Get Up, Stand Up...

My sleep habits are unhealthy, that's for sure. Last night entailed me going to bed as it was actually getting light (about 3.21). (This is written on roughly 6 hours sleep, so I managed hopefully just enough to fuction properly). The night before I managed about an hour earlier (the point where the moon disappears from the view of my window.

These bouts of insomnia are filled with (and quite possibly, in no small part, down to) writing comedy material. Now what with Friday Pictorials, attempted witty tweets and various sketches/sitcom drafts/plays all kicking around, one would imagine that I might have had just about enough of comedy writing, however there's one bit of ground I'm yet to break. The big 'un, the comedy grail: Stand-up.

Now, as primarily a writer, I subscribe to the old literary adage of 'get it writ, then get it right'. I'm very much still at the 'get it writ' stage. It's basically rambling and not funny enough and the 'get it right' stage is very much a pipedream. Like all things, I imagine a good deal of it comes down to practice.

It's fair to say that I have an unusual style in the sense that my influences are incredibly wide-ranging. I've talked before about the profound influence of Cowards on my writing style and indeed Messrs Key and Basden in their own right. Add in touches of Mark Watson, Tim Minchin, Russell Brand, Dave Allen, Willie Rushton, David Mitchell, Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan and you can see the massive melting pot of genius comedians arguing in my head for precedence. This makes writing a rather inconsistent and tricky process.

Fortunately, last night a good deal of potential material was served up by the ever reliably outragous talkSPORT. While waiting for Matthew Crosby to appear in his 'presenter's friend' role, myself and Katie and Zoe from Twitter heard all manner of preposterously outlandish opinions on conspiracy theories regarding 9/11. One man actually said, and I quote, "it's only an airliner, a building like that, the damage would be 'negligible'."

Let's just ponder that point for a moment. 'Negligible'?! At best this man was a cluelessly misguided, if a little offensive, man who spends too much time on the internet. I think the basic principle when it comes to any kind of vehicle crashing into a building is that it will definitely do some damage. If that vehicle happens to be a plane, then 'negligible' is probably not one of the words one should be grasping for. 'Devastating' perhaps, but not 'negligible'. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I don't think that word means what you think it means...

That said, if you really want to lose faith in a large section of humanity, then it's worth a listen. Fordy certainly attempts to offer the voice of reason in the face of simply staggering unbelievable bullshit, but there's only so much one man can do. The show certainly picked up for the hour when Crosby was in attendance however, once he had left the airwaves, I followed him (by which I mean, I switched stations, instead of, say, stalking him across the Big Smoke).