It is now over nine years since I did stand up comedy for the first time and after working on a couple of split-bill projects in the past (Utopia: Under Construction with Christian Russel-Pollock and Eliza Fraser and CISter Act with Sam Michael), I am now working on my own one-hour show: Talk Nerdy to Me, an hour of niche and nerdy comedy on a huge variety of subjects.
My original plan for my first solo hour was a politically themed show entitled Jon Matthews: Vaguely Political Comedian, which would have been a highlights reel of jokes I have written about politics over the last ten years. It would also have been a tribute to my own comedy journey, which started out with me performing in mixed-medium open mics and art house gigs, where I delivered long-winded jokes about corruption in the Cameron government and criticised the austerity policies of George Osbourne et al. All very thrilling stuff! For the first 18 months or so, I was guilty of trying to learn comedy in a vacuum and although I made friends, it was not until I moved to China and started exploring the ex-pat comedy scene that I really began to improve.
Performing political comedy in China is a dangerous business and we were legally required to avoid criticising the regime. Instead, I wrote about ex-pat life and the fun of being an outsider (didn’t we all?). I also enjoyed the international view of British politics and was able to learn more about how the world sees us. I learnt a lot about comedy thanks to instant feedback from dedicated and loyal audiences and a clear pathway of progression to longer sets and showcases, as well as a close group of comedy friends who were always ready with advice and ideas.
Brexit was a gift, from a comedy perspective, because it thrust British politics into the international limelight and the rhetoric around it made for some fantastic material. When I returned to the UK, in 2017, I found that the subject was already tired here. I feel that at the peak, I had three very good jokes about Brexit and one about Trump. Returning to the UK was difficult, as a lot of the material that had been reliable in China was largely meaningless living in Bristol. During the three years I lived in Bristol, I was able to continue to develop my act. It was a good period for political comedy and I actually found the conservative towns of the South to be a surprisingly happy hunting ground for me, my self-deprecating streak probably making the left-wing perspective more palpable.
As I reviewed my material from this time, to determine what would be suitable for Vaguely Political Comedian, I was unsurprised by how dated it felt. If politics moves fast, then political comedy does too. The strongest material from this time was about more general political ideas or was fairly apolitical in nature. This was the difficulty I faced as I first drew the ideas of Vaguely Political Comedian together, how do I construct this retrospective in a way that feels interesting and relevant, as well as funny?
Covid, of course, did not help. The enforced break from live comedy saw me retreat into other writing projects. Unlike many, I did not take advantage of the online comedy craze or the emergence of comedy on platforms such as TikTok. This was probably to my detriment and by the time comedy returned, I was living in another part of the country, trying to break through on a different regional circuit.
Comedy was strange after the lockdown. It was difficult to know whether to talk about covid or not, was it a cliché to be avoided or an elephant to be addressed? Should comedy represent escapism or exploration? A lot of other things happened in that time, the #metoo movement affected comedy profoundly, as did Black Lives Matter. Both of these issues deserve a significant nod as part of a political comedy show. To what extent am I, a white male, placed to do this?
During the post-lockdown comedy revival, I wrote jokes on a wide variety of subjects: science, maths, history, languages, family, religion, as well as politics. I felt a personal aversion to writing jokes about covid, feeling as if we’d heard enough about it over the eighteen months or so it was the leading news story. That isn’t to say that there isn’t some great material out there on the subject, it’s just something I didn’t personally fancy writing about.
As I reviewed my more recent material, I found that it was the so-called ‘nerdy’ jokes that I’d enjoyed telling the most, rather than older political material. It made sense to focus on this instead, a realisation that was the beginning of the end for Vaguely Political Comedian. Compiling my favourite nerdy jokes, alongside some new ideas, seemed like a much more rewarding approach to my debut solo show, and one that I hoped would find a receptive audience who would enjoy hearing my nerdy jokes as much as I enjoy telling them.
Talk Nerdy to Me will be performed for the first time at The Playwright, Nottingham at 4:30pm on the 5th of November as part of the Nottingham Comedy Festival. Tickets available now.
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