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.
