Gig 67: Open for Laughs @ Bar 1:22, Huddersfield – 19th July 2012

July 24, 2012 4 Comments

Following the disappointing cancellation of SAS Comedy (NOT Gig 67), I was desperate to get back on stage. Luckily, a few acts had dropped out of this month’s Open For Laughs and I was able to get off the sub’s bench.  I had been warned that there could be a very small/non-existent audience, but I thought it was a risk worth running in order to see how far I could push my Roy Walker story.  I had successfully transitioned it from a weird 90-second joke, to a 4-minute set at this month’s Magical Animals (Gig 65).  The next step was to see if I could make it work as a 10 minute set, and OFL seemed the perfect place to try it.  My last appearance in Huddersfield (Gig 58) had been in character as Den Kodd and had constituted an epic death.  As I was going to be trying out a routine with ostensibly no jokes in it, it seemed a good test as to whether it was actually funny or not.

As the start of the show approached, it seemed as though the audience would consist of 3 people (plus the acts).  Fortunately, there were a number of latecomers and it reached double figures.  It wasn’t a massive audience, but there were enough people for it to be workable.  There were three acts on in the first section, and then I was the first of two acts in the second.  Thankfully it went really well and I got lots of laughs throughout.  There were also a number of non-English people in the audience, who still seemed to enjoy it despite having no clue who Roy Walker was.

It’s probably one of the gigs that I’ve most enjoyed doing. The material is all about the performance, and I don’t think I could script it if I tried.  There are certainly things that I know I need to hit – both to make the story work and to get laughs – but much of it is really loose, and I think it actually depends on me reacting to the audience and making it feel organic.  The fact that I’m now able to make this in any way work feels like evidence of my progression as a performer.  It also felt very natural for me to be doing this kind of stuff and another step towards finding my “voice”.

The next step is to make it last for 20 minutes.  Wish me luck.

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gig 62: Magical Animals @ Sandbar, Manchester – 11th June 2012

June 12, 2012 4 Comments

Last night was quite momentous as it finally saw Terry appearing as….errr….”himself” on stage.  It was long, long overdue.

Terry is the character I concocted which helped me work out how to do Den Kodd; it’s Terry who is the person that performs the Ken Dodd tribute act.  Other than some YouTube videos (see here), Terry has only appeared as Den in public.  He was supposed to perform at last month’s Magical Animals (NOT Gig 58), which I had to cancel, so I was desperate to get it out of my system.

The genesis of the act came when I decided to make a short mockumentary about Terry, with a friend (still a work in progress).  It struck me that it would be great to get some footage of Terry on stage, floundering around, trying to be a comedian.  Where better to give that a whirl than the home of oddity in Manchester, Magical Animals? Because Terry was supposed to be bad at comedy, this gave me the opportunity to give something else a try that I’d been longing to do: be under-prepared and just see what happens.  I didn’t want to completely improvise; I thought it would work better if I had a few ideas that I could work around.  I had a couple of poems that I wanted to try out, and thought that I’d resurrect my Crocodile Dundee material from Gig 49, as it really seemed to fit.

Until the drive over to the gig, this was all the prep I did.  I did have a little think about it on the drive over, and latched onto the idea of Terry trying to ape some of the comedians he might have seen on the telly.  This amounted to asking the audience how they were and talking about wanking.  I didn’t practice any of this, and I was hopefully going to try and go with it in the moment.

I was on third, and as soon as I popped the teeth in, Terry took over.  It was the most fun on stage that I’ve had for ages, and I loved the combination of having ideas to use and then messing around in between them.  I think the audience liked it (some of them at least!), but I was having too much of a good time messing around to really digest how it went.  The four minutes ended all too soon and it just left me wanting to give Terry another crack at stand up.

As is usual, I was came second in the vote.  The night was won by Penella Mellor and her tales of poo-eating dogs.  You’re never going to beat tales of poo-eating dogs. Even Terry.

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gig 59: The Bernard Bananas Cabaret Show! @ Lass O’Gowrie, Manchester – 23rd May 2012

May 24, 2012 Leave a comment

Sean Connery at the 2008 Edinburgh Internation...

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.

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gig 58: Open for Laughs @ Bar 1:22, Huddersfield – 17th May 2012

May 18, 2012 3 Comments

After an aborted attempt on Monday (NOT Gig 58), last night I finally got the first gig of my second year of comedy out of the way.  Hooray.

