The Wilderness Years
In my time away from blogging, I wrote and performed my first stand-up show entitled The Wilderness Years. Someone asked me pretty much straight after the final of the three shows of my Camden Fringe run how I wrote it. I'm not sure the answer I gave was at all satisfactory so I'll attempt to remedy that here.
I think it was around February/March time last year that I committed to doing it and even then the idea of writing an hour seemed daunting and impossible. I had the concept and title in my head for at least a couple of years and knew that a lot of my strongest material would fit into the theme and narrative. From there I've revisited certain events in my life that I thought had comedic potential but were not necessarily punchy enough to warrant inclusion in a 10-20 minute club set.
It has ultimately ended up being a chronological journey through the last six years of my life and I've tried not to deviate too much from that. There are small structural elements in it but I decided I didn't want to tie myself into knots by implementing anything overly complicated. It's an hour of "man and a microphone" stand-up that makes sense as a whole that will hopefully give me a platform to write something more challenging/conceptually interesting in the future.
I'm still considering it as a work in progress and I'm performing it again at Happy Hour Comedy Club this forthcoming Tuesday 17th January at The Joiners Arms on Denmark Hill, should you wish to see a man stumble through something he's mostly forgotten for 50 minutes ish.
I think it was around February/March time last year that I committed to doing it and even then the idea of writing an hour seemed daunting and impossible. I had the concept and title in my head for at least a couple of years and knew that a lot of my strongest material would fit into the theme and narrative. From there I've revisited certain events in my life that I thought had comedic potential but were not necessarily punchy enough to warrant inclusion in a 10-20 minute club set.
It has ultimately ended up being a chronological journey through the last six years of my life and I've tried not to deviate too much from that. There are small structural elements in it but I decided I didn't want to tie myself into knots by implementing anything overly complicated. It's an hour of "man and a microphone" stand-up that makes sense as a whole that will hopefully give me a platform to write something more challenging/conceptually interesting in the future.
I'm still considering it as a work in progress and I'm performing it again at Happy Hour Comedy Club this forthcoming Tuesday 17th January at The Joiners Arms on Denmark Hill, should you wish to see a man stumble through something he's mostly forgotten for 50 minutes ish.
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