Stand-Up

I was scribbling down the beginnings of a little diatribe tonight and thought it might make good stand-up. Just this sec scribbled it out, possibly the stuff is old hat, but it made me laugh.

I was forced to go into Boots the other day because it was my girlfriend’s birthday.

That wasn’t part of the celebrations, by the way. Yeah, birthday at Boots, New Year at Clarke’s, Christmas… with her mum…

Her mum who bought her £50 worth of Boots vouchers, which was why we were there. Vouchers are shit.

It’s aunts and uncles normally. You ask for money and they know it’s to fund your alcoholism. “Good luck finding fags and vodka in Argos,” they write in the card. “We might only see you once every two years but you know what? We like to exert just a little bit of control over you. We’re going to tell you where you spend that fiver, even if it means you have to spend more than the voucher’s worth in petrol getting there.”

When Hitler was going through his Christmas list you can guarantee every bastard got ten Deutschmark’s worth of Boots vouchers.

“What did you get? It was just a card, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, it was a card.”
“Any money in it?”
“F**king Boots vouchers.”
“Adolf Hitler is a c**t.”

Up until that point my girlfriend didn’t know I called her mum Hitler. But it’s a little joke we have between us. I call her Hitler and she… doesn’t know.

So we’re in Boots with a princely fifty quid. We’re trying to find things to buy. “We need toothpaste don’t we?”
“No.”
“But it’s on buy one get one free.”
Now, riddle me this, will you - if I don’t want one, why am I going to want two? Buy one get one frees – BOGOFs – they love saying BOGOF, don’t they, all these supermarket people – I think legitimising saying BOGOF to customers was a masterstroke for Kwiksave – but BOGOFs aren’t that bad. The rot set in with 3-for-2, in my opinion. Now it’s “one chicken breast for 99p. Or ten for nine pounds fifty.” Oh, buy ten then. I don’t want ten! Does Asda think I’m running a bloody restaurant or something?

I was in there the other day and, as you do, I was eyeing up the reduced items trolley. An Aladdin’s cave of shite. Four dented tins of tomatoes, a taped-up multipack of Monster Munch and a Soda Stream canister. And an eight-pack of Grolsch, with two bottles missing. I was curious. Original price, £5.99. Turns out the mathemagicians who did the discounting were working on overtime: Reduced price, £5.79.

£5.79! There are shards of glass stuck to the box with dried-on beer! I’m risking my fingers buying this sticky crate of shite and I’m paying twenty pence more a bottle for the privilege!

Would anyone else get away with that? “Yeah, I paid some builders to do the extension, and they just took my toilet away.”

OK, probably a bad example.

I think stand-up is very hard to critique from a script, because it's all about the delivery, timing and stage presence. Tommy Cooper's jokes were all really quite lame, but his stage presence was brilliant so he's a classic stand-up (in my eyes at least). Peter Kay doesn't really tell that many jokes, but the way he says them, his delivery is superb and so he too is a brilliant stand-up. So like I say, it really depends how you would read that, because you might do it one way and its awesome, whereas I'd read that and do it another and maybe it wouldn't be so good.

I can see there's potential in it, but to get the best critique its obviously best to perform and see if people laugh. Well, thats what I think anyway.

To add to Charisma's point, try recording it as a video blog or monologue and then we can appreciate your comic genius in all it's glory.

I enjoyed reading it. There were some good lines I thought.

It wondered a bit (Just did that spelling mistake to annoy Aaron) but as mentioned above its hard to know if thats good or bad as its all about deliverey. Theres easily a decent routine in there although I would cover more subjects than just vouchers and special offers.

Not bad, would work better if seen performed. All my standup stuff looks crap on paper. The only thing is it's good lines without a story. When I do standup I try and put one joke in the beginning, reference in the middle, and then conclude in the final line.

Mm, as I say, it was pretty much a stream-of-consciousness last night - I plan to add more stuff to it. Don't worry folks, I've sort of done this kind of performance before, my delivery is A1! (He says, dying on his arse a couple of months later.) As such if I try and record it onto video on my lonesome it might look shit as with a crowd you have a feeling of where to go with it and react, or whether to just run for your life, so it might look bad... I might have a go in a bit though.

To echo Charisma's comment (who now, countless abused hankies later I discover is some hairy trucker!), stand-up in written form is a hell of a tough sell.

I wrote a feature once with a comic as my secondary character. It ended with an incredibly difficult scene involving the comic doing an impromptu performance at the funeral of the main character; his deceased friend. It was meant to be emotionally cathartic as well as funny. And you know what? Every which way I tried, it just would not work. Not just because the tone was so hard to nail, but because stand-up just does not play on the page.

So get out there and perform the thing. I'll be here waiting. Hankie in hand.