It has often been said, often by me on this blog, that hot weather is the bane of comedy.
It makes people lethargic and less inclined to attend a gig because even the slightest effort of moving around causes unpleasant perspiration. Until this past week, I never realised quite now sweaty my knees get.
Anyway, sweaty knees aside, the point about hot weather being bad for comedy has been reinforced this week when audience were in scarce supply.
At one gig, we had one real person for audience. While at another, the tally was stretched to a massive seven, but only after including a couple who were sitting in a corner and had very little interest in actually listening to what was being said.
Numbers took a big leap at the second outing of Love and Lilley: Fear and Loathing on Saturday, with a colossal 13. But they were a great 13 and made it an enjoyable experience.
I felt it went much better than our first preview. I chose to drop the material about my time as a reporter, largely because it relies heavily on weak puns and I don’t enjoy doing it. But I suppose that is at least a fitting tribute to my miserable 15-months as a small town hack.
I replaced the reporter stuff with a brand new bit about the internal struggle of starting a missing person’s investigation for a housemate I hadn’t seen in some time, which was inspired by one of my numerous housemates I have had in my three and a half years living in London. As far as debuting new material goes, it was very positive and I will continue trialling it to get it road-ready for the Fringe.
Fear is a fun concept to play around with, particularly with the audience, because at some point in everyone’s life we have all feared something. I managed to get some decent mileage out of riffing on fears of the audience.
As a result, I didn’t have time to do my finale, which I wasn’t too disappointed about because I still have yet to write an ending for it. Nevertheless, I will need an ending for it soon.
We have another preview on Friday, so I might actually have an ending next time I write on here. By the way, with Edinburgh coming up, you can expect ramblings on here more regularly. I am aware that my entries in the last few months have shattered my self-enforced brevity rules, but if you read them in instalments then the effect is similar.