Twitter
Comedy Club – review
Monday, June 08 2009
Twitter Comedy Club.
Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Comedians tapping away at laptops,
trying to make people laugh down the other end of cyberspace? So,
did it work? (Live blog here by the way)
Was the Twitter Comedy
Club any funnier than going to a normal comedy night? No, of course
not. Was it a success? Yes.
It was an experiment
and should be treated as such. No one seriously imagines an unsteady
stream of jokes, punctuated by buffoons and hecklers, will be an
absolute pearler, but Mitch Benn, Mark Watson, Terry Saunders and
Gary Delaney in particular got some belly laughs from this follower.
The post-gig comments
at #tcgig are almost unanimously positive as well (@markrs "Please
definitely another one", @CodingMonkey It was a great Comedy
Set on #tcgig More events like this please! "Twitter Comedy
was a bit mad but I enjoyed it" etc etc). And let's face it,
if the punters hadn't enjoyed it, they would've soon piped up...
Hat tips must go to Terry
Saunders for embracing the format and using Spotify to accompany
his set (ie setting it to music, specifically the notoriously sexual
Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin) about
introducing his gammy gonad to a young doctor. Delaney, Pappy's
Fun Club [pictured] also employed Twitpics to comic effect and worked
hard in their 10, although with four of them typing away, they were
hamstrung and their set was a little confusing. They were also hampered
by getting heckled by none other than the Penny Dreadfuls, the bastards!
Mitch Benn nailed his
set, coming up with new lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody to take the
piss out of Twitter and people's clamoring for more followers.
Battle for the re-tweets
Of course, with instant
comedy comes instant judgment, and re-tweeting became the currency
of a great gag. It is a toss up between Benn, Delaney and Watson
for who garnered the most re-tweets, Benn for his "So you think
you can spam me and twit in my eye/So you think you can love me
and not @stephenfry" lyric, Delaney's line "Bit disappointed
by Walt Disney On Ice. It's just an old bloke in a freezer"
and the night's final gag by Mark Watson: "Why does Cliff Richard
never die? Is God keeping him alive to inspire us? Or just putting
off having to meet him?"
Matt Kirshen –
hunkered down typing backstage at an actual gig, Old Rope –
was first on and introduced the world to dying on your Twittery
arse, thanks to appalling typing speed and an anecdote that didn't
fit the format. Still, the man's an excellent comic nonetheless.
And I enjoyed Carl Donnelly's 'set' despite its galling, appalling
laziness – the cheek of just posting a YouTube link and kicking
back is, come on, kinda funny...
So what have we learnt?
The best way to do a Twitter Comedy gig, as we suspected, is through
the one-liner, as employed by Delaney, Rob Heeney and Mark Watson.
But heroes can emerge, such as Terry Saunders, who metaphorically
made sweet lovin' to the format and, with some nifty typing skills,
created something pretty special. Final hats off to Tiernan Douieb
for having the idea in the first place and the balls to see it through.
Bottom line – would I tune in next time? Yep, I would.
Four stars
To read the live blog
of the Twitter Comedy Club, as it happened, including comedian summaries,
click here
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