eviltechie.co.uk Life and times of a sit-down comedian

Party Piece

And he storms on from strength to strength.

Last night was Party Piece in Stoke Newington.  I’d heard mixed things about the night, and the area itself has always had the reputation of a shithole, quite frankly.  However, when I got there, it was great.  Stokie (as I believe no-one calls it) was a nice area, maybe it’s because the sun was shining and anywhere (even Balham) would have been nice but I really liked it.  Arrived with ages to spare (the evil Hils Jago’s advice about turning up early to gigs was actually sound), wandered around and ate the remains of the previous nights dinner (roast pork & potatoes - fact fans) in a park.

Actually that’s one of the nice things about doing comedy - getting to see areas of London that I never would have considered visiting.

Mark & Pru turned up unexpectedly - well not completely unexpectedly - I did text them - but I didn’t expect them to show so it was nice to see them.

Got chatting to the promoter (Tom Webb), who’d I’d met once before, albeit very drunk (I was very drunk, not him), and the highly amusing John Atkins (who I’d met at Stockwell).  John was asking about Logan’s course, but I advised him not to bother as it’s aimed at absolute beginners and I think if you’re gigging and on the circuit (I can’t believe I actually used that phrase in a “non-ironic” sense) it’s probably a waste.

Broke my rule about not drinking before the gig and had a pint.  Gah.  On the plus side, unlike other gigs where I’ve had a few (i.e. many) beers beforehand it didn’t seem to make much difference.  Still, maybe I would have been even funnier if I hadn’t.  Who knows.

John did an absolutely brilliant 5 minutes that consisted purely of him doing a 5 minute 90’s rap medley, starting out with Ice Ice Baby, before veering into the Fresh Prince and ending on Turtle Power.  It wasn’t traditional comedy, but it was very funny.

But yeah, after all that, my 5 minutes went very well.  Said all my stuff, wasn’t too nervous on stage, got some good laughs.  Once again the punchline to the eurovision bit went down like a lead balloon, but I got much more laughs by pointing out that it had taken 3 minutes to get to that point.  Why do people laugh when you point out that a joke has gone badly?  I dunno.

In other news, I’m going to see what happens if I do a 5 minutes w/o mentioning the face thing.  Just to see what happens.  I’ve probably got a load of stuff I can resurrect from the course that I never did again.

Although it does give me a very good entrance and gives me about a minute of quick fire gags - which builds up a level of trust from the audience that I then subvert by doing another 4 minutes of tedious, offensive stuff about Wikipedia and Lewis Caroll.

Ah, the trials of being a performer.