Last night, Sir Ian shouted at a small audience for Variety Radio Live. He covered AV, Syria, Winnergate, and more…
Why not listen here:
This is an occasional series, the Comedy Book Reviews, in which I’ll look at various books and tell you how useful I think they are to the budding comedy writer, or writer-performer.
Standup Comedy: The Book by Judy Carter
Opening this book is like stepping back into the late 1980s. From the drop shadows on the geometric shapes that litter the pages, serving as – I can only guess – graphic design, to the choice of comics used as examples, to the description of the industry, this book is clearly 20 years out of date. Which is unsurprising, as it was first published in 1989.
What is surprising is that it is still in print. How can a book written before the Berlin Wall fell, before 9/11, before Jack Whitehall was even born possibly be of any relevance today?
Well, it is. Although the industry it describes isn’t a huge amount like the one that will face a comic in the UK, it’s fun to wallow in the world Bill Hicks described as his ‘flying saucer’ tour, one where there are actually clubs called things like ‘The Laugh-Inn’, and where Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling and Roseanne Barr are still working comics rather than bloated, corporate comedy brands. The industry may have changed, however, but the job hasn’t.
There’s a reason that this book is still in print (and pretty readily available) more than two decades after it was published. It gives a really good grounding in how to write and perform a particular kind of standup act. Admittedly, it’s standup of the confessional kind, the autobiographical kind, and the observational kind, but all of those styles are still relevant and popular today.
The joke-writing and material-generating techniques are still solid, and should enable anyone to craft a couple of minutes of decent gags about themselves, their situations, and the things they have noticed about the world. If that’s the style of comedy you’re interested in performing, then this is a good introduction.
Even if it isn’t, there are things to be gleaned in terms of structuring a set, setup and punch, and general rules about how to handle an audience and prepare for a gig. The section that deals with the more alternative forms of comedy: topical gags, character comedy, musical comedy or prop comedy is a little perfunctory, and this book is much more helpful for people who want to do straight standup.
This is a good basic primer I would recommend to all comics who are preparing an act to get up on a stage. The appendices and actual club and industry information are obviously of little use now, but the principles and ideas for material, how to generate and structure it, remain as true today as they were back when there was a Tory government, regular riots in London, IRA activity, and Libya was always in the news. Oh.
Here’s Gary’s second appearance on Dick And Dom’s Funny Business:
It’s been quite a year for my favourite MP. He stood down as Labour MP for Buckland and Ruttington, and stood up as Conservative candidate, beating himself soundly.
He was then deeply involved in the negotiations over the Coalition Agreement, which he insisted include a stipulation that non-jellied puddings be standard at Cabinet meetings. Political observers believe this to be a jibe at Danny Alexander, who likes nothing more than a bowl of jelly and ice cream after a hard day at the coal face. The coal face made up of newly-redundant teaching assistants.
Anyway, why not look back at how much (fashions, political realities, hairlines) has changed in the last year.
This is A Year In Bowler…
In April he suffered the shame and ignominy of having to resign. For a month.
After the election, his highly publicised spat with Alastair Campbell on Sky News led to his developing an entirely new colour in his cheeks. Scientists have provisionally named it ‘Megapuce’.
Sir Ian is so brilliant at using his computer he accidentally split this overlong video in two. Why not be the first person to ever watch both parts? (Because that would be dull.)
In late summer, Sir Ian was drafted in to help explain the changes in the child benefit system to a perplexed country. He did so by exploiting vulnerable youngsters, much in the same way he solved Buckland’s shocking lack of bootblacks and chimney sweeps.
Sir Ian decided to sing his opposition to the students. Because it rhymed. Sort of.
Enraged by his musical response, the students marched on London, and caught Sir Ian inside Millbank Tower.
Early this year, Sir Ian went on a speaking tour to explain our foreign policy…
And to berate sleepy financial experts.
And just last week he made sure that we all understood AV. What a legend.
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About three years ago I thought it would be funny to write a blog called Having A Poo With… In each entry I would parody the thoughts of a famous person as they went to the toilet. To do a poo.
It would show off my keen ear for language that was ripe for parody (it didn’t); it would be a regular and hilarious addition to people’s inboxes (it wasn’t); and be an excuse for a lot of jokes about bums (it was). The whole thing was prompted by an image of Will Self describing the “proleptic, anti-peristaltic turtle’s head” of a stool that was proving difficult to shift from his duodenum. This would show that Craig Brown…
Needless to say, I got bored after doing one entry. It sits there, alone in a corner of the Internet, unloved, leaking misery and loneliness into the ether. As it should be.
