As soon as Peter Slater announced the 5-night run of The Bernard Bananas Cabaret Show!, I knew I’d be going along to watch.  Pete – one of the creators of SAS Comedy – is one of my favourite comedians.  He fits into the genre of comedy that I like to call “acting daft”.   It’s a genre that might not actually exist, but it’s one that really appeals to me as an audience member and as a performer.  For me, daftness equates to pure joy,  and it’s something I hope I can inject more  into my own act(s).  Anyway, you can imagine how pleased I was when Pete asked me to do a guest spot on the middle show of the run.  (In case you’re not sure, the answer is “very”.)

I decided to go with Den Kodd for the show.  Part of me would have liked to have given a run out to Gary Barlow, as it’s been ages since I’ve ‘done’ him, and feel like he needs an outing.  In the end,  I stuck with Den\Terry because I’ve had a busy few weeks and, since I’ve done this act in my previous two gigs (Gig 57 and Gig 58), I wouldn’t have to cram anything new into my head.  I also wanted to do it again because Gig 57 felt a little off (I was trying new material) and Gig 58 was a total death, so I wanted to make sure I could still make it funny.  I arrived at the Lass at 8 o’clock and for about 20 minutes, it looked like my new status as the Jonah of comedy was going to persist as there was no audience. Luckily, some good folks (6 of them) did show up, so it would at least go ahead.  And, as Pete mentioned, it’s quite usual for Edinburgh audiences to be in the single figures, so if you can make a handful of people laugh then you’re probably doing something right.

The show lasted just over an hour and I came on about half way through and was scheduled to do ten minutes.  I’ve mentioned previously that I usually forget to set my stopwatch, so don’t know how long I’ve done.  This time I just looked at the time before going on and that (obvious) strategy (unsurprisingly) worked.  I used the same set as Gig 58, only I threw back in my joke about a recently deceased celebrity, even though in my gig diary I claimed that it felt like something I shouldn’t do.  Weirdly, a second celebrity died this week who was tangentially referenced in another one of the  jokes.  I had the idea of doing the first joke, claiming not to want to make fun of someone who had just died and then immediately launch into the second joke.  This seemed to make the act of telling the joke the joke, and this got me over any distaste that I may have felt.  I was probably over-reacting, anyway, as neither of these jokes references the deaths or makes fun of them.  I also ad-libbed a few bits that I really enjoyed; in particular I kept repeating the punchline to my Sean Connery joke, with Terry hoping that this would make the audience “get” it.  Overall, I had a lot of fun with the act, but, perhaps partly due to the small audience size, I never really felt like I had them completely won over.

I seem to be going through a period of fairly indifferent gigs at the moment, and it’s a little dispiriting.  I’m objective enough to understand that I will go periods like this as I develop as a performer, so I don’t let it get me down too much.  I think the hardest thing to deal with is that in my first couple of outings as Den Kodd it worked really well and with the mediocre\terrible reactions that I’ve had in the last couple of weeks, I find it almost impossible to work out where it’s going wrong.  With the material largely the same (with some new jokes, but of the same variety), have I changed the emphasis in my performances without knowing in what way?  I genuinely don’t know, which is the problem.

In a recent post (see here), I mentioned that I sometimes expect too much in terms of lessons learned following gigs. I think my only option is to keep going, keep working at it and hope that this will lead me to a breakthrough.

In one 10-minute fell swoop (Gig 1), I was officially a performer (although, I’m not sure who or what makes it “official”).  It might be reasonable at this point to ask what my aims\goals were going to be as a fledgling comic.  Frankly, I didn’t have any.  It seemed so unlikely that I’d be doing it in the first place that I didn’t even consider what my aims were.   The closest thing I had to a goal was “keep doing it”, but even this is slightly disingenuous as from the second I’d done my first gig, it just seemed to become something that I would continue to do.  I didn’t ask myself whether or not I would.  I just would.  As time has gone on, I’ve still not given myself any specific goals, other than trying to do a gig every week to make sure I don’t get rusty.

