Identity Crisis

Yesterday I found myself in Oxford with time to kill before catching a train. So I decided to use the time to try and develop my on-stage character a bit.

A comedian's stage persona is often very different from how they are in "real life". I know one comedian who is really vivacious and friendly, but his comedy style is deadpan and on stage he portrays himself as a neurotic intravert. Another guy I know is the opposite - intense and serious off-stage, carefree and whimsical on-stage.

An identifiable stage character will create the right context for my material. For instance, Jimmy Carr's character is an impeccably well-dressed, well-spoken, slightly superior, middle-class Englishman. In real life Jimmy has a strong Glaswegian accent and his father was a docker.
OK I made that last bit up, but Jimmy isn't as posh as he makes out - it just allows him to tell jokes like: I'm middle class, but I'm hard. Al dente, you might say. 

As Tony Cannelloni, I had this sorted. Character comedy allows you to very quickly establish your character's angle and let's the audience know where you're coming from. When Tony says he has sung in all the great venues, you know he probably means the Labour Club and the Britsh Legion. But doing it without the wig and the medallion is a bit more tricky. I don't really know who Sam Brady is yet, and this makes it more difficult to write material.

Anyway, to get to the point... I went around Oxford yesterday looking in charity shops for clothes, asking myself, how does Sam the stand-up dress? Who is this guy?

I was getting nowhere really and then I passed a Specsavers. I went in and tried on some glasses. And I think it worked. Suddenly a new Sam was peering back at me in the mirror. 

I said to the bemused assistant, "If you have perfect vision but you still want glasses, does it make them cheaper?" Eventually we established that it doesn't.

I'm not sure about the glasses or anything else yet. But I feel a new Sam is about to emerge soon, like an alien from the belly of a space station engineer.

If you have any thoughts about who Sam is, let me know.

I was sent this today by a friend and thought I would share it.

It's a great talk on the phenomenon of UFOs and alien encounters which ties in with a routine I am working on about beliefs and opinions.

I liked it. Hope you do too.

Hoping for a Happy New Year in Chorlton

I've just agreed a booking at Mirth on Monday in Chorlton at the Iguana Bar for 5th January.

I'm looking forward to this as I used to live in Chorlton and have quite a few friends there.

It's also part of my decision to try and move away from Gong Shows during the first quarter of 2009. This gig is a 10 minute spot supporting more experienced comedians so it' a much better environment for learning (possibly the hard way).

I'll probably still have to fill in the gaps in my diary with a few gong shows. Hopefully I'll get some spots on Beat The Frog, which I love. 

Beat The Frog World Series

Last night I went to the Final of Beat the Frog: World Series at the Frog & Bucket in Manchester. This is the climax of a knockout competition between everyone who won a Beat the Frog gong show during the year.

The standard was high and it was great to see some acts I know well really raising their game. In particular I thought Andrew Ryan was fantastic with his Irish take on living in England - he is so likeable on stage. (Even though he was actually completely shitting himself,  you wouldn't have known it.) Andrew came second which was a considerable achievement but he could easily have won it.

The winner was Sam Gore from Leeds, whose continuous improvement I have also witnessed over the past six months. He really nailed it.

It's really encouraging to see people progress. It makes me aware of how good I could get. I was pleased for them both, but if I make the final next year, I hope they die on their arses.

Lessons Learned from the night:

1. Never pinch other people's material - even if the audience don't spot it, other comics will.

2. The later you appear on the bill in a Gong Show the better your chance of winning - drunk people have short memories.

3. I can be as good as these guys if I keep working at it.

THE GAG BANK

In response to Guy's idea that there be a central post against which anyone can add a comment with their comedy idea, here it is.

I started to completely over-engineer this, setting up a forum and all sorts. Then I thought, Bollocks, What am I playing at and just added this post instead.

All thoughts, musings, etc, gratefully stolen...er...I mean...received.

Thanks
Sam

Read the Comments

If you a reading this blog (which you obviously are) then here's a top tip.

Read the comments that people leave. They are generally the best bits.

Cheers

Sam

Everyone has an Opinion

Some of the funnyiest writing is funny because it draws out the absurdity of human behaviour. We really are a bunch of plonkers.

For instance, we are all very good at having opinions. Opinions are great. They are particularly useful in the absence of any knowledge, understand or facts.

Take the "Credit Crunch" for example. (Alliteration is another fabulous thing but I'll save that for another day.) The economy is amazingly complicated and boring. Not even the top economists seem to really understand how it works. Politicians don't have the concentration span to understand it. Bankers don't need to understand it (they get paid anyway). And the rest of us don't give two hoots about it until we are queuing up outside our bankrupt building society trying to withdraw our savings.

Yet, despite this shortage of understanding, the torrent of opinions on the subject never seems to dry up. It's the bankers' fault! It's Gordon Brown! It's Margaret Thatcher! We should privatise the banks! We should go war with Iceland! Blah blah blah.

It's the same with the environment. I don't think anyone really knows what the hell is going on. But there is no shortage of opinions.