I was reminded of this when seeing another piece of advice to young writers in which they were sternly admonished to finish those things they started. That that was what separated the professionals from the rest of you. We finish what we start. We don’t leave abandoned half-drafts all over our hard drives. We don’t start without a plan, we know where we’re going, we finish what we start.
Balls. Unalloyed donkey-balls.
Whilst it is undoubtedly true that you can never get anything made (or published) unless you finish it, I think that there’s another risk just as great as starting something you never finish. And that’s never starting the thing at all.
Whereas in the past I would have happily ploughed in to a new idea whenever it occurred to me; now I have pinboards, charts mapping out act breaks, the will to muscle on through bits of writing that might not be working the way I’d hoped, and a huge pile of projects that I haven’t ever started because I’m not happy that I’ve got a complete grasp of them yet. Before writing was my job I would have played with these ideas, tried writing them. Now that seems irresponsible unless I know how they are going to turn out.
So they sit there.
And I look at them and think that if I’d taken that first moment when the idea seemed so brilliant and written everything that enthused me about it then, then I would have at least have a bit of them written. At least a bit I could look at, decide whether there was anything in it and carry on with. A bit that would have the fire in that initially excited me. Rather than a bunch of denatured plans for incomplete ideas.
Sometimes we have to play. Sometimes we have to just follow what excites us. Sometimes we have to fail.
We have to do the bit we think is excellent to realise that we don’t want to do the rest of it.
Which is why I’m glad i wrote the one entry on Having A Poo With… It’s a testament to doing something incompletely, but still having something that you like at the end of it. Its one entry is short, but still funny, and written. It’s there.
As opposed to all the well-worked through, not-quite ideas I have planned. So whilst it’s great advice to young writers to learn to finish the things you start, I wonder whether it might not be just as important to start things you have no idea how, or even if, you are ever going to finish.
That one entry? Having A Poo With… Charlie Brooker. Here it is:
Have you ever noticed how tawdry and awful doing a shit is? No, really. It is.
You sit there with your trousers around your rotten ankles, waiting for death, and straining so hard you look like Popeye wanking himself into a stupor, as he lies alone in bed imagining Olive Oyl being savagely bummed by Bluto. Who’s dressed as a clown.
Not only do you grunt and squeal like a piglet drowning in a bathtub full of razorblades and gin, but you’re actually squeezing actual human turds through your foetid ring-piece. You disgusting cock. Get some fucking dignity.
You’d almost feel sorry for yourself if you weren’t as despicable as the rest of the human sodding race. We should all have our heads replaced with bums, so that instead of going around having opinions, we could just spoot noxious clouds of toxic guff in each others’ bum-faces. Like cocks.
As if that weren’t bad enough, you’re then expected to wipe your own arse like some sort of idiot slave with nothing better to do than to smear actual shit around a piece of semi-absorbent paper. The shame of this makes you leak hot twat-tears into the uncaring toilet bowl.
The only thing that makes the process half bearable is the knowledge that the whole degrading process is at least confirmation that you’re still alive, and taking up precious space on this rubbish planet. For now.
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Books. I’ve been in love with books forever. I’ve got thousands of them stacked all over the house. Just the word ‘book’ looks like a comfy, cosy bed, into which one could sink with a good, long book. Books…
I’ve wanted to write books for as long as I can remember. Not only that, I have written them, from ‘The Adventures Of The T Family’ in 1985 (in which the family’s mother foils a robbery in a toy shop by beating a burglar with her handbag, and which, incidentally, passes the Bechdel test) to the series of ‘comic’ novels I wrote in my early 20s and that no one will ever see. Because they are awful enough to shatter the enamel on your teeth.
I’ve writen for newspapers, radio, the television, the internet, but not books. I even got one of my manuscripts bound so it could sit on a bookcase with my name on the spine like a book, but I’ve never ritten anything that’s actually in a proper book. Until now.
True, when I visualised stroking the glossy covers of my masterpieces, they rarely had light-blue, undead revenants on the cover, turning to advce on the reader with a terrible, merciless glint in their eyes. But that’s because I didn’t know that what I wrote was going to be in The Zombie Feed: Volume 1, a new anthology from Jason Sizemore.
And now I get to march in the grand parade of self-promotion for yet another reason. I now won’t just be hassling you to come to shows, or watch TV at a certain time in morning, or listen to podcasts, but to actually buy books.
