Diaries Of A Dirty Open Mic-er - April

Hello and welcome to my very first blog post on comedy! By the way i hate the title it was generated by AI. I feel like AI is just a manager of sorts. The title isn't me and i hate it but its convinced me that what i would have called it was worthless "I Don't Know What You'd Call This" is what was going to be my title. Has an air of mystery about it, instead of an air of middle aged desperation, from wanting people to read about my "comedy journey"... nauseating

Anyway... Let me start by saying I don’t know how to blog, and for anybody reading this, it will probably be me complaining about how I am not yet a professional comedian, even though by every right I don’t deserve to be, even though from time to time my ego says differently.

I was inspired to create a blog by a brilliant Brummy comedian called Eric Rushton. I saw him once last year in Bristol at “Comedy Loft”. Everybody came in that night and had a great time! The place was packed out, and a year later, I still remember all of the people on the bill – Lee Hudson opened the show – I immediately thought he was brilliant and have had him in a few shows that I have booked since.

I was there, I was happy as I did well. Frances Keyton was brilliant, and I've continued to be a fan of hers, and okay, there was another… I may have been a bit premature in saying I remember everybody from that night! I do, but I'm so bad at names, I'm worse at names than somebody who is really bad at names! I do, however, remember her material. She was also from Brum and she spoke about how you can say whatever you want about somebody as long as afterwards you say “bless ‘em,” which is a brilliant bit. If she ever reads this, then I'm sorry, and if anybody else reads this, again I am sorry. I'm poor at writing, but that’s what never listening in school gets you. Makes pursuing a career in something that involves an intense level of writing pretty difficult. If only I knew that comedy was a thing you could do and that you could write about. I just thought writing was reading boring classics like "An Inspector Calls." Which in my adulthood I much prefer, but as a teen, I couldn’t have given less of a shit. I was too busy trying to figure out why I had a boner in maths.

You can tell I'm poor at writing as I use the same adjective to describe every comedian I've seen. They’re all “brilliant” and whilst they are… It seems like if everybody is brilliant, then nobody is.

Back to Eric Rushton, he’s… brilliant! I followed him after that on his Instagram @ericrushton96 and saw that he did a blog, which I found again brilliant. I think he is a very good writer, and it inspired me to write a blog too, in the hope that one day I might be like him… I also bought glasses. Anyway, I just wanted to kiss his arse for a bit. Now to the blog.

This will probably be me just mentioning about gigs I've done and how bad I am or, on the odd occasion I do well, I'll talk about that. It won’t be interesting, to be honest, but I am hoping that it will make me a better writer and in turn a better comedian. Time will tell… It'll be a once-a-month job at first because that is the only time I will be able to take to write about myself. I can't think of anything worse than a weekly segment all about me, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. So, rather than not do it, I thought I'd save up information about me and make it less bite-sized and more painful. But hey, if you’ve read this far, then well done!

Gigs this month – 17

I'm writing this in the middle of the month, so to be honest, I can't remember how some of them have gone. It's safe to assume that some of them went well, some of them went okay, and some of them I absolutely shit the bed at. In my opinion, good ones are good, bad ones suck, but it gives you something to go off of, and okay ones are the worst.

Also, in my opinion, I shouldn’t have to use the words “in my opinion” because if people are coming here and expecting factual information, then I'll be honest, that’s on you. Following that, the royal family are all lizards and we should be afraid… very afraid!

I find okay ones the hardest to learn from, and those ones are the ones that make me rack my brain the most after the fact. The good ones make you think you’re great, the bad ones make you think you’re awful, and the middle ones give you no idea what to think.

The only thing that I have managed to do with these ones is look at somebody in the audience, if anybody, that is enjoying it the most and perform to them and cut out all the other disappointed faces as they look at me and think my dick jokes are tasteless, crass, and unnecessary. They're right, of course, it is hack material, but it is also so fun to do.

Gig list:

Bath – don’t remember,

Lemon Rocket – Lovely gig, went well, led me into a false sense of security with 7 minutes of new material that all killed!

The Swan – did the same new material and died a death,

Joke and Mirrors – did the same new material and went averagely if I'm being kind to myself.

Comedy Loft – Amazing night! Killed it! In front of friends no less, it's always nice to not have to have that chat afterwards of “are you sure this is what you want to do sam?”

Basingstoke Irish Centre - went well.