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

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gig 57: SAS Comedy @ Lass O’Gowrie, Manchester – 12th May 2012

May 13, 2012 6 Comments

Last night marked the final gig in my first year of comedy, so it seemed fitting that it should be where I first started (Gig 1), SAS Comedy.  This was my ninth time at SAS, but the first time that I’d done a) more than one act in a night, and b) worked with someone else.

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.

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

TGB 31\Gig 44a: Terry Dowling aka Den Kodd on BBC Radio Leeds – 2nd April 2012

April 8, 2012 Leave a comment

Terry Dowling aka Den Kodd aka One of the North-West’s leading\only Ken Dodd tribute acts makes a guest appearance on BBC Radio Leeds with Vic McGlynn.  He tells us a poem and then quizzes the Yorkshire\North Lincolnshire region with an amazing love songs-based quiz.  Can you get all the answers right?

Yes, probably.

Unless you can’t.

You’ll have to have a listen and find out for yourself.

You can listen to it on iTunes here: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=340803894

Or, if you prefer, you can just listen to it here:

http://thegravyboat.podbean.com/2012/04/07/the-gravy-boat-31-terry-on-bbc-radio-leeds/

Or, if like me, you have got rid of your iPhone and have realised how great Google Reader\Listen is, the RSS feed is:

http://thegravyboat.podbean.com/feed/

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary, The Gravy Boat Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gig 43: Him and Me: Comedy Circus @ The King’s Arms, Salford – 21st March 2012

March 22, 2012 Leave a comment

This was quite possibly the strangest gig I’ve done so far.

Comedy Circus is a new night run by excellent sketch duo Him and Me (formerly Him and Me TV – check out their Youtube channel), at the lovely theatre space at the King’s Arms in Salford.  It was a sketch\stand up\character night, so I offered the services of Den Kodd and his hilariously large teeth.  The night also featured stand up from Hayley Ellis and Susan Hanks, and an appearance from Barbara Angel, Ashton under Lyne’s number one psychic.

As showtime approached, it was clear that there wasn’t going to be a massive audience, and the bar was canvassed for any additional bums-on-seats.  Fortunately, three people said yes to the approach and came up to boost the numbers.   Unfortunately, these three people were…err, I’m not sure what the politically correct term is, so I’m going to say “not on this planet”.   As the show started, it became clear that one of the trio was not going to be able to stop himself shouting out, even had he wanted to.

Hayley was up first and… (this next section is written on the express instruction of Miss Ellis herself)… she stormed it! Amazing! Fantastic! She smashed it out of the park.  She smashed it so far out of the park that someone had to be sent to collect it and bring it back so she could smash it out of the goddamn park again.  She in no way was put off by the moron in the cap constantly shouting things out (“is Wrexham near Preston?”) and seemingly not realising that a show was taking place.    The problem with this sort of heckler is that they’re so out of it\in their own world that you can’t put them down or reason with them to be quiet.  It ends up just being totally disruptive.

It was into this atmosphere that Den Kodd arrived.  I decided to start with the remark “I’m a bit nervous, this is the biggest crowd I’ve ever played to.”  I thought that it was in-the-moment and that it might help defuse the tension.  What it actually did was put me into a weird low-key mood, as if Terry\Den Kodd really was nervous.   I was really overplaying the stuttering and stumbling over my words.   I realised that I wasn’t putting enough energy into it and that it was sapping the little will that the audience had left.  I tried to pick this up when I actually started telling jokes, but the audience didn’t really go for the first few and Terry knew it.   There was some interference from the trio, and the man in the cap left part way through my set.   However, his mate did pipe up a despondent “fucking hell” after every joke I told.   I don’t think he capable of realising that they weren’t supposed to be amazing.

Despite getting the odd laugh, it didn’t go great.  Weirdly, however, I sort of enjoyed myself.  It was kind of like an improv workshop for staying in character as Terry\Den.  I pretty much dropped everything I had planned, and it was taking so long to get through my forced and unforced interruptions that I ended up dropping some of the jokes.   I’m sure there was a massive lesson to be learned from it, but I’ve not quite processed it yet.  What it did make clear to me was that character comedy isn’t easy, just because it’s gone well for me so far.   If the audience aren’t going for it, then you still need the skills to get them onside (and not do things to alienate them further as I seemed to be doing).  Damn, there’s a lot to learn in this comedy lark.

Thankfully, the disruptors left in the interval and the second half was great.   It’s a shame that more people didn’t show up, but I hope Him and Me stick with it as it’s a night with a lot of potential.

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gig 38: Beat The Frog @ Frog & Bucket, Preston – 7th March 2012

March 12, 2012 8 Comments

The last time I performed at Preston’s Beat The Frog (Gig 31) – just over a month ago –  I had been left clueless (and a little despondent) at how I would approach it next time.  I didn’t feel that I had the skill or the material to win the audience over with my current straight set.  I conceived of four possible options:

1) Do it in character.