Pick any subject - War in Iraq, Education, Madonna's marriage, Kerry Katona's waistline. A scarcity of facts and a wealth of opinions.

Sorry if you were hoping this blog would be funny by the way.

I just wanted to introduce the topic and see if any of you have any thoughts on it before I start to develop this idea further. What do you think? Is there some material here?

Thanks

I really appreciate the support I am getting for this blog and so I'm going to thank some people. If you don't like gushy speeches, stop reading now.

Thanks to Guy for his consistently useful feedback. And thanks to Mary for coming to the Comedy Store.

Thanks to my future mother-in-law, Judy, for her love and for the newspaper supplement on How To Write Comedy which was really good.

Thanks to Sally for her long-distance enthusiasm from Argentina.

Thanks to my mate Tony for listening to my half-baked comic ideas all weekend.

And thanks to Jane for her ever-patient, ever-honest, ever-supportive response to my prancing about the house doing funny voices and asking, "Is this funny?"

And thanks to my daughter Lottie for telling me in no uncertain terms when something isn't funny.

And thanks to my Mum and Dad whose blind faith in my ability to do just about anything seems to be inexhaustible contrary to all the evidence.

New Material

The past couple of days I've been working on some new material.

It's a fun process but it's pretty laborious. I generally start out with some idea or impression that strikes me as absurd. Then I try to scribble down my thoughts on the subject - anything at all that comes into my head. Then, maybe the next day, I sift through the notes looking for themes or ideas I can develop.

Some days I don't feel at all funny and it's like drawing teeth.

Yesterday I was writing about disabled parking spaces. Whenever I go into a car park it's always full - apart from about 90 unused disabled spaces. Why is this? What has Warrington done with it's disabled people?

Or is it forward planning? Are we expecting a massive rise in the number of disabled people over the next few years. Perhaps Warrington is trying to attract disabled people for some reason - maybe it has ambitions to become the Special Olympic Village in 2012.

Any other suggestions welcome.

One thing I found out was that morbidly obese people can get a badge to park in disabled spaces. I guess that's why they make the spaces so wide. And nearer to the shops - less time to get to Greggs.

The difficulty here is that I don't want to sound like I'm having a pop at disabled people. I'm not. It's more of a pensive look at the mysterious world of town planning.

Some other thoughts: it's wrong of me to say that wheelchair users are disabled - they are differently abled. I am able to walk. They are able to park on a double yellow.

Ho hum. It's not easy this, you know.

Peter Kay has lost the plot

Just for the record, Peter Kay's new tv show Britain's Got the Pop Factor and Possibly a new Jesus Christ Superstar Soapstar Strictly On Ice was total pants!

The only funny thing about it was the title.

After that it was overhyped, unimaginative and unfunny. It didn't work as a spoof because whatever they did, it wasn't any more absurd than the real thing. In the end he had to resort to someone choking to death on set in order to do something that hadn't already happened on the real shows.

Peter Kay is a brilliant stand-up and a naturally funny man. But whoever told him this was funny wants shooting.

Maybe he has just been surrounded by too many Yes men.

Peter. Sorry. It was crap. Find some new people to write with.

(I'm free most weekends, by the way...)

The Great Gig Drought of 2008

Getting gigs isn't easy. There aren't that many opportunities and there's a lot of competition for bookings.

I'm a bit annoyed with myself at the moment as I was offered 3 gigs at the Frog & Bucket (my favourite venue so far) for November and December. I normally check my email about twice a day but for some reason I didn't check it at all on Monday. By the time I responded on Tuesday they had already given all 3 bookings to someone else. That's it now until next year for the Frog.

From now on I'll be more diligent. Anyway I am on the case and am hoping to get about 10 bookings for the first quarter of next year which is about as many as I can do.

In the meantime I guess the gig drought will give me a bit of time to reflect on what I have learned and to write some new material. And to have hours of fun bouncing about in front of a mirror with a mic telling myself jokes. 

Life is good.

Another gig, another lesson

This post is a bit of an epic, so settle down with a cup of tea.

Last night I did a gong show called Rawhide Raw in Liverpool at the Royal Court Theatre. That's not as grand as it may sound - the gig was actually in the downstairs bar to about 60 or 70 people.

As gong shows go it's a pretty good one for learning the trade. 

For a start, it's a small crowd and small crowds are much more difficult to warm up. They are more self-conscious about laughing out loud and you have to get most of them laughing before you get a critical mass. With a bigger crowd of say 250, you only need 20% of them to laugh and it lifts everyone else. So a smaller crowd is a much better measure of how good (or bad) you really are - there's nowhere to hide.

Also, the format at Rawhide is different. You get five minutes grace before the audience are allowed to gong you, which gives you time to try out material and to build rapport. This is invaluable stage time.

So how did I get on? Well the bell sounded to mark the end of my 5 minute grace period. And then the gong sounded one second later and I left the stage. I might be exaggerating - it may have been less than a second.

What went wrong? 

1. I didn't establish rapport with the audience.

2. My opening line fell flat on its face.

3. Some of my jokes were shit.

4. I think I scared the girls in the front row.

What went well?