Crack comedy competition – went okay, weird vibe. No idea what was going on with the audience to be fair, nobody did well except the MC. And my friend Ryan Murphy went missing after he didn’t get through; he had a meltdown and ran off through the streets of Kingston naked.

Bath New Comedian of the Year comp – was a very good gig for me. I thought I was going to win it until Joe Kanczes went on and absolutely crushed the room. Can't be mad when somebody outclasses you… just bitter.

Bognor Institute of Laughter - new bit about 2 girls 1 cup, which I personally think is very good, but it's hard to get past people's disgust on the matter…

The Hobbit – one of those gigs with 3 people in the crowd, to be fair they were a good crowd. Gave me a chance to have no pressure and get some stuff out that I knew was shit but wanted to say anyway. I don’t mind a shit gig; I think you can learn a bit from it, I think it's freeing. It gives you a chance to experiment with stuff you might not usually do. Of course, I'd choose a nice gig over it any day, and when I think about how I didn’t get to my bed until midnight, it makes me hate everybody and everything, but I said I'd do the gig and I'd feel like an arsehole if I didn’t!

Hot Water Comedy Club – After an exhausting trip up to Liverpool (lovely city by the way), I got on stage at the new Hot Water with a couple of my comedy chums and it went well. Although not as well as I had hoped it would go! I was hoping to crush it so hard that people had to be wheeled out of there. Crush it so hard that everybody would forget all their childhood traumas. Instead, people just laughed a bit at my jokes, and then that was that. Maybe I just expect too much!

Cheltenham - My first Mirth gig. I think I'm right in saying that in this comedy world, moving into Mirth gigs is the next step… I'm not sure where I got that from… the comedy ether perhaps. All I know is I was excited to do it, and it was once more one of those gigs I wanted to crush, but I just did a solid 7/10. The problem with a 7/10 is that once you have felt the effects of a 10 out of 10, that is all you want. Constantly chasing the dragon that is making people laugh so much they hold their stomachs. I wasn’t too pleased with it, but the organizer came over to myself and James Mileham (who was great) and told us that he had done 6 of these gigs, we were “by far the best middles that he has had,” which was nice to hear but ultimately worthless to me as I feel like I didn’t do too well, which just made me think if I was bad, how bad were the others! This night I also had a gig at my gig I run with Laughing Belly's comedy in Southampton and the venue Belgium and Blues. It was a good lineup of comics, and It was a shame to miss it, but I had bigger fish to fry… although it was a little overdone, it was still edible.

The Snug Christchurch – another gig that I run, it was fantastic! The crowd was amazing and up for it. I MC’d, and we had a few great acts on in the meantime. I'm a big fan of Ben O'Sullivan's stuff. He does 10 minutes of talking about bowling shoes, and I think it's silly fun but also poignant as he makes great points about the disappearance of the once statutory footwear. Along with Billy James who crushed his set… annoyingly! Great crowd, great night!

Felsons Bournemouth – It’s a pool house in Bournemouth that has a lot of promise, but at the moment, it's just finding its feet. Tough night for most, to be fair, luckily when things become tough now I find it as the best chance to be free with what you're doing. When it's going well, there is that pressure you may lose them. When you have never had them there is no pressure because the chances of getting them is like catching a fart in the wind.

However, I did some older stuff with new tags that people thought was shit, which was a shame because I enjoyed it. But then a newer bit about Festival season that went unbelievably well in an audience that ended up being rather nice. It wasn’t good, but there was no death for Samuel that night. I think the Grim Reaper of comedy had his hands full with some of the other acts.

Arundel Jailhouse – Unbelievable gig! My first time seeing a comic, Alex Petrovic… He was class and opened up the show well. I went on and had a crazy good gig as far as the audience was concerned, and I had a buzz from the audience, but thinking about it afterward, I missed tags and parts of jokes, so although it was a 10/10 gig, my performance was probably a 7/10. I think it’d be harder not to do well in that room, to be honest. Kiss of death this! Next time I go back I will die horribly!

Southampton Parkgate Solent comedy – Crushed it!

I did fewer gigs than 17, I believe because I bailed on doing KING GONG at the comedy Store. I don’t regret the decision at all. That’s my first blog. I don’t really know how to sign off a blog; I guess I just say “bye”. If you liked this Checkout my Podcast! its silly fun. Not at all good but Silly fun all the same!