Day 8 and 9: Edinblog
Added 2018-08-09 00:24:59 +0000 UTCYesterday (Tuesday) was a glorious show and a lot of fun. A bunch of fans of Stuart Goldsmith’s inside comedy podcast came along to the show and then we went into a bus that is also a vintage cinema and did an interview about comedy that made me feel a bit overexposed.
I’m no good at talking much after shows, so this was a challenge, but Stuart is a very good interviewer and his audience were all lovely and the questions were interesting, even if not all my answers were on point.
Today I did the kids version of This is Your Trial, which was a lot of fun, followed by the regular sails kids show I’m doing in the caves and then a nap and then my show. According to some people who were talking in the dressing room today this is “black Wednesday”, where ticket sales are sluggish and audiences are quiet. I had the Scotsman reviewer in, so I hope they heard about black Wednesday too. I had fun doing the show though, and some people came up after to chat and said nice things so that’s what matters more. Probably.
After that I went and bought some superglue to fix a prop and then did Set List, which is a sort of hybrid improv/Standup where you have to pretend that cards they throw up with topics are a part of your regular set list. (The bullet point version of a set you’ll use as a mnemonic on stage).
The game of the show is that you’re “remembering” the gear you have on whatever topic they’ve given you and it can be a lot of fun to wind your way towards the key words from an interesting angle. They do tend towards setting you up with deliberately controversial or dirty cues, which given improv’s tendency towards the lowest common denominator (first punchline you think of) can be hard to keep your head above the potentially infinitely dark depths of deliberately going for a shock laugh.
Set List is always a great show to do. It’s fun, a good challenge and I often come out of it with my gears whirring, and having triggered the joke-building instinct. If it was a regular thing in whatever city I was in, I imagine it would be a great place to go when you had writer’s block.
Onward and upward!
