abdi was, unsurprisingly, voted off. Although, I say unsurprisingly when we perhaps didn’t see enough of the others to really judge. It’s also noticeable that I don’t feel like I know anything about any of the acts yet, which is a failing of any reality TV format.
I’ll probably stick with it and hope that we get to see much more comedy as the contestants thin out.
Related articles
- Stuff I Watched: Show Me The Funny – Week 1 (poursomegravyonme.co.uk)
- Show Me the Funny – and the unfunny (guardian.co.uk)
About sherby57
if you go on the website you get to see the full 5 minutes from 2 of the best acts each week. mainly they say how nice the audience is a lot. fawning is key it seems. none of the 4 shown are bad but neither are they owt to be in awe off. but they don’t seem to say a great deal in five minutes.
Interesting, I’ll have to try and check that out. The fact that they only show the full 5 minutes for the two best acts – and the fact that they weren’t that impressive – is a bit worrying. Maybe it’s just that stand up doesn’t lend itself to this kind of format.
I guess it’s also pretty hard to come up with 5 minutes of genuinely good new material every week!