2) Don’t prepare any material and just see what happened.

3) Try and write a set of material that I thought they might like.

4) Just try my usual stuff again.

Interestingly, I didn’t have “don’t do it” as an option.  Although I had questioned whether this particular night would be of any use to my development, I still hadn’t decided and thought the best way to find out would be to do it anyway.  Of the options I did consider:

1) I would have quite liked to have tried Den Kodd (Gig 33 & Gig 36), but as there’s not really a back stage area, I wasn’t sure of the logistics of doing my “Den Kodd” hair and inserting his teeth without anybody noticing, and I didn’t want to lose the impact of his initial appearance.

2) Although I would like to try this at some point as an experiment, it felt too much like giving up, under the circumstances.

3) They say that you should just write stuff that you think is personally funny, but I did think of trying a different style as an experiment.  I ran through some ideas of more observational stuff, and which bits of my existing material I might be able to convert.  I soon gave up when I realised that everything just ended up in my usual style anyway.

4) Realistically, it was always going to be option 4, wasn’t it?

Basically, I looked through my material and tried to pick bits that weren’t too obtuse, leaving out bits that were, and making sure I framed it all by explicitly making clear that my act was like this on purpose.  It had only been three weeks since my last straight stand up gig, but it felt like forever, and my material felt quite alien to me.  As I tried to pick a set, I felt as if I had no material, and it was a horrible feeling, but I managed to concoct something that I was willing to try, even if I didn’t hold out much hope for success.

I didn’t feel great in the lead up to the night.  It was perhaps the first gig I’ve done where I hadn’t had any enthusiasm for it beforehand.  To make matters worse, my previous gig (Gig 37) hadn’t gone great and on the day of BTF I was hit with a wave of epic tiredness that made me just want to go home to bed.  I knew I couldn’t do that, though, and got myself up to Preston.

The venue wasn’t as busy as last time – although still with a very healthy crowd in attendance – and I felt like I might have a better reception from those who were there.   This was based purely on gut instinct from scanning a room, so I don’t know how valid an opinion it actually was.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, I did have a better reception.  They didn’t say how long I lasted, but it must have been over 4 minutes.  Going off my timed run throughs, it could have been very close to five minutes.  Close, but no cigar… although that’s not quite the full story.   My set list for the night was:

1. “Stretched cat” – this is becoming a standard opener for me.  It works as a joke, but also indicates the kind of material I’m going to do.

2. The “lawyer-advised” Joke Book variant.  I’ve used the “joke book” in many forms.  Essentially I’ve got a book full of lame jokes and I use the book as a device to get them over.  On this occasion, I decided to address the fact that some people might not ‘get’ the opening joke – although I’m sure the vast majority did – specifically that it was supposed to appear to be going wrong and that I might do something else similar.  By addressing this early on, I was hoping to give the audience confidence that any apparent mistakes were actually part of the act.  I then suggested that my lawyer advised me to read out some pre-preapared jokes as a way of assuaging any fears they had about my competence.  By doing this, I was able to use some easily recognisable jokes, but in a slightly unusual way.

3.  ”Can’t fight the Moonlight” – now a regular bit.

4.  Peter Andre – This was a brand new bit, which was just a throwaway one-liner that I thought of in work.  It’s not spectacular, but I liked that it was very short and completely unrelated to anything else.   Importantly, it got a laugh.

5.  Arnie.  This is the first time I’ve done the Arnie bit without immediately going into the “controversial incomplete joke” bit.  I thought this would be a bridge too far and would almost certainly have gotten me gonged off.

6. “So she lost her job…”  - another bit I’ve done a few times before.  It seemed to go down OK.

7.  One Day in Liverpool.  This is the point that I got gonged off.  I was going to go into my short play, and to do that I had get the microphone back in the stand.  I’ve noticed with BTF that if a card or two are up and there’s anything approaching a pause\hesitation then the remaining cards shoot up, so I knew that this could be a key moment, especially as two cards were already up.  I probably faffed about too much at this point – partly because when I’d done timed run throughs, it had been about 6 minutes to get to that point, so I hadn’t expected to have to do it – and the final card unsurprisingly was held up.

So, I was frogged off and I was, quite literally, a loser.  Yet, it really didn’t feel like that.  There were people who were in fits of laughter, and quite a few people came up to me afterwards to say how much they had loved it.  Overall the reaction had seemed pretty good, despite the inevitable bunch of people who weren’t into it.  It felt like a win.