My second gig (Gig 2) came three weeks after the first and was at the Comedy Balloon; Manchester’s longest running open mic night.  Like my first, it was also arranged for me by Vic, but, you’ll be glad to hear, after this I have learned to source my own gigs.  The Comedy Balloon is a pretty standard open mic night, so I just assumed that I should do straight stand-up.  This meant that I had to develop a whole new set for my 10-minute spot.  Luckily, I had enough nonsense in my notebooks to cobble together 15 minutes or so of material and then I whittled this down to 10 that I thought might be passable.  I also made sure that I practiced a lot, to make sure I didn’t cock up, and thankfully this paid off.   The gig went really well and I got loads of compliments and positive feedback about it.  Although I did mention this in my original write up of the gig, I felt reticent about doing so as I didn’t want to appear like I thought I was amazing or that I  wouldn’t be dying on my arse very soon.  It was really important to get this good gig in early, though, as it got me through a lot of indifferent and bad gigs.  At least I knew I had made people laugh once, so there was at least the possibility of it happening again.

Gig 3 came just a few days later and was, once again, at SAS Comedy.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to mention every gig, but there is a point to this.  I had asked to do this gig again straight after the last once (I assumed that’s what you did), and didn’t think I could just do the same character again.  I also had the urge to get the “pompous poet” character – which I originally had planned for Gig 1 – out of my system.  So, that’s what I did.  The gig went OK – I didn’t die, but it wasn’t spectacular – but the significant thing was that, without planning to do so, I’d performed completely different sets in each of my first three gigs.  A pattern was emerging.

The next two gigs were straight stand up.  Gig 4 was impromptu effort where I recycled some material from the Comedy Balloon (it went terribly).  Gig 5 went a little better and was a mix of stuff I’d done before with a few new bits.  We then come to Gig 6; the last nail in the coffin of my unnecessarily eclectic gigging strategy (tellingly, I also did an improve showcase (Gig 5a) and another pub quiz (Gig 5b) in this period).  Someone I’d met through improv, Jackie Hagan, contacted me on Facebook and asked if I’d like to do a 4-minute spot at her night Magical Animals:

“ I run a spoken word night, the next one is on 12th July, tell me if you want to perform at it, it’s only a 4 min slot, comedy, poetry, anything spoken. “

Later in the conversation, she wrote:

“Oh and the last one was mostly poetry but you can do WHATEVER.”

I knew I was definitely going to do the night – there was no way I would turn a gig down – but I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d do.  I considered doing straight stand up, but I couldn’t really work out how I could make the material I had work in a 4-minute spot.  I was also conscious that if it was mainly poetry then just doing straight stand up might prove to be a little odd.  I latched onto the “spoken word” aspect and thought about what stuff I’d written on my blogs that I might use.  I have lots of short stories and nonsense on TWoS57 and it didn’t seem a stretch that I could pick something from there and give it a try.  This idea really appealed to me as I had loads of (hopefully) funny material on the blog that wouldn’t really work as normal stand up.  There was a chance for this to lead to a whole new type of material for me to use.  It just so happened that some of the recent posts at the time were “short plays”, so I picked three of them and so had a “theme”.  As it happens, I still use these plays – in different formats – to this day, so it proved a good decision.

I wondered, in my original diary post, whether this counted as an “official” gig or not, but I went with it and my fate was sealed.  I decided to call this series of posts “A Year in Comedy” not “A Year in Stand Up” because I don’t just do stand up, and the turning point for this was Magical Animals.  Along with SAS Comedy, it’s a night that I regularly do, and which I love.  It’s interesting to note that M.A. has evolved to be anything but “mostly poetry” – it’s a haven for oddity – and I’d like to think that I played my part in that transformation.  Apologies to anybody who enjoyed it as a “mostly poetry” night.

