Matt Fishwick: I Love An Internet Superstar?
In my Two Year Anniversary Craptacular blog post at the end of March I updated you on the goals that I set for myself for the year. In case you can't be bothered to click the link, I recap the ones that I'm going to talk about today:
Goal Seven
Meet more people. This will be really difficult for me. Anyone who knows me in real life knows how really shy I am around people I don’t know or don’t know that well.Goal Eight
Be a better person. I don’t exactly know what this entails, but I know I’m not good enough the way I am.Goal Nine
Be more confident. (I’ll have to wipe the dust off of that CD)
So there were the three goals to try and make me a better person. And I think that I am a little bit thanks to the course that I went on. Up until now I never mentioned what exactly the course was, but it ended last week so I shall tell you that it was the very awesome Comedy Sportz Beginning Improv workshop.
Some of the people that know me, know I like comedy. Some of those people even know that I try and write comedy. And one of those people actually thinks that I'm funny.
Despite all the years of being interested in comedy and in the back of my mind wanting to perhaps persue it as a career of some sort, I never actually did something about it.
Until this year.
I'm 28 this year (pretty soon, *ahem* 13 days actually *ahem* for those of you wishing to buy me a card and present), and I wanted to have a go before it was too late and didn't want to look back on my life and think "if only I'd have tried" and so between scouring the Internet for porn and tea cosy knitting patterns (A man is allowed diverse hobbies, and if he can, then so can I) I found the ComedySportz UK website.
Pretty soon, the first day of the course rolled around and I was really nervous. Had I made a mistake? Would I find out that I wasn't funny after all these years of thinking I was? Are these rhetorical questions and little redundant and boring?
I rolled up to the Manchester Comedy Store (Okay, that isn't exactly true. I don't know how to rollerskate, I walked) and I learned the answers to the three questions that I (tastefully) posed in the previous paragraph.
No, Yes and Definately Yes.
While I was shy at the first class, but over the next few weeks I eventually loosened up a bit and by the end I didn't think that I did too badly. At least not bad for someone with no performing experience beyond Year 9 drama.
I met the fantastic people that organised, ran and taught the workshops: Bron Edge, Sean Mason, Chris Tavner, Jade Fearnley, and Rob Hudson. Big shout out (dig me being all street 'n' shit) to all of you. You guys rock. (Though the rolling has yet to be confirmed.)
I made friends with people and I think that I'm a little more outgoing than I was before I started. Though I can't confirm this, as I went all Howard Hughes and I haven't left my room for six days. I've also been peeing in jars, but that's just for fun.
The last session of the 8 week course was last Saturday, and at the end of our session I presented people with gifts. I won't ruin the surprise for people that accidentally bid for them on e-bay later.
I wasn't entirely convinced that I did brilliantly at it, but it's a start and I've signed up for another course later in the year, to try and improv(e). Get it?
Amazingly, they didn't think that I sucked that badly, and even wanted to get my opinion for the new promo video that they were putting together. And so after a dozen script rewrites and me having to do multiple takes, it was finally in "the can" as they say in "the biz". However, later I was told that having me crying and sitting on the toilet wasn't the best endorsement, so we ventured to the front of the Comedy Store for a little bit of that "off the cuff" magic that I will, one day in the distant future, become mildly tolerated for.
You can find the video on Youtube and on Facebook (search for ComedySportz UK).
Yes I am aware that I could have embedded the video in this post, but for technical reasons I chose not to learn how to do it.
Don't forget to watch the video for the best showstopper in the business, Ashley Miller.
PS. In the spirit of Comedy Sportz, this blog post was entirely improvised.