I don’t entirely know what to make of it all.  I’m still not entirely convinced about doing gong shows, but it at least showed that there is something for me to get out of them.  Who would have thought it?

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gig 36: Crack Up Comedy @ The Nip and Tipple, Whalley Range, Manchester – 19th February 2012

February 20, 2012 3 Comments

You may remember from my diary entry for Gig 33 that I originally created the character of Den Kodd in preparation for a gig that I later found out that I wasn’t going to be performing at. Well, even later still, I found out that I would be performing at it after all, and that’s what I did last night.  Hooray.

Due to a last minute change, I was asked the day before if I could do it and I jumped at the chance.  I hadn’t been feeling too well all weekend – just a cold, in case you’re worried – so didn’t feel like preparing too much.  I re-jigged the running order of the gags, and swapped a new one in for one that didn’t work last time.  I had a quick run through in the afternoon and that was that.

In terms of my performance, there wasn’t that much to talk about, and, in many ways, that’s something worth talking about.  It all felt incredibly easy.  I had no nerves, was looking forward to it, enjoyed the performance and was able to enjoy the other acts.  It’s probably the performance that I’ve been most relaxed over.  Although it didn’t go down quite as well as at SAS, I still got plenty of laughs, and didn’t feel out of place.  There’s things that I would improve upon, but it was only my second time doing that character.  It seems telling that I enjoy myself most at those nights where it’s a bit different and that straight stand up isn’t all that’s on offer.  I think it’s going to take me a while to process what to do with that information, and how I could use it to my advantage as a performer.

I don’t usually talk about the other acts in my diary posts, but it was an honour to be part of such a great bill.  It was the first of a new monthly comedy night at The Nip & Tipple, and although the audience was small, it was appreciative and the room was great.  It was a cracking line-up of character comedy: Peter Slater (from the amazing SAS Comedy) MCed as Bernard Bananas, with Rod Shepherd: Conspiracy Theorist and me\Den Kodd\Terry in the first half.  The second half was an extended set by Spanish lothario, Wilfredo, who I had seen in Edinburgh.  It’s the first time that he’d performed in the North of England, so I don’t think the audience knew what to expect but they were easily won over by his questionable charms (definitely go and see him if you get the chance to – he’s a great act).  Hopefully word of mouth will spread about the night and will help establish it as a great night for local comedy.  If you’re a lover of comedy and you’re in the area, then you owe it to yourself to make this night work.

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gig 34: Magical Animals @ Sandbar, Manchester – 13th February 2012

February 15, 2012 2 Comments

My spot at the last Magical Animals (Gig 23), back in December, didn’t go great.  I tried a whole bit about pretending to be the A-Team when I was a kid and it didn’t really get any laughs at all.  It was the first time that I’d done stand up at M.A. and I vowed there and then that next time I’d do something completely different.  In fact, I decided on that very night that I was going to do some kind of turn based on Bobby’s Snacks.

Regular readers of the blog will be fully aware of my obsession for all things Bobby.  I’ve often written about him, and his wonderful products, in my Consumer Queries feature. You can read them, here.  As I’d performed two other completely different sets in the same week – Gig 32 (straight set) and Gig 33 (Den Kodd) – and have another gig later this week (a different straight set), I didn’t have time to overly prepare the Bobby stuff.  I had an idea what it would be about that it would be based on some of the blog posts. Fortunately, it only took about an hour of re-writing on Sunday morning to get them in as much shape as they needed to be in, but I didn’t have much of a chance to rehearse.  As I’d be reading the stuff – I didn’t have time to memorise it – I felt confident enough that I’d be able to wing it to a sufficiently adequate standard.  The beauty of Magical Animals is that you’re free to just give anything a go – I’m usually categorised as genreless oddness – as long as it’s only 4 minutes in length.

I was the final act out of 15 performers and the audience had been a little restless all night, but I was just looking forward to getting out there and seeing what happened. It went OK, and there were a few laughs, but I felt it could have been better.  I think the main problem was that I had FAR too much stuff to cram into the slot – which meant I was rushing – and the material was a bit too wordy. There were bits that I liked, however, and I think it could be developed into something slightly different (and better), which is why I’m being a bit cagey about revealing too many details.  A couple of people did come up to me afterwards to say that they liked it, so that’s always encouraging.  Now I just need to think up what nonsense I’m going to do at the next Magical Animals.

Erm, I don’t really know how to end this, so…..BUY BOBBY’S SNACKS!

Related articles

Filed under Comedy, Gig Diary Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 568 other followers