Courtesy of my good friend Mr Pete Ashton, here’s an audio of my first ever stand-up comedy gig from last night.

Tom Lennon’s First Standup from Pete Ashton on Vimeo.

(This, of course, means I’ll now have to write fresh material)

I’ll be doing my first proper stand-up comedy set this Sunday night (11th April).  The venue is now:

Highlight Comedy Club (formerly Jongleurs)

Quayside Tower
259-262 Broad Street
Birmingham

B1 2HF

Doors 6.45pm,  Tickets £5

It’d be great if you could make it.

Update: there’s been a change of venue for the Sunday night stand-up comedy show.  I’m just awaiting final confirmation and will update the details ASAP.

I’ve been a bit quiet as of late due to a couple of reasons.  Firstly, I’ve been writing an article for a new magazine that my pals Jon Bounds and Danny Smith will be launching soon.  There’ll be more about that in due course, I imagine.

Secondly, I’ve been attending a weekly stand-up comedy workshop and in a couple of weeks time will be doing my first live gig in front of an audience alongside fellow workshop graduates.  This is a big deal for me, and I’m rather excited and petrified by it all.

Details are as follows:

‘New Faces of Comedy’ event,  Sunday 11th April 2010

The Victoria

48 John Bright Street

Birmingham

B1 1BN

Doors 7pm, Start 7.30pm

Tickets £5

Please pop along if you can.  You’ll either get to see my long-awaited moment of glory or witness me fall on my arse catastrophically.  Not bad for a fiver, then.

I won’t have much time over the next couple of weeks for any fresh bloggage, but what I plan to do is have a trawl through my archives and post up some old articles and stuff that isn’t currently on the Internet.

Normal service will resume as soon as possible.

Radio 4′s The Secret World is billed as a ‘comedy series that offers an insight into the private lives of the famous’, but don’t let that rather off-putting description put you off. Pitching its tent somewhere between Radio 4 classic Dead Ringers and Chris Morris’ sublime mongfest, Blue Jam, it’s anthracite dark funny stuff that I highly recommend.

On first impression the show might seem like an unofficial Dead Ringers spin-off, insofar as it features Jon Culshaw in a variety of roles and is produced by Bill Dare. Like Dead Ringers, it’s also full of Radio 4 in-jokes (in one sketch, we’re introduced to the seedy world of sectarian intimidation that goes on behind the scenes at Thought for the Day). Unlike Dead Ringers, however, the comforting cackle of the studio audience has been replaced with ambient music and the material is much darker in tone.

The highlight of last night’s episode, the second in a six-part series, was a sketch in which the venerated Britflick director Mike Leigh was depicted as cynical conman who hires out gullible actors to companies like Wal-Mart as cheap labour. Leigh pockets the wages while the likes of James Gandolfini and Keira Knightly, believing they are researching a role for Leigh, are happy to work for free.

The Secret World is on Radio 4 on Tuesday nights at 11pm. Last night’s episode is available on the BBC iPlayer between now and 28th April from here.

While we’re on the subject of the Latitude Festival (and, let’s face it, I have been banging on a bit about it as of late), I was pleased to see that the minimalist composer Michael Nyman (he of The Piano soundtrack fame) will be “curating a programme specifically for the intimate environment of the Music and Film Arena.” That sounds like my kind of shit, that does.

I do like Michael Nyman. It’s not so much because of his score for The Piano, which I didn’t care too much for as a film, to be honest. (For one thing, the protagonist is a scotswoman who, from an early age, consciously decides that she’ll never speak to anyone ever at all. What’s going on there, then?). No, the reason why I like Michael Nyman so much is because of his work with the British filmmaker Peter Greenaway. As I’ve said elsewhere:

I was a bit of a Peter Greenaway nut in my teens. For a certain type of subversive but sensitive teenager in the 80s, Peter Greenaway films were a staple of the late-night Channel 4 schedules. They were arthouse films that featured an abundance of nudity, so I suppose you could say they provided a valid, intellectually legitimate excuse to watch dodgy softcore smut while your parents were out.

Well, Michael Nyman’s music forms an integral part of Peter Greenaway’s films – you can’t like one without liking the other. That’d be like saying you’re a big fan of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, but all that Ennio Morricone music really gets on your tits.

Thinking about Michael Nyman has got me thinking about the satirist Victor Lewis-Smith. Here’s what Radiohaha, the online radio comedy encyclopaedia has to say about him:

“Victor Lewis-Smith is a talented comedian from the ‘dangerous’ end of the spectrum whose career has, alas, been almost entirely eclipsed by the rise of Chris Morris,who tends to occupy similar ground.”

That saves me having to say it. Years ago (it must have been 1990 or thereabouts), he had a Sony Award-winning show on Radio One that was fiendishly clever and very, very funny. It consisted of comedy sketches and crank phone calls interwoven with Zappa-esque musical interludes. I still have episodes on some TDK C90 cassettes somewhere. I must dig ‘em out at the weekend.

He also indulged in painstakingly crafted musical parodies, including one called “Process Music” which satirised the repetitive Baroque stylings of Michael Nyman and Philip Glass. I’ve been scouring the interwebs to find it but to no avail. Shame, really. I’ll probably have to resort to an old TDK C90 cassette, instead.

