Watching A Comedy Chum

For the last month or so I’ve had 2 of my chums signed up to the Comedy Virgin’s gig at The Cavendish Arms in Stockwell. It has been in my calendar for a while and I’ve been looking forward to it.

I got there plenty early and bumped into one of the guys from the comedy course I did in December. We talked about what our plans were for the future regarding comedy. He has a plan of lasting 5 minutes at the Comedy Store’s Gong Show. For him that is the measure of ‘success’ and that comedy is not a career that he is interested in. This is very different to what I’d consider success to be and it was strange to hear a view different to my own. He is planning on fine-tuning his set from the comedy show-case to give him a tight 5 for the Gong Show… I wish him the best of luck for it.

Regarding the chum’s I was attending to support, well 1 turned up and other was unfortunately ill. The guy who turned up was Chaand and he had threatened to bring 35 people to the gig! I’m not sure Comedy Virgin’s could handle that many extra people but it would have to cope. Chaand had written some new material for the gig and had it printed out, word for word, on A4 sheets of paper. He wanted to go through it to us two and we settled down to hear it.

The first thing we both noticed was Chaand’s usually excellent delivery was stilted. He was reading the words and then tripping up over them and missing bits out. Both of us advised him to write some bullet points to remind him and to have faith on him knowing the stuff he had written. 10 minutes later and he had his bullet points written out and the delivery was so much better.

We were called into the gig and took our seats. Some-how Chaand was front row and centre. He seemed very eager to get up there. The Host (Paul) did a great job warming up the room and advising of the rules. The room was PACKED and there were a few very drunk people there already who felt they needed to join in. There were also a lot of people just talking all the time which was a little unfair on the acts.

The acts came on stage thick and faster. Based on the sign-up list at the door there were well over 20 acts looking to perform so it would be a LONG night! I decided before we sat down that if Chaand was on in the first half, I’d leave at the interval. Not in the spirit of the bringer show but I felt with the support Chaand already had, one less wouldn’t be a problem. I did see one of the acts leave at the same time so I wasn’t the worst person there!

Eventually Chaand got called up to the stage and began his set. With just his small bullet points rather than reams of paper he was a lot more confident up there. I think this was a different experience for Chaand from the Comedy Showcase but he took control of the crowd well. His material was solid and he got plenty of laughs. I think he could have easily done another 3 or 4 minutes with the material I saw earlier in the evening however the strick 5 minute set time at Comedy Virgins is not to be questioned!

Hopefully Chaand will do more gigs and get further confidence in his comedy self. I also look forward to seeing him on ‘Dinner Date’ and see how he copes with the food from strangers!

Fancy listening to it? Click it below.