It was at this stage that I entered a period of indifferent\bad gigs.  This didn’t worry me per se.  I was getting to a point where being on stage seemed something I actually did, and I expected things to get harder as I started to learn what I was doing.  What did concern me was I couldn’t work out what, if anything, I was learning from the experience.  I’d come away from a gig which had gone OK, but I didn’t even know what OK meant.  I had trouble judging which bits had gone well\badly, let alone why they had gone well\badly or what I could do to improve things.  In hindsight, I think I was expecting too much and was frustrated by the lack of tangible ‘lessons’.   This expectation is probably due to the way my brain works.  After a performance I expected to be able to quantify exactly what progress (or not) had been made:  “I said thing A, which got a laugh of magnitude X.  The last time I did it I paused for T seconds when delivering the punchline and on that occasion it generated a laugh of magnitude 1.5X”.  In essence, I’m a geek.  The reality is that the lessons aren’t necessarily conscious and the act of continually repeating something incrementally changes something in your brain until the ‘lessons’ work their way in via osmosis.  As such, it can be difficult to sum up what I’ve learned, other than practice makes perfect (or, more accurately, practice makes you better than you were when you were totally shit).  Suffice to say, everything I’ve done has been a learning experience.  This includes Gig 8a, which was so poorly attended that it didn’t actually count as a gig at all.

And that’s nearly it for this time.  The final thing I’ll mention is why I haven’t gone into what it’s like to die on stage, when it clearly happened to me in this period.  As I mentioned above, I expected for gigs to go badly at this stage as I had no idea what I was doing.  I think it will be more interesting to discuss what it’s like to die when you’re not expecting to.

Stay tuned for that little gem.

I hope this week isn’t indicative of how things are going to go this year.

It was disappointing not to get the perform, but at least the preparation for it useful.  This gig was going to be my first time performing a 15-minute spot, so I had to work out whether I actually had 15 minutes of material.  As it turns out, I easily had 15 minutes, but this was helped enormously by bringing back my “Personal Bit”.  It’s the only bit I’ve got that hangs together as a 4-5 minute piece.  It’s also a bit that sometimes works really well and other times is a bit flat.  The last time I tried it was in Gig 46, after which I wrote:

My “personal bit” still appears to be a conundrum, but I think I need to sit down and try a re-write of the whole segment before I can really pass judgement.

Although, I didn’t do a complete re-write, I certainly gave it a good tweak.  I didn’t add or remove any of the jokes, but have re-phrased a lot of the set-ups and have added a pause or two in order to maximise the laughs.  I also officially tagged on a bit from “Personal Bit 2″ onto the end of it.  Sadly, I didn’t get to find out how the changes worked, but at least they’re ready to go for the next time.

Oh well, let’s hope the next week is more successful.

This would be my fourth appearance at Bar 1:22 (previously Gig 18, Gig 25 and Gig 35), so I thought it would be good to try something different.  I decided to unleash Den Kodd onto the people of Huddersfield.  My thinking was that I wanted to see how Den\Terry might work at a straight stand up night, and felt comfortable enough with the venue to give it a go.  Den had made an outing only a few days previously (Gig 57), and it hadn’t gone amazingly well.  I had been trying a bunch of new jokes, some of which didn’t work, and I also hadn’t paid enough attention to the character’s backstory, and how this is revealed through asides about the jokes.  I prepared for this gig by working out which of the new jokes could stay in the set, then arranging them in an order which makes sense.  Although there’s no real though line with the material, some of the jokes can be used to reveal bits about Terry’s life.  Last Saturday’s performance made me realise how important this aspect is to the character.

On arrival at the venue, I spoke to the MC to sort out the running order.   I asked if I could be on in the first section, so I could sneak off before the end, due to the drive back.  After explaining that I was a character act, it seemed wise for me not to go on first to give the audience a chance to get warmed up before being hit with something odd.  However, nobody else seemed willing to do the opening spot, so I volunteered for the job.  It seemed only fair since I’d asked to go on in the first section.