Like the e-book version which you can get if you can’t wait for the book itself to be published. Yes, within seconds of reading this your e-reader of choice could be throbbing with 17 new short stories about zombies. One of which will be by me. And, if you get it from Amazon, it’s £2.14 for your Kindle (or Kindle-enabled device. Your kinda Kindle). That’s not even the price of a soft drink in most London hostelries.
And I’ll get royalties! Perhaps. I haven’t checked the contract for e-book sales. But I might. And that’s something.
So this year I can tick off Radio 4 and books. Pretty much all that’s left now is comics. And films. And grownup TV. And the West End. And a musical. And… oh poo.
Buy! Buy! Buy! And then buy a ticket to my show in Brighton!
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This is an elongated version of an article that originally appeared on The Spectator Arts Blog here.
Did you know that if you took your bowels and laid them end to end, you’d die? That joke works with practically any of the useless facts you were given about the human body as a child. Did you know that if you took off your skin and laid it out it would cover five tennis courts? And then you would die. If everyone in China stood on each other’s shoulders they would reach past the moon? And most of them would die. And life would go on in Midsomer completely unchanged.
There is, however, one substance, deep inside many of us that is inexhaustible. No matter how much you pull out of us, lay end to end, stretch across tennis courts, croquet pitches or badminton galleries, wind around the surface of Jupiter, or hurl, cackling, into the fiery bowels of the sun, there will still be more. Day after day, week after week it comes. That substance? Hatred of Richard Curtis.
No matter what his achievements, his international successes, his seemingly irredeemable niceness, all qualities we claim to value, almost everyone can be driven into a fizzing, supercilious foam by the mention of his name. Assailed from the left, scoffed at from the right, article after article after article appears, solely about how appalling Richard Curtis is.
I’m guilty of it myself. In an article I wrote for The Spectator last year I spent much of the middle section berating Mr Curtis, culminating in this particularly unpleasant couple of sentences:
“Fortunately, even as wrong-headed, ill-thought-through, patronising, glib and stupid as No Pressure is, it’s not Richard Curtis’ worst film. That’s Love, Actually.”
It’s all too cool and easy to join in the Curtis-bashing without thinking. Or even with thinking. With thinking and gleeful anticipation at all the horrid things you can say with impunity. And with writing yourself little notes in the middle of the night when you dream a particularly acidic putdown and don’t want to forget it before morning. I assume.
But all of the comedy I truly loved growing up had Richard Curtis’ hand in it. The first television programme I ever learned off by heart, imitating each and every one of the performers’ vocal tics, was Blackadder’s Christmas Carol. At school, we all knew it off by heart (when I say ‘all’ of us, I mean those of us not involved in the rugger, violence or sodomy cliques. Four of us).
We knew every series off by heart. And it introduced us to the hard stuff: A Bit Of Fry & Laurie, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, worlds that had seemed impenetrably adult before.
In the mid-nineties he was responsible for the teenage female population of Great Britain becoming infinitely more susceptible to awkward public school boys with unruly hair, when Four Weddings And A Funeral became a hit. My teenaged self is forever grateful. Many women now entering their mid-30s may well not be.
In fact, as the creator of so much of the comedy I devoured repeatedly during my formative years Richard Curtis is certainly responsible, at least in part, for the fact that I now make my living writing and performing comedy. That may be another black mark against him for many.
When I started writing the terrible student plays that terrible students write, I kept crossing out jokes, muttering ‘too Richard Curtis’. Now I just cross them out, muttering ‘too shit.’
How, then, did it reach this pass? How is Curtis-lambastation such an easy trope to fall into? How has Britain’s media become a trough of venom for one of the most successful figures our country had produced in the last century?
He has many of the virtues our right-wing media purport to hold dear. He’s a self-made man; and, although Harrow and The House don’t exactly smack of clawing one’s way up from the streets, he won a scholarship to Harrow, and his career has been marked by an quite boggling amount of work. Richard Curtis clearly works hard. Almost constantly.
And I think this is one of the things we hold against him. We’re lazy. We’re all lazy. Writers are crippled with the knowledge of all that time they’ve wasted checking emails, ‘doing research’, or playing Mineswee… rechecking emails. And when we catch a moment between wines for a quick snooze, we fall asleep haunted by the knowledge that somewhere Richard Curtis is writing something that millions of people will love, and that will lead to his having to build an extension to his bank.
