Anyone in from the internet?
Thursday, June 04 2009

Twitter Comedy Club. Mon 8pm. New era in comedy? Mark Watson, Pappy's Fun Club, Terry Saunders etc do 10 mins each, jokes in max 140 charact

Agoraphobics rejoice! Thanks to brainy scientists who do technology, and dynamic comedy organisers such as Tiernan Douieb, you can now attend a comedy night from the comfort of your own home.

On Monday at 8pm, Twitter Comedy Club will open its e-doors to some actual comedians, who will each spend 10 minutes making mirth through the medium of tweeting. So that's comedy at 140 characters a go. Max.

If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, it's like a stream of Facebook statuses, only more flexible than a FB status and more open to sprouting into conversation. If you are unfamiliar with Facebook then JOG ON GRANDAD! I mean, you're either fulfilled or bloodyminded, carry on. Basically: Facebook is Cheers, Twitter is Frasier.

The line-up on Monday is a belter. Get these people in an actual comedy club and it'd be a ruddy sell-out. The headliners will be Mark Watson (won comedy awards, proper ones, written books, on Radio 5Live's Fighting Talk a lot) and Pappy's Fun Club (pictured, sketch quartet, If.Comedy Best Newcomer nominees, make world better place), and they are preceded by some fine stand-ups in Terry Saunders, Rob Heeney, Carl Donnelly, Matt Kirshen, Gary Delaney, Mitch Benn and host Mr Douieb.

Let's face it; it might work, it might not. Being coaxed into laughter face to face is very different to being coaxed into laugher through the written word. The reasons you might laugh at a Bill Bailey song or a Tim Vine one-liner are very different to why you might laugh at, say, a PG Wodehouse set piece or a tabloid headline. What you lose in body language and atmosphere you gain in the joy of reading, and re-reading, an exquisitely worded sentence or a massively laboured pun.

"Fuck it, let's see what happens" is very much the spirit of the venture, and bravo to Tiernan for making it happen. He says: "It's an experiment, we're just playing with the idea and we just want to give people a laugh. It's a challenge for us because you have to have strong material, you can't just rely on personality.

"But there are some fantastic acts, Pappy's I think are going to do stuff with Twitpics [when you post a picture instead of words] and we're not restricting the comics to one joke per tweet, it can go over several tweets.

"I'll be at home doing the gig in my pyjamas with a Cup-a-Soup. I just hope my cats don't tread on the keyboard."

Matthew Crosby of Pappy's has promised "characters, pictures and lots of costume changes" from the Pappy's Fun House, which conjures up images of some serious japery.

So there you go. In 20 years when Twitter is the Betamax of its time, we can look back at this and piss ourselves. Hopefully we'll also be doing that come Monday 8pm.

Twitter Comedy Club, Monday, June 8, 8pm. To follow the gig, you can view it on LondonisFunny here, you can follow the hashtag #tcgig, other links of use are @tweetcomedyclub, Mark Watson, Pappy's Fun Club, Terry Saunders, Gary Delaney, Carl Donnelly, Rob Heeney, Mitch Benn and Matt Kirshen, plus the host Tiernan Douieb. You are invited to heckle, but only specifically to each comedian as they are on stage, not to #tcgig. Also visit www.twittercomedy.co.uk