There’s a small “backstage” room where I sneaked to get changed once the show had started, so the reveal of Den wasn’t ruined.   When I perform as Den, I usually have a small slip of paper with a list of key words on to remind me of the order for the jokes.  Ideally, I’d like to do it completely from memory, but, as I’ve not even got a settled set list yet, and do a whole bunch of other acts to distract me, it’s a compromise I’m having to make for now.  With the addition of new jokes, the list was the longest yet (26 jokes), so I wasn’t sure how long the set would be.  The advantage of doing one-liners is that it’s relatively easy to wrap things up quickly, so I was just going to keep an eye on my watch and make sure I stuck to 10 minutes.

My set did not go well.  Although there were some laughs coming from what I suspect was the comedians’ table, the majority of the audience did not like the act at all.  They seemed affronted by the crapness of some of the jokes, when they crapness of the jokes is one of the act’s main selling points.  I guess that one of the problems with this kind of act is that if the audience don’t go with the concept from the start then it’s really tough going because you’ve got nowhere else to go.  Perhaps I should have broken away from telling the jokes to address the failure more (I did start commenting on some audience members having a conversation during my act), but I’m not sure that anything Terry could have done won have won them around.

Another problem was that I forgot to start my stopwatch as I went on stage. Again! I forget to start it nearly every gig, it’s just ridiculous.  What makes it more ridiculous is that I make a big deal about remembering about it before I go on stage, but when I get to the final part of actually pressing the little button it just goes out of my head.  This meant that I didn’t know how long I had done, so it made it even harder to judge how to play it.  Because it had been going badly, I wasn’t sure whether I’d done 5 or 10 minutes, so wasn’t sure how much more to do.  In the end, I just decided to skip some of the jokes so that I didn’t prolong the agony (for both me and the audience).

It was a slightly dispiriting experience, but then I did do it to try something different, so I can’t really complain.  I thought that Den was worth a try with a more general audience type, but I’ll certainly think again before whipping him out willy nilly.  What’s hard to judge with gigs like this – with an act that has worked well in the past – is how much of the failure is down to the performance and what I could have done differently.

The final thing to note about this gig is to do with a joke that I didn’t do.  On the afternoon of the gig, I read that a celebrity had died.  A celebrity whose name was a punchline to one of my jokes.  My immediate thought was how a relatively obscure reference in a joke had suddenly become very topical.  This could be my opportunity to look on-the-ball for once, but I had doubts.  Did I really want to tell a joke about someone who had just died?  Not really.  The joke doesn’t actually make fun of the person in any way – and I really like the way that it works in the set – but it ultimately felt like something I shouldn’t do.

And on that respectful note, I bid you a fond farewell.

Related articles

• A Year in Comedy: Introduction (poursomegravyonme.co.uk)
• A Year in Comedy: My First Gig (poursomegravyonme.co.uk)

I don’t really like this photo, but it was taken at my first gig, so I suppose I’d better use it.

In the first part of this self-indulgent series of posts (see here), I looked back on the events that led me to into performing comedy.  This time I’ll take a look at my first gig.

By April 2010, I had enough confidence to consider giving performance a go, but no real impetus to actually do so.  Although it now seemed at least conceivable possibility, there was still quite the leap to actually doing it.  Left to my own devices, I’m not sure I actually ever would have made that leap.  Luckily, up stepped my friend Vic, again, to make it happen.  She booked me a spot at SAS Comedy and told me I was doing it.  Now I had a booking I would definitely go through with it, so it left me with about a month to prepare.

SAS Comedy is a true alternative comedy night, which features character acts, sketches and some of the stranger\more original acts on the circuit.  Although a lot of the preparatory notes I had been making were geared towards (my version of) straight stand up, I also had a fondness for character comedy.  I often performed in character on my podcast, and, errr, worryingly, in real life.   As I had this natural predilection, I didn’t really consider doing straight stand up for the gig, in an attempt to fit into the ethos of the night.  Vic suggested that since I’d written lots of stupid poems on TWoS57, then I could perform some of those as a kind of halfway house between character and stand up.  I had a vague notion of wrapping my poems up with a rather pompous character who thought his verses were poignant rather than idiotic.