Mr Curtis’ body of work is an indictment of every lazy one of us. Added to which, to a certain part of the right-wing commentariat, it’s probably just typical unpleasantness about a scholarship boy; every haughty reference to The Boat That Rocked a coded whisper about how Curtis has second-hand hockey kit.
He is also an incredible public fund-raiser. Funds that, much to the chagrin of the same cabal of tiresome proto-fascist foghorns, are freely given by people whose concerns are much the same as those of Richard Curtis: alleviating poverty in Britain and abroad with grass-roots projects.
It gives the lie to those libertarians (or, indulge me, ‘fibbertarians’) who claim that they don’t object to things being done for the poor in and of themselves, it’s just when they are done by governments that it’s also a problem for them when Richard Curtis does it. The fact that they are whipped into a steaming, broken, hate-froth by a man who spends a lot of his time organising charitable giving, bankrolled by his private income in the free market (where, incidentally, he’s pretty successful, too) just goes to indicate what decrepit, empty, noise-hoses they are, blaring hateful inanities until their eyes burst, or until Nanny turns down the topsheet. To be clear: they are against the Nanny State, not nannies
You’d think that if you wanted charitable giving to replace the welfare state you might at least take a polite interest in the activities of a man who has raised £630 million through Comic Relief (not counting his involvement in Live Aid or Live Eight). You might be a little intrigued by the way in which it operates on the Golden Pound principle, whereby none of the administrative costs of the organisation are paid for by donations, but rather through interest on money in the bank or corporate sponsorship.
If nothing else, Comic Relief took a grim, drab, wet, minor public school in the bumcrack of Surrey in the late 1980s, where most of the spring term was spent running between classrooms with books over your head to fend off the rain / hail / prefect urine, and offered the possibility that maybe, just for one day, the teachers might let you tell jokes, watch videos, do silly things to raise money. They never did, of course. Being slippered by a man in a plastic red nose is very similar to being slippered by a man without one, but it at least gave us hope.
We’re often told that the left ‘hate success’. They can’t bear it. They search around for anyone showing the slightest zest or entrepreneurial spirit, and then tear them down like a bunch of barely-motivated lions mauling a zebra. Or Richard Branson.
Very few Britons have been as internationally successful as Richard Curtis. It’s often a bit of hyperbole, but it actually would actually take too long to list all of his accomplishments here. His creations are beloved by the world: he co-created Mr Bean. He single-handedly invented a whole genre of films ‘the Britcom’. He’s Oscar-nominated and has a string of hits to his name. He came up with two long-running sitcoms. He hasn’t met a format in which he hasn’t had a huge success. He has exported a certain sort of British culture across the world, and had it embraced everywhere.
It isn’t the left who hate success. Dastardly from Wacky Races (or Stop The Pigeon if you’re a purist) hates success. As do people who write endless gloating articles about Richard Curtis’ perceived failings.
And how can we hate Richard Curtis? He’s so nice. So absolutely, irredeemably, bastardly fucking nice. He’s polite, unfailingly respectful (in public at least) of those around him, gathers talented people and gets excellent work out of them, for free. He’s a national treasure. What is there to get so upset about?
Four things keep coming up.
I’d probably best address the one I played on in the article I wrote: that he seems to have a tin ear for emotion, that he seems not to distinguish between real, earned emotion and cheap sentiment. I was first troubled by this in the infamous “we actually are expected to entertain, even for a beat, the fact that Julia Roberts’ stardom is more of a burden than Gina McKee’s not-having-any-legs and not-being-able-to-have-children” pastry distribution scene in Notting Hill.
To me, this made Love, Actually unwatchable actually (have a look at the other article for some of my specific problems with it), but, you know what? Curtis straddles the line between emotion and sentiment, and the exact position of that line is different for all of us. For some of my friends “Oh, is it raining? I hadn’t noticed…” is intolerable, but I relax into it with an enjoyable mental squelch.
Millions upon millions of people disagree with me about Love, Actually. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m emotionally deficient. Or maybe it’s all right when people disagree about films. And when he gets it right, he gets it exactly right, as he did at the end of his episode of Doctor Who last year.
The second recurrent criticism is just a vague sort of dislike-by-association, because people have him linked quite closely in their minds with Tony Blair and the late 1990s. I don’t see any real evidence for this, although the years of Curtis’ greatest success and prominence as an international figure were also those of the rise of New Labour.
