Material #1

First piece of material.... 

round of applause for our guest speaker.. and his friend mic, mic does a bit of stand up too. 

ooo the perks of being a small flower.

So, I'm Amy I'm from st.helens and no we don't have hairy ears. Yeah coming to a college full of scousers wasnt my best idea yet... my accent gets taken the mick out of daily. But when its by a squeaky voiced scouse wanna-be from widnes you kinda feel ok about yourself then.

something i dont get about people from widnes is that they call their city centre town. like really? st.helens is a town so if i go to town its the town centre. people. if youre from liverpool your from a city... so youre going to a city centre not a town!!

i actually went to liverpool city centre on the weekend, i went to pizza express... anyone ever been? yeah its ok, bit over priced but ok... i got pizza obviously and you know that first bite of pizza when the cheese is all stringy and the sauce is still piping hot well anyway, i burnt my mouth... and so i was sat there trying to cool it down with a glass of coke and i realised its always the ones you love most that end up hurting you.

another thing, have you noticed people from liverpool always look dressed up and nice like theyre going somewhere... where as people from st.helens walk round in their jarmers and t-shirts that have dork written on their chests... they do realise it mean penis right?

yeah st.helens the place that pays millions of pounds for a statue of a head that looks like a cock... did you know it was done for the miners? yeah.. suppose that why it looks like a dick, they always were going into dark holes. 

so ive been amy, ill be back.. bye.




When i had first started writing my stand up material i had first thought about things that i could talk about that annoyed me or things that had happened to me that i found funny, as we were told to write things that we thought were funny and not what we thought other people would find funny. 

For the start i thought i would try to open with some sort of joke that could maybe gain a few laughs and had found the pun and thought i would try that, it had worked so i thought i would use that before going into more ranting material, just to get the audience a bit more warmed up. The next line i had used because when practising, someone tall had been before me and the mic stand was too high, i thought of the line afterwards and thought it would also get laughs which it has when i had said it to the class when doing a run through.

After those things i start to rant about different things, the first thing i mention is referring to a joke made by a comedian, John Bishop that all women from st.helens have hairy ears. I used this as i thought that people in the audience would know what i was talking about as they could be familiar with the comedian as most will be scouse. 

I mention the accent as that is something that happens a lot within the college and people do take the mick and joke around a lot with the way i say things sometimes. I didnt think that this would be as funny on its own and so i added in the whole scouse wanna-be gag as most people will think people from widnes do actually want to be scouse and pretend they are with fake accents. 

The next rant i do, is something that does actually annoy me a lot and i have had numerous disagreements with people from liverpool on the topic. I know a lot of the audience will actually be from liverpool and so i think that may spark a little bit of banter. I thought this wouldn't actually go too well as i knew a lot of audience members would be from liverpool, however during it and showing my frustration over how they say 'town' i think they found it funny how much people get wound up over something so little as calling a place different things. 

I struggled a bit after writing this much of the material as i didnt know what else to write but i started to brain storm different things that i was awkward with or people found awkward about me. I came up with food as i am a fussy eater and wont eat certain things.  I thought that talking about the pizza and how hot it is would be easy relate to as there would be people in the audience that would know what burning your mouth on pizza feels like. I struggled with the ending though as i didnt know how to finish the gag and so i left that and started on the next one. But as i came back to it i finished with the line "its always the things you love most that hurt you" as i thought people would find it funny how the pizza is hurting you and so i used that and it worked as people did laugh and i got feedback that they know the feeling and could actually relate to it.

I thought i would also mention the whole dress sense that is different as it is a big thing that both places are complete opposites with. If you were to go to liverpool it would be guaranteed that most people you see look like they are ready for a night out. But if you were to go to st.helens people do walk around in pyjamas so i added in the dork shirt gag to gain more laughs as a lot of people walk round in tops like that, i thought that it would make it funnier to know that people are walking round with a word on their top that means 'penis'. i think this actually worked as it did get a few laughs from the audience and especially because  there was someone with one of the shirts on, people recognised it and would laugh.

