Monday, August 23, 2010
It's how you hold it
My exercise in reliability is going pretty well. Today I was worried since, despite having gone to bed early, I overslept and woke up very sleepy. It seems to happen on rainy mornings, so I came to the conclusion that I'm more meteopathic than I thought. It's of course a very dangerous thing to be in Scotland, although it has been quite a good year from that point of view. But my performance was good and I got laughs all the way true. I'm also experimenting with ways of holding the microphone. Ivor Dembina told me that leaving it on the stan would help me to avoid looking down and loosing visual contact with the audience, but I love to move on the stage and I don't want to do like Lewis Schaffer, who walks around with mic and stand. So I'm now holding the mic with both hands, as if to project an ideal stand in front of me. For some strange reason this seems to force me to look high while also allowing for freedom of movement. Please send your Freudian interpretations on a postcard.
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Hi! We were there on Saturday, the two people you gave free tickets to on the road outside, I was the map-holding unshaven one!
ReplyDeleteWe thought it was great! You seem such an intelligent and witty guy. I loved the stuff about Zola being a linguistic genius so much haha. However you should know Capello only ever has trouble with his English when he's pissed off or doesn't want to answer questions put to him properly. That's when co-incidentally his English seems to desert him...
Anyway yeah, we laughed quite a lot from up the back - the person I was with had to dive out for a lager-wee near the end though and didn't make it back up from the catacombs of the venue in time for the end of the show, she wasn't a walk out! And the girls in front of us seemed to really like it too. Don't be too hard on yourself! It's a brilliant, honest thing you do and I'm insanely jealous of people that do it.
I was wanting to speak to you apres-show but we needed to get food first and you weren't there by the time we got back to C. Like I say you seem like a genuinely funny and thoughtful guy, and we genuinely enjoyed the show, it has a vein of intellectual, cosmopolitan honesty and thought in it, most comedians at the fringe will just reel off a load of jokes about wanking and then bugger off. My theory as to why you might not have been getting a particularly good reaction is that there's a sort of comedy 'voice' in most stand up sets. I am no linguistic expert but the rhythm of stand-ups jokes and the inflections at the end and stuff seem to just signpost 'gags' and then the audience almost Pavlovian way seems to laugh sometimes. If someone is speaking in their non native language then sometimes it seems these little signposts aren't there and people who aren't really listening properly might miss them. That's my theory for why some people don't seem to laugh much, as some of the stuff in your show was really really excellent! We'll keep an eye out for you in future!