a bread roll with that funny, please
January 10th, 2008
The plan worked! I am now going to every single event as part of the Out to Lunch festival – Official Photographer! (unofficially photographying!)
On Tuesday I saw Eilidh MacAskill – who was both very natural in her style and very funny. Only eight days after completing her daily ukulele ceilidh she is touring to tell the tale of the last year. Maybe next year she will tell the story of the year she told the story of the thing she did the year before that…
Of course the original thing she did last year was to “perform” her ukulele in some fashion, to somebody, every day for a whole year. She didn’t go into full detail, though by the sound of it she certainly had a good year. The uke seems to lend itself nicely to cheeky humour and Eilidh knows how to play and make everyone laugh.
I am always amazed by the intelligence of comedians, they are often the sort of people you wouldn’t expect to be very intelligent, I do hope I’m not offending any right now, but I’m sure you get it. Going to bars and making people laugh each night. Making people laugh. Talking about ‘ordinary’ things to ‘ordinary’ people. Whilst of course giving the impression that you too are just like them; very ‘ordinary’. But of course they aren’t, they are intelligent.
Think about it, how many jokes have you made up? Real jokes, and kept it coming for an hour or more. Not that time where there were laughing at you!
So there’s the rambling about a topic, or variety of topics, that relate to your life, and in some way the audience can also relate to – and putting in the odd joke, or one big joke.
Paul Sinha, at the Black Box on Wednesday, was a real intelligent person. A qualified GP. Plus he helped his school win the 90s game show ‘Internet’ (apparently only one result on Google and I can’t find it) when he was 15. He’s openly gay, so he has confidence, though so do all stand-ups. And being Asian means he will always be able to talk about how his family moved to Britain in 1968 to have their only son become a clown. But it works and he is very funny. And intelligent. And he likes to show off that intelligence a bit too.
This afternoon Barbara “as in Streisand” Nice “as in the biscuit” flew from Stockport with her pink suitcase, which she brought onto the stage with her. Her show, she calls ‘Higher and Hiya’ for two very obvious reasons, that you can only understand after seeing her perform.
Higher – as in she – successfully – gets the audience feeling higher than they did at the start of the show. By higher, read in a more pleasant, jolly mood. Hiya – she gets the audience to interact with each other and tells everyone that they should say “hiya” when meeting people in the street. Very funny, very “ordinary”.
These slightly sunny, very cold days in that soulless office are being nicely split up with a small bit to eat and sweet sweet bread rolls along with the occasional hysterical laughter. More of this I say!
