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.