Comedy news: Twee and Cake comedy club

Tweet

A growing scene in south-east London is brewing a new type of lo-fi comedy. Georgie Hobbs talks to three promoters with big ideas.

"There's a real cool club on the other side of town
where the real cool kids go to sit around
and talk bad about the other kids.
Yeah, it's a real cool club and you're not part of it."

There's Millie, Pickles and Pattycakes too
and Cubby's making mean jokes about you
ha ha, ya little twit.
Yeah, it's a real cool club and you're not part of it."
'Cool Kids' by Screeching Weasel

As a teenager obsessed with Californian pop-punk, San Franciscan band Screeching Weasel were one of my favourites.

Cool Kids was an ironic ode to elite scenesters; its catchy chorus an indictment against all that was pretentious.

Comedy is often billed as the new punk rock (yawn). But now there really is a small scene spreading through South-East London where a lot of cool kids go to sit around. And tell jokes. Only, they're not too mean; they're nice. There's Joanna, who runs The Funny Folk Café in New Cross, her boyfriend Tom and his pal Terry, who co-run laughterinoddplaces and their friend Joey, who turns a Deptford dive into a surreal circus once a month.

Before they met, they'd each travel across the Thames to Robin Ince's Book Club and feel part of something special. But, says 20-year old Tom Searle, that was when it was "really cliquey in a good way". Since then Ince has got big and where once there was gay camaraderie and a sense that anything could happen, now the same roster of comedians reel out repeated material, says Tom. "You know, Natalie [Haynes] does her Diagnosis Murder bit, Chris [Neill] does Jodie Marsh and after a while you want something else," he moans. "A year ago it was brilliant, but [even] Robin Ince knows it's run out of steam."

Tom Searle says: "Ours is the sort of club Daniel Kitson wishes he could have."
Outspoken entrepreneur that he is, Tom set about creating something equally brilliant. After watching Terry Saunders' Pulp Boy in Edinburgh last year, he knew he'd found a fellow Londoner to share his vision. The two launched the first Laughter In Odd Places together last October. Now one Sunday a month, at around tea-time, Terry brings whichever Airfix model he's working on to, say, a record store, charity shop or library, and delights a homely crowd with stories about how he built the bloody thing.

Domestic farce is a running theme at these clubs, where a bunch of familiar faces bond over shared anecdotes and in-jokes. It's what fellow comedian Dave Nicholls calls "homemade comedy". And it's taking off. 22-year-old Joanna Hawkins has only held the one Funny Folk Café so far.

She started planning the night's anti-folk theme before she'd even met her boyfriend, Tom. "I thought I was so original, like; 'cardi's and anti-folk and cake - it will be great'," she recalls, embarrassed. "And then [Terry's friend] Tom Bell told me about laughter in odd places and obviously it's exactly the same ethos," she laughs.

But what is that ethos? Well, it features a lot of smart, cool kids with a jumble-sale aesthetic and punk attitude. News of their events is spread by word of mouth (or, let's face it, MySpace) and free entrance gained by waving hand-drawn membership cards past Terry and Tom at the door.

Their's is "the sort of club Daniel Kitson wishes he could have," asserts Tom. It's the antithesis of profit-making mega clubs, like Jongleurs, that charge around £14 per ticket, seat up to 300 people and make comedians alter their acts to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Offering slick professionalism and cheap booze to stag nights and hen parties is not really Tom and Terry's thing.

"Jongleurs and The Glee Club are working class where people want jokes they'll be sure they 'get'," he says. "If we're being honest, we're more middle class and think it's fantastic when you don't know why you're laughing." At these nights, comedians provide "confused laughter from the gut and that's what blows [Tom's] mind."

Unlike Jongleurs, Tom and Terry's is a teetotal club. "Some people moan and say; 'What's the point of that if you can't get a drink?' but then I probably don't want them to come," explains Terry. "I want the audience to be like me and not want [lager-loutish behaviour] from a comedy night." Despite a growing membership list, they won't allow more than 40 people through their doors. Why? "One in 20 people is a cunt," says Tom. "Say we had 100 people turning up, that'd be five cunts too many. And they wouldn't like our gigs anyway." He may sound like "some faux-rebellious teenager," he says, but he knows their club isn't for everyone.

Tom is hesitant to call it part of a 'scene' as such, but Dave Nicholls is not. "If it were music, this movement would be lo-fi," he says. Favouring rambling narratives and quirky tips over polished punch lines, straight jokes and audience-fuelled aggression, the New Cross comedy scene is very much like anti-folk.

A movement which local anti-folk musician Phil Serfaty calls, "a punk approach to folk music, it values honesty and humour over technical ability, lyrical clichés and trends." Of course, you don't have to have limited technical ability to be considered anti-folk, he says. But the point is, it's not the winning, it's the taking part - the attempt to do something different.

It's the same ideology that sees Daniel Kitson place a positive emphasis on his stutter or Josie Long exuberantly apologise before her sets and have a go anyway. It's Terry's broken Airfixes and Jo Neary telling audiences, "I don't do comedy, I do little moments."

This Is Not A Circus

As co-founder, cake baker and compère of This Is Not A Circus, 22-year-old Joey (pictured left) personifies the anti-comic style. "He's what Time Out would call 'off-beat'," says Dave Nicholls, the first ever act at his friend's club. Three months old next week, his is a pseudo-seedy affair fit with skewed carnival music, brightly-coloured balloons and dubious day-glo green cakes.

While Tom and Joanna want a jolly good time, Joey lusts after barely controlled chaos, just about kept in check by the kind of polite hipsters he hangs out with. "What I want to try and create is a sort of a Vic Reeves Big Night Out; an anti-comedy night where people just come and interrupt, where there's a bit of mayhem rather than you know, 'here's an act, then a break, then an act'". he says.

To ensure just the right amount of mischief, he pre-arranges disruptive sketches with the acts because - as with anti-folk - "being shabby is part of the whole thing".

Hence, 'Frank'. With stained singlet and a short temper, Frank's a drunk who routinely 'welcomes' on each act with a belch and a grunt. Supposedly he lives in the bins out the back. When he disappears, comedians Matthew Crosby and Tom Parry play ludicrous games like 'Musical Cheese' and 'Soup of the Day?' In the breaks, the audience enter drawing competitions for crap prizes.

On my first visit, I came away empty handed but my friend won a potato. Next time, says Joey, there will be toffee apples. Only, he might not be able to afford them since he works at Pizza Hut during the day.

Anti-folk fan Joanna says the time is nigh for an indie-comedy revolution. She agrees that nights where the comic and crowd lock head over smart-ass heckles are depressing. "I think it needs to move on from that.

Why can't you bring about change by being quite nice rather than being angry and volatile?" She says a traditional delivery of rehearsed jokes is "old hat" and this new "homemade" style is more "genuine". "In 10 years time there might be some sort of ironic return to 'joke-set-up-punchline'," she ponders, "but at the moment, I like how it is."