Tell us about your Comedy Lab workshops.
Comedy lab workshops teach a combination of stand up, improv and clowning skills designed to upgrade your presentation and make you more present for any performance. I have designed it to be accessible for people of all experience from complete newbies aiming to overcome their fears to veteran performers looking to upskill their tool kit.
Comedy, improvisation, clowning and stand up are all disciplines that can evoke fear in people so they can shy away from them. I aimed to create a combination of techniques that combine and compliment each other in a way many will not encounter. I hope it will be a unique, fulfilling and engaging experience.
What inspired you to set up these workshops?
I was already experimenting with comedy workshops leading up to the pandemic. I was performing regularly and studying a Masters in Contemporary Performance after my comedy degree at Salford Uni. In order to make some extra money around my Masters, I was doing a prototype of these workshops with companies like Green King and at Clarenden Sixth Form. I was developing what would be considered a unique style of improv clowning stand up that was being delivered at comedy gigs and competitions such as Leicester Square New Comedian of the Year, Harrogate New Comedian of the Year and Chortle Student Comedian of the Year. These are all nationwide competitions where I got to the finals, and I came runner up for Chortle.
When COVID happened, all of these opportunities dried up very quickly in a manner I could have never predicted. I felt I needed a safety net should something similar ever happen with the theatres shutting down again.
So I retrained during the pandemic. I decided if the theatres shut down again I needed a fallback and decided to to do my teacher training. I picked up a masters level PGCE in Life Long Learning from Huddersfield University to become a performance teacher. In doing so, I learned lots of ways to upgrade what I was previously delivering and combine it with cognitive science. This helped to plan the workshops and structure them so the techniques can be learned more effectively than before.
Thus decided to relaunch my workshops under the company comedy lab.
What kind of skills and topics do your workshops cover?
We cover elements of solo comedy such as clowning, improvisation and stand up writing skills and ways to mine subjects in a way that is truthful to you, thus discovering comedy that is unique to you. I also focus on being in the moment and not being afraid of failure and in fact what happens when you embrace these things. I find once someone is in the moment and not afraid of exploring through performance it is like they unlock another level of themselves. It is very exciting to see and help people achieve.
Often performers use some of these skills (usually one) and the others become neglected. However by learning these techniques and how to combine them, it makes your performance more dynamic all around. And when it is more dynamic, it is more eye catching and engaging, something I think all performers are striving for to some degree at least.
How can clowning, improvisation and stand-up techniques apply to a variety of situations?
We are always presenting whenever there is another person there, no matter what situation we are in we are presenting. There was a study conducted by by Dr Albert Mehrabian that found that we process other people as 55% body language, 38% tone and only 7% on the words we actually say. We so often just focus on our words to convey ourselves and let the other 93% be forgotten. But when we have the ability, through stand up and performance techniques to retool, this we become much more effective communicators.
For improvisation, it is something we use every day. We are constantly presented with situations where we must act without thinking. The foundations of comedy improvisation enable us to be able to enter into a free flow state when we may have otherwise been prone to overthinking and potentially anxiety. Accepting, building small increments of progress processed individually are all incredibly useful and enable us to stay in the moment more, often in stressful and non-stressful situations.
Clowning is the one that can have the most amount of worry attached to it for my students. I believe this is because we have as a society told children that they need to grow up and settle down and behave and so on from a very young age. As such I feel I have the most amount of barriers up from students when they start to engage with this aspect.
But clowning is often that extra element that allows people to reach that next level I mentioned above. Clowning due to its childlike nature is essentially allowing yourself as you did as a child to be in a space with endless possibilities, exciting possibilities and exploration without the worry about failure. Often when we embrace this feeling we become unstoppable.
How do you tailor your sessions to the needs of people on the course?
I am a believer in differentiation and catering the exercises to the experience and ability of each person, adding in extensions or further help where needed. I do try to help students be independent learners throughout this process and have an open dialogue through all the exercises.
I am influenced by a cognitive scientist called Vygotsky who said that there should always be a more knowledgeable other. And in regards to people’s education, only they will know what resonates with them and helps them learn. Throughout, I try to be listening and engaging and making tweaks so that each person is learning to the best of their abilities, in a way that makes them feel comfortable and ready to challenge themselves in ways they did not know they could.
I am also influenced by a educational professor called Rosenshine, who aims to start small and provide an educational framework for learning to help the students engage with the activities regardless of their experience and creative vision. To use a somewhat literal architectural analogy. Each building is made of bricks but when the scaffolding is on they all look the same but when that scaffolding is taken off we can see who has built a tower, a cathedral, The Taj Mahal, The Empire State Building.
That is something I want the students to feel like when they work with me: That they can achieve anything whilst they’re learning using the knowledge and structuring, then when the scaffolding is taken away they’re left with what they imagined and, what’s more, its all their own. I just provided the framework and support to help make it happen.
What are your hopes for the workshops in the future?
I hope to get Comedy Lab up and running in Manchester and then expand to having one in London, and then Brighton and Edinburgh – all cities that are very meaningful to me and have thriving scenes.
I only allocate 10 spaces per course so I can cater the courses to individual needs. I would like to, once the workshops become popular enough, run multiple sessions. I would then like to expand and offer out the opportunity to learn from some of the fantastic people I collaborate with such as comedian workshop leader Ben Hodge and actor/producer and workshop leader Rob Stuart Hudson.
What do you hope people take away from your workshops?
I hope they leave feeling like they have found their next level of their performance. It’s like a flow state. I want to find ways for them to tap into that, it may not be for the first time but if it is even better! I want to show them how if they have the tools to unlock that flow state, then they can access it and stay in it for longer.
But in a more tangible way, they will take away a 3-minute clip of their new material interlaced with performance techniques they have explored. They will be able to use this for networking and as a unique introduction piece for people within the industry, such as casting directors and agents. I also just hope it will be a nice memento too.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve been given as a performer?
There are loads, it’s hard to pick one. I am actually writing a book about the rules of comedy that I have picked up through my career that may come out one day. I think the main one from that book is that you must have reality, there must be a logic to whatever it is you’re doing. It gives you and your comedy purpose. It allows the audience to suspend their disbelief so you can take them to exciting places.
More broadly, since your question was about performance, I remember one of the lessons I was taught really early by Justin Moorhouse, one that I try to live by all the time as a performer: “There are 3 rules to working in show business: First, be on time. Second, be nice to everyone you meet. Third, do your best with every opportunity you get given. And that third part is actually the least important one.”
The final thing is something I tell newer acts all the time: Just focus on enjoying yourself and then everything else becomes a bonus.
Do you have any advice for people hoping to get into comedy?
The first thing I recommend is seek out your local open mic scene. This useful in that you will meet lots of people who are also just starting out. You will find new friends and a support network, which is invaluable.
My next piece of advice is try to get the mechanics of it down. Lots of people want to get on stage and break rules and push the boundaries, but it is difficult to do in a meaningful way that if you don’t know what the rules and the boundaries are in the first place.
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