Journey to... Best of 07 Awards
Journey to... Best of 07 Awards was a round-up of the best performers to appear at the Journey to... Comedy Clubs (The Poetry Cafe and Inn on the Green) over 2007.
What a journey it was. It was held at Inn On The Green, a queer little venue on the Portobello Green complex that is so badly advertised it seems like they don't want you to go in there. When we arrived there was hardly anyone there but a few locals playing pool and chatting to the barman. Having said that, it certainly had an original charm to it, albeit a slight similarity to the youth centre in Byker Grove.
The comedy was held in a small adjoining room with a DJ booth in the corner playing intro music, plus a few sofas, tables and chairs. The space could actually have held a lot more people so it felt strange when there were only about 20 of us in the room. What was even more unnerving was the spotlight that stayed on the audience throughout the performance. I try and avoid being spotted at all costs at comedy events and leave the front row to the attention seekers. Sadly this was not an option and myself and companion were held up for the all too familiar 'job scrutiny'.
I think the minimum number you should have at a comedy night is 40. Otherwise there just aren't enough laughs, and even those that do want to laugh are put off if no one else is doing it. In this case I laughed in places I normally wouldn't just to fill the uncomfortably dead air. It clearly put off the comedians who pretty much all commented during their act on how badly it was going, including one poor woman who remarked: "I am literally dying on stage". The first act, Aaron Rice, was quite funny but some of his jokes sailed over people's heads and his delivery style, mainly one-liners strung together, didn't suit the unforgiving atmosphere of a 20-strong crowd.
The death on stage girl, Elise Harris, had a shocker. It got to the point where no one could decipher a single joke from the nervous prattle and she cut her set early. The first act to valiantly pull it off without remarking on the lack of positive feedback was Crispin Flintoff, nominated for Best Act of 2007 at the prestigious Hackney Empire Awards. He was far more professional, managing some good improv with the audience and put a lot more energy into it, receiving more laughs than most. He claimed to have Ragamuffin's disease – an obsession with reggae music from 1987-1994 and finished with a great song akin to Musical Youth about eating your 5-a-day veg. Unfortunately the organiser had a heckler friend in the audience who also had Ragamuffin's disease and felt he needed to sing along. Flintoff handled him very well eventually just telling him to "shut the f*** up". After a short break where half the audience and the heckler did a runner, Paul F Taylor was up and had some good banter analysing the night so far. Referring to the heckler: "Who the f*** was that weirdo? What the hell was he talking about?!" "What's that woman doing in the DJ box over there?" He drew attention to how surreal the evening was very well and had a very natural and relaxed manner on stage.
The last comedian was Sharon Court who started off talking about smoking and the government's nanny state approach to encourage quitting. Commenting on the proposed introduction of blackened lung pictures on packets to scare us off she had some great analogies: "You wouldn't get shown a picture of an ugly girl sleeping in your bed before getting served a pint would you? You wouldn't get shown a picture of a shit-spattered toilet before ordering a curry, so why this? If we want to smoke, we know the consequences!" Her last line was also a winner: "I'm into the karma sutra at the moment –although my worst position is The Plumber. You wait around all day and no one comes."
You have to hand it stand-up comedians. It takes so much courage to get up on stage and have your humour held up for scrutiny. Sometimes jokes that work very well in one crowd don't in another and if the organiser hasn't done a good enough job of filling seats, they pay the price of painful silence. Some of the acts that weren't mentioned were very forgettable, but the rest certainly have a good future in comedy, it was just a shame the atmosphere wasn’t right on this Journey.