About a week before the gig, Vic told me that the night was going to be a “Eurovision Special” and so I decided to change what I was going to do to fit in with the theme.  Now, there are two things to say about this decision: a) it was only the second half of the show that was Eurovision-themed, so I needn’t have worried; and b) the last minute change wasn’t as annoying as you might think, as I hadn’t actually prepared anything in the first place.  My lack of preparedness, I think, was due to nerves rather than complacency.  If I didn’t prepare then I wouldn’t have to address what I was about to put myself through.  It’s not necessarily a strategy that I’d recommend.  However, it did afford me the flexibility to quickly change to another unprepared character: Hans Klaussner.

Hans is a “character” that I would sometimes use on TWoS57 and who appeared on a couple of podcasts.  He was essentially a slightly weird German fella, which, I concede, wasn’t a wholly original idea, but it was fun to do, and something I felt I could slip into on stage pretty easily. Crucially, I had a silly voice, and that’s half the battle.  The act I decided on was that Hans had moved to England to try his hand at stand-up comedy.  In my notes (and in the odd pub quizzes I’d been involved with), I’d discovered that I had a “talent” for writing really awful, Christmas cracker, pun-based jokes.  I had a bunch of these that I thought Hans could do, and, because he was supposed to be a rubbish wannabe comedian, I thought it would be OK if he clumsily read them out from a notebook.  This cunning ploy meant that I wouldn’t actually have to learn them, which, frankly, was a blessed relief.  To tie it all together, I lazily wrote some introductory spiel about who Hans was and why he was there.  I was (sort of) ready to go.

The week leading up to the gig was absolutely horrendous.  I can’t begin to express how preoccupied I was by it; how I constantly had butterflies and had sleepless night after sleepless night.  Actually, that does begin to express how I felt, so forget I mentioned it.  What made this week stranger was that I didn’t tell anybody that I’d be doing it.  Obviously, Vic knew, and another of my best friends found out (because of something Vic said on Twitter), but that was it.  I was so nervous that I couldn’t face anybody making a fuss about it or, worse, offering to come along and watch.  I just wanted to get it out of the way as quickly and quietly as possible.  Only, you know, not so quietly that there weren’t any laughs.

So, we get to the gig itself.  As I wrote in my original diary post (Gig 1), it’s hard to say how it truly went because I was so nervous that I, genuinely, couldn’t really tell you what happened.  It was the strangest feeling, and, thankfully, not something that’s happened since.   From the fragments that are there, though, I’d say that it went OK.  My lack of preparedness for Hans’ introduction was a problem – I forgot some stuff, messed some bits up and dropped another bit – but the jokes themselves got some laughs and so I didn’t die.  I took not dying at my first gig to be a big win, even if it didn’t go amazingly well.

Hans hasn’t made an appearance since, but he has set the formula I’ve used at several SAS gigs since:  stupid character trying to be stand up + introductory framing device + pun-based jokes = my act.  Thanks, Hans, I owe you one.  Those of you who read my blog regularly will know that SAS is my favourite night as a performer and spectator, so it only feels fitting that it’s where I got my start.  I performed there 9 times in my first year and it feels like my comedy spiritual home (if you will allow me to be so poetic about such a daft night).

Next time, I’ll take a look at some of my earliest gigs.  I bet you can’t wait.

‘Great concept of using different plays and all different characters.’

‘Great idea’

‘Ace.’

‘Unusual and very funny, I really liked how most characters had the same accent and the black roll necked top. Brilliant.’

‘Great idea. Would love to see an actors warmup at the beginning. A few tongue twisters and stretches would be hilarious.’

‘Great! Very funny, simple but effective.’

I had been worried about what might come back, mainly because it seemed to go well on the night, so if the feedback had been bad then it would throw my whole judgement into question.  There was one bit of negative feedback, however, and it was this:

‘Awful, didn’t find funny at all. Like watching a really boring person tell a story.’

