Day 24 - Derbyite Theory of Shakespeare Authorship

So the end draws near.

3 Man Roast had its last performance. A triumphant barnstormer for all concerned. All we were missing was pyro and dancing girls to make the show complete.

What was even nicer was a number of the audience were current members of Lip Theatre Company, my old university drama group. It is wonderful to see that the old flame is still burning bright no matter how much alcohol they attempt to douse it with. Though it did put into perspective that the current president of Lip was 6 years old when I joined. But she had a pet sheep so nothing changes.

I then went to watch Nick Helm's Dare to Dream. A combination comedy show and exercise in ennui. Utterly inspiring in one sense and interesting how similar he is to Paul Foot though with an entirely different tone.

LOTWAA had the potential to be awful as there were drunken locals about being annoying.

One complained that Kevin Shepherds show CARonicle, a car themed show, was themed about cars. In her opinion some of the show should have been about lesbian sex and not just cars. I won’t try and contemplate such cast iron logic.

When doing comedy the worst thing in the world is the unknowing punter who wants to chat about what its like. Normally they begin with the "You must be very brave" gambit. Comedy is not brave. Firefighting or dragonslaying are brave. Comedy is what bullied kids do in game of long-form catharsis. There is a long list of questions asked which are all or some of the following;

• Tell me a joke
• What's your favourite joke
• You don't seem very funny off-stage
• What got you started
• When will you be famous
• When will you be on TV
• ll tell you my joke (it's a bit blue)
• Please validate the drudgery of my pathetic, baseless existence by talking to me

This drunken woman proceeded to go through all of these at length and by the end I was wondering if it might be considered impolite to end the conversation by vomiting.

This put me in a thoroughly bad mood for the show. LOTWAA had a small but reasonable crowd. We had 2 walkouts but I was beyond caring by that point.

Then I socialised with Will Howells for the last night and sat down to figure out the most important thing in all Edinburgh.

Where will I watch Doctor Who "Let's Kill Hitler" tonight?

Day 15 & 16 - Extropianism

As I was unable to access a computer yesterday due to needing a little nap today is a double post.

I think time is compressed in Edinburgh. It’s a year of gigging in a month both physically and emotionally all compressed into 30 days. It the comedy circuit as zip file. Because of this I'm not exactly sure which day some of these incidents occurred in so this post will take the holistic view of it all.

3 Man Roast has been uniformly lovely and LOTWAA has been less consistent.

There seems to be a pattern where Laurence Tuck and I do well and Dan Adams not or vice versa. On one of the days was the first time I thought we did uniformly well. As LOTWAA has a later slot the audiences can be a little friskier than with 3 Man Roast. The learning curve is excellent as an upshot of this.

I have long shied away from doing any material about coming from Norfolk as its all mostly hack nonsense (Give me 6) peddled out by even the best comedians. However, after doing about 2 and half hours of thinking with a premise which started off with a joke about Northern Ireland I suddenly came up with an original quip which inverted the whole thing. I have trotted this out in front of the disparate demographics of Edinburgh audiences and it appears to be working almost universally.

Thusly I shall be trotting it out on the circuit from September onwards.

3 Man Roast picked up a 4* review from Whatsonstage.com with the lovely sign off note

                         "These boys are definitely ready to graduate to a larger room."


I also ran into fellow Norwich resident John Osbourne's whose show John Peel's Shed has been picking up 5* reviews across the board. 

Most evenings have ended tomorrow morning and however much Diet Coke I am consuming I have yet to become a more confident and independent young woman.