Gig 70: Moviejokie @ Frog & Bucket, Manchester – 8th August 2012

The lesson learned from the last Moviejokie (Gig 66) – Manchester’s premier character comedy night cum movie quiz – was to keep the characters as big and daft as possible.  After a bit of input from Jeff Downs – Moviejokie’s daddy – I went with Harry Potter and Casio.

Harry Potter was on in the first half of the show.  I concocted a broom for him to ride (actually the brush from my kitchen), to which was attached a tennis ball on a bit of string.  I was able to swing this around my head so that I could “play Quidditch”.  I had written a quick script for Harry, which was about his attempts to get Quidditch into the Olympics (oooh, topical), but I tried to make it as much about acting daft as it was about performing a comedy routine.  Sadly, it fell a little flat.  There were definitely some laughs, but also a few lulls. I think I probably fell between two stools in that the bit was too half-baked as a scripted routine, but not loose enough for me to be able to play around with it.

Casio, thankfully, went down better, which was ironic considering it was quarter-baked at best.  The concept was that Casio was going to give some insight on how he’d transformed some Hollywood A-listers from mingers to gorgeous, via the means of before and after photos in a Powerpoint presentation.   Jeff had prepared the presentation for me, so I hadn’t actually seen it before the show.  I knew who each of the actors was, and had a few ideas about what I was going to say, but I wanted to try and keep it quite loose and interact with the audience.  This did mean that I was crapping myself (not literally, which was a bonus given how tight Casio’s wet look leggings are) as I waited to go on, because I largely didn’t know what i was going to say.  On the whole, it went pretty well and people seem to enjoy Casio and his crude outlook on life.  I talked about 4 celebs, and was pretty pleased with some of the comments that I came up with on the fly for the first three.  Sadly, on the final celeb, I completely forgot who it was, and this totally threw me and I forgot what I had planned to say (it was Sean Connery, who I was going to claim was a plastic scouser who I’d advised to change his accent).  I just about got away with it by acting daft, and by doing my tremendous “Sean Connery’s hobby” joke, and then I was done.

Moviejoke as a night goes from strength to strength with the unusual concept rapidly coming together.  If you like something that’s a little bit different then get yourselves down to the next one.