Wednesday walkabout

Now with a fully working PA, Comedy Shorts was a mad mix of character comedy and stand-up today. The audience hadn't entirely warmed to ironic terrorists, fake drug overdoses and casual misogyny so when I closed the show I was prepared to die on my arse. Fortunately this older crowd of 10 rather liked the perils of the self-checkout - to the extent that I also did 'Shuffle and Stop' with some enthusiastic joining in.

Flyers duly handed out I made my way to The Southsider and stapled flyers to blue books for ten minutes, handing over a pile to Andy Onions. Wednesday always has the potential to go badly and we were going to do our best to reverse this. Again, the previous shows had amassed less than 5 audience between them so it wasn't looking good.

Things took an interesting twist when upon opening our little partition a mother and her 3 teenage girls came in. We resolved to keep it as clean as we could and I hastily created a tailored set of first world problems that might apply to them. Following the family we had a few couples and an older gentlemen I mistook for blogger John Fleming. We kicked off to a very respectable audience of 13.

All three sets were warmly received which kept things relaxed and informal. The response to 'One Shot', my final track, was deafening. The rest of the pub must have wondered what on earth was going on. The bucket was better than yesterday and seriously enhanced by £10 from the mum - parents clearly the way to go midweek.

Following a pie and chips with my dad I hot footed it to the other side of town for an appearance at Comedy-Geddon at the Bourbon Bar. Aware of the issues with this venue since seeing Jonny Gillam and Daniel Offen's show there I wasn't sure how it would go but in the end it turned out pretty well. The room itself, which resembles a futuristic bunker with terrible noise bleed from both the bar and the other performance space, had all of its modest twenty seats occupied when the show started. 

The quality of the acts was pretty good and a couple of music sets nicely broke up the comedy. My two tracks went down well and a couple of enthusiastic trans women in their fifties assured me they'd be coming to Mirthquake to get hold of a CD. I've been rebooked for today and tomorrow.

Show complete it was over to City Cafe to see Peter Merrett finally perform at the night he's been working for all month. Yuriko Kotani put in a nice ten minutes too and I finally got to see "The Upper Class Rapper" - who had his character act down to a T, though performing an entire song about famous people who are c*nts and repeatedly using the word for shock value seemed a bit lazy.

By 2am Onions, Peter and myself had joined others at the Gilded Balloon for Massaoke - a singalong with live band and lyrics projected on a screen. It was a good laugh and the only thing that irked (aside from everyone else being about 18) was the thought that I hadn't come up with the concept first.

Final shows added!

Shows Performed: 3 (46)

Bums on seats at Mirthquake: 13 (342)

Money in the Mirthquake bucket: £18 (£478.10)
Steps walked according to my pedometer: 14,906 (338,111) 

CDs Remaining: 58