I think Mr Curtis made his feelings pretty clear about Tony Blair in Love, Actually, and that we should bear in mind that one of them two of them holidays with murderers, dictators, alleged hirers of child prostitutes, and seems unable to distinguish between ‘morality’ and ‘venality’; and the other makes funny films and raises money for the poor.
Another criticism is that he is ‘too political’, something you won’t hear those same commentators saying about Rupert Murdoch. When these fibbertarians spend their time bemoaning the way a private individual chooses to give their time to causes they support, you really have to question their commitment to the principles they claim to espouse.
Their problem, of course, is not that he is too political. I’m sure, if pressed, they would concede that he’s entitled to be exactly as political as he wants. They are merely concerned that he is too good at being political, at achieving things and publicising the causes about which he cares. They remember The Vicar Of Dibley.
hat sitcom took a highly contentious issue (about which some of the pepole who so rail against Mr Curtis probably wish we were still arguing now) and showed its absurdity with some delightful casting and a dopey sidekick. He healed the rifts in the General Synod with a Christmas episode about having to eat lots of dinners. And he did it with a warm heart, jokes about words that sound funny, people who don’t understand things, and without ever stooping to the level of his detractors. (Yeah, me! Take that!)
His concerns are close to those of the general public, which is why when Richard Curtis decides the Robin Hood tax is a good thing, the aim of the bankers’ arm of the right-wing commentariat (which is all of the right-wing commentariat) suddenly becomes to destroy Curtis himself. The flying donkeys have been unleashed, beware a torrent of horse-manure.
The last criticism I have heard a lot is that Richard Curtis’ best work is behind him. To which my response is: And?
John Cleese’s best work is behind him, Woody Allen’s best work is behind him, but that is no criticism. When you have left behind things as glorious as they have, you can keep trying on the offchance. When even your relative misses far exceed most other people’s hits, it’s not a terrible thing to not be on your personal top form.
In conjunction with Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis also gave us something that is, I think, more valuable the whole Britcom genre. I call it the Comic Rallentando of Airy Passages. Or CRAP. This is something you’ll see a lot in the more florid passages of dialogue in Blackadder, or whenever there’s a particularly delightful mental image to savour, Rowan Atkinson slows down as he approaches the end of the sentence, and the silly word (ideally a monosyllable) that completes… it.
Atkinson’s eyes roll around the whole room before giving that last word. Often ‘pebble’, or ‘plinth’, or ‘Bob.’
I found myself using the other day with the word ‘glans’. I hadn’t realised when writing it, but as I mouthed that ‘glans’ in front of a room full of people I couldn’t help but think of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson, rolling their plosives around in public.
That’s just one of the rhythms they gave us. When he worked with Rowan Atkinson, we had the joy of seeing someone delighting in writing word for someone who delighted in saying them. Every labial, oily crevice of a word would be exposed. Richard Curtis gave us a comedy in which language wasn’t funny because it had a second meaning, or because it revealed character, but because it was funny to say.
I have problems with some of Richard Curtis’ films, I do think he sometimes takes the easy option for his characters and stories, but he has given us new modes and rhythms of comedy. He wrote the comedy language that a lot of us learned as we grew up. He’s a dominant international figure, an ambassador for Britain, has a phenomenal body of work, and he has added to the lexicon of British comedy, changing it for the better.
Comic Relief is his crowning achievement, a unique testament to the man’s passions and achievements and one that engages all sorts of people across the country to do naff, unsophisticated things because it makes them laugh. Once every two years, Richard Curtis gives us an opportunity to change the world in small, tangible ways and to revel in laughter.
And nothing makes cold hearts sicker than knowing not only is the country laughing, but the country’s giving at the same time.
Oh, and for the record? Bernard And The Genie was excellent. I watched it so often I wore my videotape out. It should be on every Christmas, everywhere. And this Friday, I’ll be watching to see what new things he has come up with to entertain, amuse, and to save lives across the world*.
I’m putting money into Richard Curtis’ pot. I suggest you do, too. And then I’m punching myself in the face for contributing to the torrent of bile that washes over him, and doesn’t seem to have the slightest effect.
Did you know that if you took all of the venom spewed by all of the commentators and put it into a swimming pool, then you’d die. Both because there’s loads and you’d die of old age, but also because venom is… venomous and you shouldn’t even be in the pool in the first place, and… Oh, Richard Curtis is great. Give money to Comic Relief.
The End.
(*This is a fib. This Friday I’ll be at a gig. But I’ll watch it when I get in.)
