Tonight I was in Mosborough for the 4rd anniversary Laffa Cakes comedy night. This is a joy of a small air conditioned venue and whilst gigs have been held there for a couple of years now, I don’t think you could really describe the audience as being comedy savvy just yet, so I was eagerly anticipating their reaction to being Rogered.
Compering the night, Greg Philips is pretty much on home territory and tonight had a couple of people in the audience whom he had gone to school with. This was all very nice, but chatting to them didn’t really involve the rest of the room. However, Greg was on far better ground with the couple at the back who had met when she, basically, ran him over/he threw himself at her car. There were plenty of laughs with these. The glassing story has a lot of potential and I can see Greg workshopping that into a real winner. The draught excluder was good, too. Similarly, the airbnb comments were funny, relatable and can be used when someone in the audience has a holiday of their own booked.
Katie Brown
Not to be confused with t’other Katie Brown, this one was new to me and I very much liked what I saw. The TLDR version would be that she has some nice ideas and is on the right track, but with a few tweaks could be so much stronger. Her opening routine about a family fight was very easy to get onboard with at the top, but there is room for a few more jokes to it. The ‘condition’ was a great routine. Brown received a lot of laughs for this. It was also very relatable to the audience and there was nothing that she spoke of that was esoteric and hard for people to see the joke in. I liked this section, although the energy did drop very slightly with the nurse and the emergency chair has room to be made even better. Day three would have benefitted from a bigger punchline, but the rest of the cult was spot on. Egyptian was nicely visual and broke up the standing in front of a microphone aspect of her delivery comedy. If Brown was specific with an example of her doing a good job on the hand signal, I think she might get a massive laugh for it. Ambitions and jobs was a nicely open handed section that everyone could get involved in and if ever Brown comperes, it would be a nice way of her to bring the audience into the show. This was a good set from someone who has promise, but with a few small changes, will be even better. It was nice to see people coming up to her during the intermission to compliment her.
Roger Swift – 200 puns in one hour
Swift is a phenomenal prop punster and one whom I thoroughly enjoy seeing. I get his sense of humour and his take on the art/craft of comedy. He is famously, a marmite act, so not only do I get to enjoy seeing Roger at work, but I also get to look at the audience, too. Usually most of the room are going with it, some look as if they want to bump him off and the rest will be laughing that hard, they actually look as if they could be in danger of doing themselves physical harm. His is a performance that is right on so many levels. The structure of his show is funny puns. There’s nothing emotional here, no journey to be taken on, no message or wider point being made and that doesn’t matter. It’s funny and that’s the main thing.
The show opens with a video show that lays out what it is about and this builds up atmosphere and before you know it, Roger is off to a flying start. With 200 puns the quality could be variable, but I found them consistently good, with some that were superb. My personal favourites were ‘Fame’, unplugged, M… it (this received applause) and the superb running joke of, ‘they were alive when I wrote it!’ It’s possible with the train landing that Roger could turn that on its head by either going with, ‘they were dead when I wrote it!’ or ‘they were alive when I wrote it, but I had to wait for them to be dead before I could use it.’ Another possible gag that could be improved would be low shelf, as there must be a Sean Connery joke in there somewhere and where Roger does the 10 years old gag, I’m surprised he didn’t ad lib, ‘I peaked as a comic at 10.’
Speaking of ad libs, these really helped to sell Roger as a person. The audience loved his injection of personality and I shouldn’t be surprised if these didn’t get a fair percentage of the big laughs. They certainly helped him build up a lot of momentum.
It’s well known that at around the 35-40 minute mark in any Edinburgh show, the energy will start to dip and a change of gear is needed to revitalise matters. Roger handled this with a quick story and then him dealing with the Australian border force. This was a thing of beauty that everyone enjoyed. The acting in it, especially by Steve Lee is absolutely spot on. In memoriam at the end was the gift that kept on giving, with the planet and the apes getting the biggest laughs.
This was a show that naturally enough split a the room a touch, with probably 90% of people onboard, 10% not so fussed, but a lot of people really invested in it and doubled over. I had a tremendous time watching it.
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