BBC

29 March, 2001, 08:02 GMT 09:02 UK

How to be a standup

BBC News Online's stand-up guinea pig Helen Briggs enrols on a comedy workshop to learn just how hard it is to make people laugh.

If comedy's the new rock'n roll, I'm a banana.

Have you ever wondered why any seemingly sane person would want to ridicule themselves in front a bunch of perfect strangers?

Only during group therapy, perhaps, or ritual humiliation? All these thoughts flit through my mind as I skitter onto the stage, clutch the microphone and turn to face my public.

This is stand-up comedy, where self-deprecation is the name of the game. The only catch is that you do need to make people laugh.

"Did you know humans are the only members of the animal kingdom with a sense of humour?" I say, staring out at an expanse of deadpan faces.

A man on the front row checks his watch. A teenage girl squeezes a spot. I go for the punch line.

"Then what are you all - baboons?"

It starts as a twitch at the corner of the lips, then a chortle appears and soon a modest but well-earned peel of mirth spreads around the room.

It's okay, I think, they're laughing. All I have to do now is remember the rest of the act.

Eclectic

This is the Harlequin Theatre, Redhill, Surrey, where a bunch of comedy wannabes are in the shallow end, waiting to try out their water wings.

Only five weeks earlier, we had all enrolled on one of the numerous comedy workshops springing up around the country.

This one, run by Jack Milner, attracted the company of an eclectic mix, including teachers, civil servants, journalists and an, er, air crash investigator.

The first task, said Jack, was to unlock the brain's creative potential by unleashing the right side of the brain.

This, apparently, can be achieved by wandering around the room pointing at random objects and giving them the wrong name.

Thus, carpet becomes banana, ceiling becomes apple and chair becomes broccoli. Don't try this one at work.

Another technique to tap the comic genius within is rant and rave.

You take something that makes you angry, and splurge forth in an uncontrolled fashion for a few minutes, hopefully triggering a topic that will make someone laugh.

And then there's mind mapping, where you choose any subject and jot down anything it makes you think of, in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, in a thought bubble.

Then you simply take one of the thought bubbles and repeat the process, hopefully coming up with some surreal and funny gags.

Curiously our specified brain storming topic was leopard-skin thongs. Enough said.

Brain warming exercises under way, we graduated to practising our embryonic acts on each other.

After the more genteel first attempts, the class rapidly progressed to real stand-up fare - an obsession with body parts, filthy habits and general smuttiness.

There was Adam ("I call my dog Jesus - a dog's not just for Christmas"); Paul ("I think I've been dumped - my girlfriend called me up the other day and said come round, there's no-one in. I got there and she was right - there was no-one in"); and Wendy (sorry - this was too smutty to reproduce).

Oozing

A few comedy rules - there aren't any - but punchlines, like buses, tend to come in threes; long-winded anecdotes about your best mate, family and so on are fine at weddings but not on stage; don't swear at hecklers; and never nick anyone else's material (sorry, I just have).

And so to actually performing - where it helps to be a natural, oozing confidence, charm, wit and composure.

After a skirt through my Y-chromosome gags (scientists have mapped the genetic structure of the male chromosome - they found the driving gene, in the back seat - but the gene for putting down the toilet seat was completely missing), I made it to the end and survived.

And, despite the stage fright of rehearsals and the challenge of not pacing the stage like a nervous giraffe, it was a strangely liberating experience.

It seems that inside everybody there is a comedian fighting to get out. But whether I will let my comic inner child out to play again in public remains to be seen.

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2001