Is there a link between audience size and performance quality? Laughter is a contagion, and logic suggests that a packed room = punters giving themself the permission to let go. And so: a great atmosphere, and performers raising their game accordingly.
The answer, after five years of hosting alternative comedy shows, is I’m really not sure.
Some of my very favourite nights have been ones like this past Wednesday, with a half full room, some moments of utter bafflement, and professional weirdos giving it their all like it’s 1995 and they’re at Wembley Arena supporting Newman and Baddiel.
The sheer oddness of what we do is emphasised on nights like these. Hoopla is predominantly – overwhelmingly – an improv space, and we often get people expecting an improvised comedy show.
Instead, they find themselves being marched onto the stage to play Inn Keeper #2 in a school nativity by a character desperately yearning for the glory and certainties of childhood.
Camilla Borges – who I struggle to not pronounce like the Argentinian short story writer – is one of my favourite acts and pretty much everything she does is brilliant. Her combination of confidence and vulnerability is perfectly judged, and her set is a suitably weird and memorable start to the evening.
Oh yes, and I was hosting.
I’m feeling more relaxed MCing than ever before. I enjoy it? Are you supposed to enjoy it? Is this… confidence?
This month’s gambit was scams, a seam I’ve mined before. This was inspired by a conversation I’d had with Chris T-T earlier in the day, where he’d mentioned that the drummer from a noughties indie-landfill band is now a conspiracy theorist, with Covid jabs his gateway crankery.
Legally I must again point out that this drummer is not in The Vaccines.
From here I read out a list of things that could be described as scams, flim-flams or pyramid schemes, and asked the audience to boo the ones they think are scams and cheer the things they think are legit.
This ranged from improv, capitalism, France, the police, and the indie landfill band The Vaccines.
This led to a great deal of booing. I should have done it the other way around.
However, it seemed to work, despite my warning mid-set that “we’re just going to do this and nothing else for the next two hours”. One young woman in the front row, a France troofer, got the clapping and cheering underway, and off we went.
Closing the first half, as is becoming traditional, was Next Level Sketch. After the cast-a-ganza for our celebratory 5th Birthday Special, we were a pared-back troupe of seven: Cara, Josephine, Paul, Rebecca, Vic, Ben, and myself.
It’s been great having Ben in the cast. Ben is an NLS sketch-writing legend. We could – and indeed should – do an entire show just of stuff that he’s written.
He’s probably a *little* more shy as a performer – and I’m sure he won’t mind my saying that – but he has such natural comic timing.
It was a joy to watch him play those parts he’d written, in sketches with such clear and glorious nonsense-clarity like Sirens, and giving both innovation and plates a long-deserved kicking in his Dyson sketch.
I was a bit rusty. I’m having a real problem learning lines at the minute – for ADHD reasons, primarily – and needed to rely on the crutch of my notebook for the Weekend At Bernie’s: The Musical sketch, in which Daniel Smith played the titular corpse. Very convincingly, especially when he fell off his chair like a sack of dead potatoes.
My co-producer Rebecca is running an in-person sketch-writing session next month, and I’m looking forward to it, as I haven’t written much in proud of lately, and it’ll therefore be great to hopefully get some new inspiration.
On to the second half, and Ali Brice, in the character of veteran working men’s club performer Eric Meat.
A guy in the front row did NOT understand that Ali isn’t actually Eric, and that this was a parody of a terrible stand up, not an actual terrible stand up. This, of course, made it funnier for the rest of the audience, and even the guy in question got it in the end.
Finally, we had returning champion Rob Duncan, printer of the year 2024 and still talking about it in 2025.
As one of the finest clowns out there, Rob consistently toys with expectations about form, timing, and even linear coherence. He’s one of the few comics where I properly have no idea what will happen next, what’s actually going wrong and what is intentionally going wrong, and who – like Luke Rollason – would be funny in an empty room or falling out of a metaphorical tree in a Siberian forest.
He also made me feel that “printers” should be added to animals and children in the list of things not to work with, and his technology-based double act, and his contrasting it to his relationship with his brother [1], was strangely moving.
We finished on time, which as I get older and more coherently live in not-London feels increasingly important. A bunch of writers, performers, and guests had time to go down for a drink afterwards, where we talked about matching butt tattoos and dilated pupils. The artificial lights of the last Thameslink to Brighton felt especially harsh, but only because what went before was so magical that I didn’t really want it to end.
[1] Rob also performs with his brother as The Duncan Brothers, who – with and without Julia Masli – have been responsible for some of the most inspired nonsense of the past half decade.
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