Amazing.  If I had a poster then this would be going on it.  Obviously, it’s much easier for me to find this amusing because the other comments were nice, but there’s something marvellous about someone not getting the joke.  Comedy is a totally subjective medium – there’s no faking laughter – and that’s what makes it magical.  One man’s meat is another man’s poison.  Or, more specifically, one man’s great concept is another man’s boring person telling a story.

It was sometime during the afternoon that I found out that most of Manchester city centre was going to be closed off because of Man City’s victory parade (congratulations, by the way).  The police were advising against driving into town and gridlock looked likely.  To be honest, I didn’t fancy sitting in a traffic jam for hours, only to find that there was nowhere to park when I finally got there.  I monitored the parade on the television, but got to a point where I had to make a decision.  I decided not to go.

So, basically, my second year in comedy started off with me pulling out of a gig for the first time.  How absolutely crap.  I don’t actually know what the traffic situation turned out, but I imagine it was fine and I made a bad call.  If that’s the case, please don’t tell me, I feel bad enough as it is.

Oh well, it’s onwards and upwards from here.  Hopefully.

Today marks the one year anniversary of me performing comedy. Since I’ve blogged about every single one of my gigs, I thought it would only be appropriate\totally narcissistic to do a review of this first year in some depth. I had originally anticipated that this might be a couple of thousand words, but I got a bit carried away, and so this is being turned into a series of posts. Lucky you.

Note: I’m not actually so narcissistic that I think you’d all be mega interested in this. I’ve written over 60 posts in my gig diary and they get very little reaction, so I definitely don’t write them because they’re popular. I just find that if I write about the gigs then it makes me think about what’s happened in them, so hopefully I can learn something. The one year anniversary seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back with a bit more perspective and hopefully learn even more. Since I’ve taken the time to write about it, then it would be self-defeating to not turn it into bloggery.

The first thing I should probably address is what led me to getting on stage and attempting to make people laugh. This could also be phrased as: why did it take you until the age of 35 before you gave it a go?

This is a bit of a long uninteresting story, but you did ask. There’s a bit in The Office where David Brent says: “There are limits to my comedy.” The joke is that he sincerely sees himself as a comedian, and doesn’t have the self-awareness to see how ridiculous that is. Now, The Office is one of my favourite ever TV comedies, but I didn’t laugh at that part as hard as I might have. Although, I’m blessed with more self-awareness than Mr Brent (hopefully), I couldn’t help but relate to what he was saying. Being funny has already been important to me; to such an extent that I’d sometimes self-consciously remember funny ideas just so I could say them again at work to see if they’d get a laugh. Sometimes it would feel like I was thinking of “material”, even if I was only using it in real life.

Under different circumstances (\if I was a different person) this urge to make others laugh might have brought me to performing comedy much earlier. Indeed, I’d often dreamed of giving it a go, but the problem was that it always seemed to be a dream, not something I could actually ever do. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t think I could do it so much as it seeming so unrealistic that I never even considered it as an option.  I’d always yearned to do something creative (there are a couple of synopsis of unwritten novels lurking somewhere in my house), but I guess I never had the confidence or self-belief to see anything through. If you don’t believe something can happen then it never will. Plus I’m quite lazy.

Without wanting for this post to take a hideously cringeworthy turn, there have been some pretty big changes in my life over the last couple of years. Firstly, I lost a significant amount of weight (see the post Losing It) and – despite putting some of it back on – it has given me a different outlook and a belief that I can accomplish things I used to think impossible. One of the other changes is rather more mundane: blogging. Ugh, I know.  Blogging is the cheat’s way of doing something creative; you bash out some nonsense (well I do), post it, forget about it and then do it again. There’s no commitment and you can do it as frequently (or infrequently as you like). The World of Sherby57 started in May 2007 (which, incredibly, means that it’s now 5 years old). It was essentially a dumping ground for any stupid ideas that I had and developed into a repository of daft stories, nonsense and very fake news stories. TWoS57 (as it’s been cleverly acronymed as) was joined by this blog in November 2008. I started a second blog as I thought it might improve my writing if I wrote about actual things rather than just the idiocy that floated out of my brain. It was a partial success on both the improved writing and the non-stupid subject matter.