The gag about the statue, 'the dream'. I thought i would put that in as it was a big thing that people talked about when it was being built. It was a big deal in the town that it was being built and it was in the newspapers a lot. But when it was built there was a lot of people saying how it actually looked like a penis. I thought because it was a big deal and some people may have known what i was talking about i could make it funny. So i added in the more explicit word and tried to make it more funny with the way i would get it across. I think using a different word for penis worked as it did gain laughs and i think the whole gag was a success as some people in the audience knew what statue i was talking about and so they know that it does look like a cock.
Although i got mixed up and didn't really deliver my "the perks of being a small flower" line because i was handed the mic instead, i think my first act went ok. I think that the material i had come up with had gotten across really well and the audience had found it funny too. I wasn't too nervous, although being first and believe that my deliverance of it had worked well and didn't change from rehearsals and i stayed as a moody teen ranting about different things that annoyed me. I think this is one of the things people found funnier was the fact i was ranting about a lot of things whilst using a lot of gags, as i was the only one to do so with everyone else doing sketches, one liners or telling jokes about people or things. Overall i believe that my first piece was a success and i had good feedback from people in the audience and said they agreed with some things i had said. 

The beginning of the unit

-One of the first things we had done when starting the comedy unit was learning how to hold a mic properly when performing. We had been shown how grab the mic and move the stand to the side, this helps with being able to have more freedom to move around the stage and perform more rather than just standing behind a mic and stand and staying still and just saying the material like that. We had practised this by just getting a joke ready and having to come onto the stage, grabbing the mic and moving the stand before telling the joke. This also helped us with how we would present ourselves on stage and how we could come across more confident or even engage with the audience more. 

-We also started to watch more comedians and analyse them, we would see how they would perform their own material and if they would do other things to make the audience laugh. 

In one of the friday lessons we had watched two different comedians, Daniel Kitson and Stewart Lee.

The Daniel Kitson video we watched showed him rambling without many jokes or gags but describing people he know by exaggerating some of their traits. He had gone described the boys he would pick for his football team, over the top and energetic which would gain more laughs. The fact he would impersonate people more that just standing there telling people jokes is more appealing and gives him a wider target audience as the material we saw in the video could be watched and enjoyed by all ages.

However, there was a major difference with Kitson and Lee.

Stewart Lee's video that we had watched was one from his tv show. He would be taking the mick out of a lot of people, for example the first thing he says is "if you've only read one book in your life, i highly recommend you keep your mouth shut" by saying this he is showing that his audience will be full of intelligent people that read and know intellectual things, he know what type of people he is speaking to so writes things they will also find funny. He takes the mick out of Chris Moyles' Style of writing as he picks up his book and reads a line, he is saying that he is thick and not funny. 

-We had also been given a week to chose a comedian and part of their stand-up routine and perform it to the class. We had to not only just say it we had to perform it, not exactly like them but taking our own interpretation onto the gag. I think this gave us more of an insight of what performing comedy would be like as we weren't just standing there with a mic telling a short joke for a couple seconds.

-We had also had a lesson with Jill were we had thought of different character ideas and situations as well as problems and made them into a short sketch. We had each taken different routes with different characters but all characters were funny. In my group I played a loud mouth teen who was in the cafe just to get out of the cold and everything that would happen I would make snotty comments about. I think this helped with us developing our routines as it helped us decide whether we should use those characters as one of the routines or develop something else. 

-We had also had a workshop by a guy called Gav. We had explored a range of things. We had done a group task were there was three chairs, (Level 1, Level 2, Level 3). Each chair was a different emotion;
Level 1- film
Level 2- soap
Level 3- panto
What we would do would be to sit in level 1 first and show an emotion that wasn't really exaggerated. Then on the higher two levels we would would do those emotion but more exaggerated than the one before. But then it was changed and we would go to a chair of any level and someone would have to go and either make it more exaggerated or less. I think this had helped some of us as it gave us more of an idea on how to show emotion for different types of acting. As well as showing us how doing emotions over the top can create more humour and make an audience laugh, which could help with people doing sketches for the stand up unit.

He also got us to pair up and try different characters out, we would try as many characters out as we could think of and the person you were with would tell you if you could improve and make it funnier or if it wasn't working. We went and stood around the mic and chose our character that had worked best. Without being told we would then go to the mic and show the character even if it wasn't as funny. I think this gave people an idea of characters for their stand up and sketches as sometimes not talking and just doing gestures is funnier than telling more jokes and trying to be more funny.

I think that the whole workshop with him had helped us all with our comedy pieces as we were shown different ways to create humorous material that could gain laughs from the audience. It also gave us the opportunity to develop characters that we were wanting to try out and that we could use within the performance. It gave people the opportunity to try things out and see if they would work or not and to decide whether you should work on them more or not. Overall I would say that the workshop had helped the whole class with their comedy pieces and their perspective of what type of things can be funny and what things will gain more laughs than others.