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This post was originally a guest post on The Zombie Feed, written to promote the anthology The Zombie Feed: Volume 1 in which my zombie story ‘Cold Comfort’ appears.
In the dead of night, when all that’s out the window are moon-weevils and shadow-bats, you can sometimes hear bodies being disinterred. There’s the scrape of metal against coffin-wood, the sigh of entombed air escaping from forgotten sarcophagi, and the tapping of fingers against keyboards.
All across the world, writers are sitting and wrenching new ideas, new stories out of their brains. Often they find themselves in the process of plundering the graves of long-dead authors, trying on their shrouds, playing new games with their characters, their themes, their stories. Part of coming up with new things is robbing the tombs of the dead, and cackling whilst you do so.
In my case, for the story in The Zombie Feed, I plundered Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master And Margarita.
Bulgakov wrote his great magic-realist novel about the Devil’s visit to Moscow at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror. A respected member of the Moscow literary establishment (and one who received personal telephone calls from Stalin) Bulgakov wrote a number of drafts in secret; if its existence has become known, it would have meant internal exile if not death.
The book is both a fantastic romp, and a satirical piece, with Satan running rings around the petty bureaucrats and functionaries of Soviet Moscow. At the time I’d also just read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Orlando Figes’ brilliant assessment of how private life was eroded in Soviet Russia: The Whisperers.
Totalitarianism was preying on my mind, and the ways it intentionally dehumanises people. In order for a government to dominate its citizenry so completely it must ensure that they cannot trust each other. A culture of informing, corrupt bureaucracy, and a people in permanent need of basics like a warm coat, or an extra room, all of these served to make the real tragedy of Stalin’s Russia a population that could not trust itself.
Not friendship, not kinship, no tie was secure from the intrusion of the state. No one might not be turned against you. You couldn’t ever just relax and blow smoke. Not entirely comfortably.
So, zombies, then. They’ve been used a lot to satirise capitalism, mindless consumerism, the ease with which we are swayed by demagogues, and I thought I’d drop them into Soviet Russia, to see how they swam. To see how they did, you’ll have to read the story…
But it almost seemed too perfect. What kind of story is more about loneliness, isolation, the inability to trust those around you, than a zombie story?
My zombies aren’t the typical shambling infected, however, they are spun off from minor characters in Bulgakov’s book, specifically the severed head of a Soviet commissar that refuses to stop trying to order those about it around. Hopefully, it catches some of Bulgakov’s dark humour, throws a few new twists into zombie lore, and is an unsettling and, on occasions, revolting read…
To preorder your copy of The Zombie Feed: Volume 1, click here.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, famous alumnus. And, in all fairness, he was reasonably famous before we started.
I’ve been teaching Nick Wallis, Breakfast presenter for BBC Surrey, how to do standup comedy, in aid of Comic Relief for the last few weeks. Summaries of bits of our lessons can be found here, here, here, here, & here.
Having exposed himself to the hecklers and monsters of Reigate a couple of Fridays ago, last week Nick had to go and perform for a minute in front of Jo Brand, Jon Culshaw, Hugh Dennis and Emma Freud last week. He had to do actual standup in front of actual standups. You can read all the details, including how Nick felt he was going to be ‘sick on the spot,’ and watch a video of his performance here.
Teaching standup is an odd thing. One week you may be fearing for your students’ safety, the next wiping a tear from your eye as the knob gag that you helped them work up from a weak pun is rapturously received by an audience of… tens, usually.
Still, doing this with Nick has been especially gratifying. Not only has it been heartening to see him take to comedy so easily, but it’s also been a way of raising money for Comic Relief. It’s rare that a a profession so mired in (and fuelled by) cynicism and bitterness gives you an opportunity to do something so utterly wholesome.
What was particularly encouraging was the way in which the judges said that Nick was “most like an actual standup”, “comfortable”, and “so good looking”. I am going to take credit for all of those things…
My notes would be: if you’re going to do an improvised bit, Nick, make sure you’ve got a punchline to end it with, and a way of getting back to the material you’ve prepared. And, stop putting in extra words again, you’re swamping your punchlines with verbiage! But I shall berate you thoroughly for all that next time I see you.
Well done. Next stop: the Komedia on March 17th!
If you’d like the same sort of comedy tuition that Nick Wallis has been receiving, why not drop me an email about one-to-one lessons, or look at the Courses page?
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- Wax On, Whacks Off… (nathanieltapley.com)
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- Brian Logan on novelty standups (guardian.co.uk)
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Nathaniel Tapley 