Aside: At this point I seem to have stray WAY off the path of the story of my first year in comedy. I’ll attempt to get back on track as soon as I can.

Despite a somewhat sporadic start to my blogging career, it eventually built up a bit of momentum and I posted at least semi-regularly. It also prompted a few spin-offs, including the hit internet story Hazard of Parsnips (written with Dr Angel), a self-published book (still available, here) and my podcast, The Gravy Boat.  Because of all this, being creative became a normal pursuit for me, and laid the groundwork for my eventual emergence on stage. Although, frankly, even at this point, I would never have actually ever even thought about doing it, let alone getting up there, without a push. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I would never have actually done it without my friend Vic making me do it.  Luckily, she’ll never let me forget this fact.

Around the end of 2010, she started floating around the idea that we were both going to do some stand up gigs in the new year, and this was my warning that I’d better start thinking of ideas for material. Once she’d floated the idea out there, and was so matter-of-fact about it happening, I guess I just went along with it and duly started making notes across several notebooks. I’d just write down any thought or off-the-cuff quip I made that made me laugh and hoped at some point I could turn it into material.  We also went along to a 3 hour clowning workshop.  I still don’t understand what it was, but I think it still counts as part of my development.

In January, Vic suggested that I go along to some improv workshops run by Comedysportz and it seemed like it might be fun. Despite being at my socially awkward best (I think it took me until week 7 of 8 to actually say hello to anyone), it did help me realise how much I love showing off in front of people, and that, crucially, I was actually alright at it. (Recently my friend Joanne watched some YouTube clips of me doing improv and said that it didn’t really count as that’s what I’m like in normal life. In my defence….errr, well, she’s got a point.)

The other performance thing I did pre-Gig 1 was to occasionally help out Vic with her pub quiz. This doesn’t sound very comedy related, but I was introduced as the experimental round and did some extremely stupid questions; these took the form of “guess the impression” (where the impression generally didn’t sound like who they were of) and “guess the punchline” to impenetrable pun-based jokes. I think the quizzes could certainly be seen as a kind of test run for my type of comedy. Not least because some people loved it and others hated it\were baffled.

I guess other main influence on me is my love of live comedy. I’d always been to comedy shows sporadically, but this became much more frequent over the past few years. I realised that I kept missing really good acts who appeared locally and decided that in future I was just going to go and see them, regardless of whether anybody else wanted to come or not. In hindsight, this was significant as a indicator of me pursuing things that I was really interested in.  I also wonder if the fact that I saw more touring shows, rather than being a comedy club regular, has influenced the type of comedy I do\want to do.

Anyway, that’s it for this time. In the next installment of AYIC, we get to my first gig. Exciting.

You can read the next post in this series, here.

In the first half of the show, I reprised Den Kodd (first seen in Gig 33), as I had some new jokes that I wanted to try.  Some of the jokes were existing jokes added to Den’s set following Gig 49, when I realised that they’d be a good fit.  I also produce a steady stream of suitably rubbish jokes for Den\Terry to try.  As I had a really busy week, I didn’t really have any time to work on what I would do with the act.  The main thing was to give the jokes a try and just have fun with it.

It didn’t work quite as well as I would have liked.  Some of the jokes were perhaps a little too obtuse.  My favourite new joke didn’t work at all (it relied on people guessing what the punchline was going to be, and then me subverting that, but I don’t think they guessed what it should be).  I also felt a bit weird about doing the exact same introduction of who Terry\Den was as a character, so I messed about with it.  In hindsight, this was a bit stupid as I knew that the audience hadn’t seen the act before, and it meant that Terry wasn’t really fully established.  Some of the jokes worked, though, and it was a good learning experience for when I do it again.

