Fight Comedy

Tonight I had my second dose of comedy, heading all the way to Arab Street to Fight Comedy, in the upstairs room of a bar.

Fight Comedy is somewhere between improv and stand-up; they get six comedians and feed them some subjects, chosen by the audience. So that would be ... improv, right? Well, not really, because quite a lot of the time they're not really playing off one another; put six comedians in a room and you'll have at least seven egos battling away. It would also be better if they filtered the audience's suggestions; some people don't know the difference between a question and a statement, and the problem with questions that are just too, like, ha-hilarious, dude, is that if all the funny is extracted before the comedian gets to react, there's not much else to go to.

Similarly if you try to make people make jokes about a video which is already a comedy, it's more difficult to see where to go. Or a video of something that's ostensibly comedy. Or a video of Family Guy. I can see that you'd want to stretch people, just sometimes you might stretch them too much. But then I love watching films about a man sitting at a desk for hours, doing nothing, so perhaps I'm not a good judge of this.

It's not without its promise. Certainly there's areas to improve (in particular, efficient ways to get people on and off the stage so the audience isn't left looking at a deserted microphone stand) but it's not hard to see how you could fix those things. Plus it's only been on for three weeks, and these things take some time to figure themselves out. I'll better try to crash into it quick while I still can.