1. I now have a few gags that have worked every time - that's a good start.

2. I also have a few that have consistently bombed and will never see the light of day again.

3. I got a very big (and prolonged) laugh for an ad-lib. I am good at them and I now realise I need to be a bit more spontaneous.

4. I wasn't nervous and I didn't feel humiliated when I didn't get a laugh - just a bit frustrated

5. I still want to be a comedian.

6. I did actually get a few good laughs.

What next?

1. I need to work at rapport - I think I'm a bit preachy on stage. I need to connect more and to relax a bit and smile once in a while.

2. I need a solid gold opening line - I had a really bad start last night.

3. I need to ditch about 50% of my material and sharpen up the other 50%

Better get on with it then.

Oops! There goes gravity!

I'm still a bit confused about what happened last night at the Comedy Store.

It would be wrong of me to say that I went down well - having been booed off the stage after 1 minute 28 seconds. But being booed is a lot better than being greeted by silence and walking off to the sound of your own footsteps. And I did get some laughs.

But the whole event was very different from what I expected. 

The first thing that threw me was the lack of intro music. I have always walked on to loud music which helps lift the crowd and kick-start the act. But instead the acts walked on to a thin smattering of applause. 

The second thing that sent me off balance was the unfamiliar character of the audience - so different from anything I have experienced before.

I anticipated hecklers - and I was kind of ready for it. But the hecklers didn't really materialise. Instead a kind of slightly prissy, moralistic air hung over the place, with murmurs of disapproval gradually swelling into boos.

It wasn't just me - it happened to quite a few of the acts. The minute the material got a bit close to the knuckle, they started moaning and groaning. I felt a bit out of place - like Bernard Manning in a Buddhist Temple. Material that got big laughs at the Frog & Bucket was baulked at. They reacted as if I had just pooed on the stage. (Which I nearly did.)

All the put-downs I had practiced went completely out of the window. Instead, I responded to boos from a particularly vociferous group by telling them to fuck off. Ironically this got my biggest laugh of the night.

At the end of my marathon 1 minute and 28 seconds, I at least amused myself by saying, "But this is me life! It's me dream!" a la X Factor. But, to be honest, it was a bit half-hearted.

My friends, Guy and Mary, came along to watch. Guy summed it up: "I think you misjudged your audience." I think he was right.

Having said all this I wouldn't like to give you the impression that I didn't enjoy myself. It was great fun and a real adrenalin rush. I feel determined to win those buggers over and I can't wait to go back next month for another go  - but maybe with different material.

Hoping for a better day

Yesterday stank.

I spent the morning being given a humiliating riding lesson by a stubborn horse who was determined to show me who was boss. The afternoon was marred by a last minute goal and a home defeat for my football team, Wigan Athletic. And in the evening we went to Old Trafford in the pouring rain to see my rugby team St Helens outwitted, outmuscled and...well...beaten in the Superleague Grand Final.

It's weird how a string of disappointments can knock your confidence - even when there is nothing you could have done to change the outcome.  I'm having to give myself a bit of a talking to today.

It wasn't helped by the riding instructor who told me that the horse would do what I told it because it could detect my "intravert behaviours" a mile off. I'm seriously hoping that the seasoned hecklers at the Comedy Store tonight are more easily fooled.

Frog & Bucket, 15 Sep 2008

Yesterday I got my hands on this picture of me at the Frog & Bucket on 15th September, when I was ten seconds short of Beating the Frog.

I think this is the "sexual confession" routine where I attempt to look shamefaced and slightly defensive. But if you look closely at my mouth you might notice that I can't resist a very slight smirk as I anticipate my own punchline. If only everybody enjoyed my jokes as much as I do.

I look quite bald as well. Must be the lights.

Rehearsing My Set for the Comedy Store

Spent my lunch break today prancing round the kitchen, mic in hand, delivering my set to the cooker and the fridge. The response was mixed: they didn't laugh, but then again they didn't heckle. (Although I thought I caught them exchanging wry glances once or twice.)

Basically I have a Plan A, a Plan B and a Plan C for Sunday at the Comedy Store...

Plan A: Do the same set I did at the Frog and Bucket but with a few tweaks and a few new gags. Topics on which I plan to hold forth: Life behind bars; Computers that can apologise; Breast englargement (and the dangers therein); Marital strife.

Plan B: If the crowd get too rowdy, my (somewhat ambitious) plan is to turn the hecklers against each other using some clever Derren Brown-like psychological trickery.

Plan C: Put it down to experience.

Whatever happens I can scarcely contain my excitement. I'm cockahoop.

Another Gig Booked In

I've had a bit of trouble getting more gigs. It's not easy.

Thankfully I just got one in Liverpool. I shall be gracing the stage at the Royal Court Theatre. Well, actually, I'll be playing in the downstairs bar, but you've got to start somewhere.

It's good because it comes only three days after the Comedy Store, so it will give me a chance to get back in the saddle after a mawling from the Mancs. Unless of course I then also get a mawling from the Scousers.

No no don't think like that! Think positive!

I am a comedy genius! Honest.