The second half of the show saw me perform in a sketch “Simeon Gold and Oliver Brass”.  This was only the second time that I’d worked with somebody else, the first being the very weird wrestling sketch from Gig 13.  I had been talking about working on some sketches with SAS regular, Lee Fenwick, so I set about thinking what we could do.   I had the idea that I could use my Simeon Gold (the one man theatre company) character – first seen at Gig 26 (and recently revived at Gig 50) – and give him someone to play with.  I set about writing a draft for the two “actors”.   As a solo character, the joke is that Simeon (and his “plays”) are just utterly ridiculous and rubbish.  The addition of Oliver Brass obviously changed the dynamic, and so shifted where the humour was.  The basic concept was that the two men were in a right-on, left-wing theatre group, who think their art is going to change the world, but they don’t realise how bad they are at acting, or how patronising they actually are to the people they’re attempting to help.  With the concept clear, it didn’t take me long to complete a script.

We only got around to rehearsing the piece on the afternoon of the gig, but it only took a few run-throughs to get it pretty much locked in (barring me forgetting to say “Olly”, which was a key line).  The performance itself went really well (I didn’t forget to say “Olly”) and it really seemed to work as a sketch.   It was quite a challenge working with someone else, in the sense that I actually had to act when on stage and be conscious of the other person, as opposed to just getting lost in a daft character when I’m performing solo.  It was hugely enjoyable, though, to have someone to bounce off, and it’s certainly something I’d like to do more of and get better at.

So, that’s it, my first year in comedy is complete.  It’s kind of spooky that I completed 57 gigs, given the significance of that number for my creative pursuits. Wooooooo. 57.

Just a couple of days after competing in Beat the Frog (Gig 54), I was back at Manchester’s Frog and Bucket, but, thankfully, this time there was no gong\frog\competitive element.  I’d been lucky enough to be asked to be part of Moviejokie, the character comedy-based movie quiz.  Yes, it’s a movie quiz where the questions are asked by people doing character comedy.  You’re right, it is as awesome a format as it sounds.

I was only asked if I could take part a week ago, so I quickly had to decide on a couple of movie-related characters to perform as (I had to do 2 4-minute spots, where I had to ask 2 questions as each character).  It seemed a no-brainer to do Harry Potter, which I had performed at the last SAS Comedy (Gig 48), and I also thought I could convert Clive Bunny – the Bobby’s Snacks obsessive – which I’d done at the SAS before last (Gig 39).  It was exciting to be able to have another crack at these characters, but it was slightly daunting that I wouldn’t really have chance to practice them in their new forms.   I worked out the basic structure of what I’d do, at the weekend, but there’d definitely be an element of me winging it on the night.

In the first half, I’d be Clive Bunny.  In his original appearance, Clive was the host of an internet consumer affairs show in which he was a little too obsessed with Bobby’s Snacks.  To get the movie aspect in, I decided to make him Bobby’s sole agent in Hollywood, and he’d talk about his movie star friends and which snacks they liked.  I basically had some packs of crisps and talked about which celebs liked which flavours and why.  The questions would be me talking about a particular snack and making the audience work out who it was that liked them.  Overall, it didn’t quite work.  I possibly tried to cram too much into the 4-minutes (a bit like when I first tried Bobby’s Snack related materials in Gig 34).  I think also that by changing the character to fit the theme, I didn’t quite have chance to work out what he was all about and how to maximise the humour from him.  It’s one of those occasions where something not quite working has given me something interesting to think about, rather than just being a bit depressing.

Fortunately, Harry Potter’s appearance in the second half went much better.  As Harry is already, technically, movie-themed, I could just do the act pretty much as it was.  The idea is that he’s fed up of wizarding (and being a movie star) and so is trying his hand at stand up comedy.  It was pretty easy to turn a couple of his “jokes” into questions.

And that was that.  It’s the first time that I’ve done 3 gigs on 3 consecutive nights and also the first time that I’d done more than one character on the same night.  Two world records falling in the same night.  That can’t be bad.