Here’s some other stuff by him:

One of my favourite Christmas presents this year was the Season 7 DVD box set of the classic 90s American comedy series Seinfeld. I say “Christmas present”, but I actually bought it for myself. ‘Twas the weekend before Christmas and – after spending a day spending my money on family and friends – I felt like indulging myself. I didn’t wrap it up or anything. I’m not that sad.

I’ve been a fan of Seinfeld ever since BBC2 started showing it as a double-bill with the equally brilliant The Larry Sanders Show 12 or-so years ago. I used to set the VCR to tape the shows then watch them after work the next day. I found it very therapeutic. Due to this scheduling quirk, even now – years later – I still think of the Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show as a pair of classic comedy co-joined twins. Maybe I always will.

Unlike other American comedy imports like Friends, Seinfeld never really caught on in this country. Maybe it was because, unlike Friends, it’s central characters weren’t funny, good-natured, likable people. They were funny, self-centred, thoroughly unlikeable people. I never much cared for Friends. The TV show, that is. In all other respects I very much care for friends.

Or perhaps its lack of popularity in Blighty was due to something else. Maybe it was because the clever-clever wordplay and shouty-shouty schadenfreude of New York Jewish comedy left many BritCit citizens cold – unless, like me, they raised themrselves on The Marx Brothers, Phil Silvers and Woody Allen and were one of the few Gentiles in the audience at Jackie Mason stand-up gig.

Or maybe it was a lot simpler than that. Maybe it was because Auntie Beeb – in her infinite wisdom – used to put it on ridiculously late at night. Like many American imports in those pre-digital days, Seinfeld (and, of course, The Larry Sanders Show) seemed to be shuffled around the schedules like an unwanted dog. You were never quite sure when it would be on, but you could just about safely narrow it down to somewhere between Newsnight and Breakfast News.

(If Heroes came out back then, I imagine the Beeb would have put it on at half-past Stupid-O-Clock on a Tuesday morning. They’d have probably cancelled random episodes at short notice in order to show live coverage of the Crown Green Bowling Semi-Finals at Roehampton. And, seeing how it’s such a continuity-heavy show, they’d have gone to the trouble to broadcast the episodes out of sequence. Like they did with The X-Files. Bastards. But I digress…)

Anyway, back to Seinfeld. For the uninitiated, here’s a description of the show I shamelessly nicked from Wikipedia:

Seinfeld violated several conventions of mainstream television. The show, which (correctly or not) is often described as “about nothing”, became the first television series since Monty Python’s Flying Circus to be widely described as postmodern. Several elements of Seinfeld fit in with a postmodern interpretation. The show typically is driven by humor dispersed with superficial conflict and characters with strange dispositions.

The characters were “thirty-something singles … with no roots, vague identities, and conscious indifference to morals.” [Hurd R. Wesley - Postmodernism: A New Model of Reality]. Usual conventions, such as isolating the characters from the actors playing them and separating the characters’ world from that of the actors and audience, were broken. One such example is the story arc in which the characters promote a television sitcom series named Jerry. The show within the show, titled Jerry was much like Seinfeld, in which Seinfeld played himself, and that the show was “about nothing.” Jerry was launched in the Season 4 finale, but unlike Seinfeld, it was not picked up into a series.

Many episodes revolved around the characters becoming involved in the lives of others to typically disastrous results. However, regardless of the damage they caused, they never gained anything from the experience and continued to be selfish, egocentric people. On the set, the notion that the characters should not develop or improve throughout the series was expressed as the “no hugging, no learning” rule. This quote is almost referenced in an episode (“The Secret Code“) where Kramer says to Jerry, “Well the important thing is, you learned something,” to which Jerry replies, “No I didn’t.” Unlike most sitcoms, there are no moments of pathos; the audience is never made to feel sorry for any of the characters. Even [George Costanza's fiance] Susan’s death in the series elicits no genuine emotions from anyone in the show.

You can see why I’m such a fan.

But back to the Seinfeld Season 7 box set. This was show co-creator Larry (Curb Your Enthusiasm) David’s last series, and – in the humble opinion of this Roman Catholic Irish raconteur dilettante eejit – was it’s finest. It featured classic episodes like “The Maestro”, “The Hot Tub” and “The Rye”.

And it also featured “The Soup Nazi“.

In “The Soup Nazi” episode, Jerry tells his deeply dishonest, atavistically insecure and cosmically misanthropic friend George Constanza about a great New York soup kitchen that makes soup so good it’ll make your legs buckle. The proprietor – however – is somewhat eccentric. He insists on a certain fascistic code of conduct amongst his customers and will tolerate no deviance, however slight. As you enter the store you step to the right, step forward, place your order, step to the left and pay. You do not engage in small talk. You do not question his judgement. You do not complain.

Needless to say, George Costanza inadvertently fails to comply and piss-your-pants funny comedy ensues. If you want to know more either watch the episode or go here. I’d prefer it if you watched the episode. Classic comedy is like good food: the menu is not the meal.

The Soup Nazi character was based on a real guy, Al Yeganeh, who ran the Soup Kitchen International in Midtown Manhattan (as I recall, it was just around the corner from the Letterman studios). When I visited New York a few years’ ago I made a personal pilgrimage to the Soup Kitchen International. Sadly, it was closed.

To paraphrase the Soup Nazi, there was “No soup for me.”