Comedysale.com

It's mad right? A comedian no one has really ever heard of, booking an 850 seat room, and not allowing the audience to buy tickets at the box office, online or over the phone? Where the only way to buy tickets was to meet him personally? Which meant he had to stand for days with a ludicrously large "Comedy Sale" sign all over London flogging tickets to passers by? Where he even made home visits to delver his tickets?

Well, this is what Sanderson Jones has done. I have written about him before where I first heard of this idea. Sanderson's logic is that as he is one of the few, or possibly only, comedian to sell all his tickets to his smaller Edinburgh Fringe shows by himself, why not book one big show?

Here is Sanderson's introduction:

Sanderson also arranged a few meet ups at his local pub for the audience to get to know each other. Well after all, it's a bit unfair if he has met every single one of us, and we haven't. There will be no strangers at this gig.

Now I tend to go to smaller gigs. It's just the way I like them. Looking back over the gigs I've attended the biggest would probably be a sold out gig at The Leicester Square Theatre. This means that the Comedysale.com gig was the biggest comedy gig I have seen since I saw Billy Connolly back in the 90s.

Sanderson sells tickets to "chuggers":

New Londoner, Sarah had come along to these meet ups. As a big comedy fan she had seen Sanderson flogging his tickets in Edinburgh but hadn't seen him. I also met a couple of fun people at the pub meets and we arranged, along with Sir Bob to meet up at the White Swan near Highbury Corner for drinks beforehand. I made the surprisingly clever decision to eat at the pub which made the rest of the night much less embarrassing.

Why is my camera showing the wrong date?

The Union Chapel is covered in scaffolding but inside is a great space. The downside being that due to it being a church they don't let you bring booze into the venue (A-boooo!)

They do sell it though which is nice. We queued up for a short time before passing Sanderson on the steps, still flogging tickets.

Am enormous screen was showing #comedysale twitter updates. I've always enjoyed live broadcast twitter feeds before and naturally writing rude words to them so mentioned casually on twitter this was happening. And bless them, they sent them in thick and fast, but unfortunately the feed had to be manually refreshed so most of them got lost which was a shame.

The show started with a slide show of all the tickets he had sold to each punter. This made us feel integral to the show if we didn't already. Sanderson came on and seemed genuinely blown away by the turn out. One man, selling 750 tickets was no mean feat!

He had done his research and the first part of the show was peppered throughout with rather embarrassing Facebook and Twitter updates from the audience. A comedy critic had not shown up, so Sanderson decided that in return he went onto Amazon there and then and left a terrible review of his last book. He reviewed the critic more than the book! I think it started with a C and ended with a T.

There was a section where Sanderson put a backdrop behind a lady in the front row and signed into Chat Roulette, finally dropping the sheet to reveal the entire cheering audience as soon as he saw an erect cock (or, as this was in a church, a man in pants - we still saw cock though!)



There was video footage of "sexy" 7 year olds dancing - (Totes Inappropes!), as well as the story of Sanderson's love lost, won, and lost again when he was in Australia. Sanderson spoke about his failures and lack of concentration, all backed up with this amazing multimedia presentation.

The show ended with fire eating, juggling, sexy
nurses (that he had chased round the room Benny Hill style earlier) and the biggest round of applause I've heard for a comedy event in a long long time. There was even an unforced standing ovation.

It's really not 2008!

What an astounding show! At the end of the show, Sanderson told us of the after show party at The Garage, so we hit the bar at The Union, then headed straight there but found it was closed till 11pm. Not to worry, we headed to The Famous Cock (no sniggering please) and went back over. For people in their 40s like me, it was great music and everyone seemed to be having a lot of drunken fun. Sanderson certainly was !

I think I may have even took my top off and may have grinded against a guys bag as he was doing the same from the other side. I think that may have caused a little bit of bafflement and confusion.

I did bump into the lovely Martin White in the Union Chapel bar who reminded me that his Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra is playing at the same venue today (ie Saturday) so think I should wrap this blog up now and get ready for MFMO !

Here's a little snippet of what you missed:

ComedySale.com - Beer Pong & Board Games

Those of you who follow me on twitter have probably heard me speak about ComedySale.com. This is a mad project where Sanderson Jones has decided to book a ludicrously big venue and try to sell every ticket himself personally. After all, he has done this to smaller venues in Edinburgh; what's going to be so hard about selling one big one?

Mikey and Sarah

By the time of the gig (14th October) Sanderson will have personally met his entire audience and will be able to tailor the show to the crowd. He thought it wasn't fair that he will have met everyone but the audience won't know each other so he arranged a beer pong and board games afternoon in his local pub in Clapham.

I arrived fairly early and got straight into the beer pong. We were all fairly useless but I got a couple of amazing shots in. It was also my first chance to meet podophile chum, "Wet Sarah" (as Michael Legge has christened her) as she has just moved to London from Canada.

Action Shot!

After beer pong we played Calcozone (or something - I can't remember the title) which was a tile based board game where you had to conquer cities and rob farmers etc. It was all very geeky int he most funnest way, and I met some fun people too, though of course I can't remember their names - There was Alex, and Sarah of course, and the astonishingly flamboyant beer pong player and games organiser Mikey. There was also the sci-fi loving girl in a star wars t-shirt who has just moved to London and has so much to discover about the London comedy scene. I ended up ordering her to go to so many things!

I was looking forward to this show before, but now I'm looking forward to it even more. Sanderson is planning some more meet ups before the gig too. The next month could be a lot of fun!

Fortnight Club - Relaunched!

The Fortnight Club has been running for around 20 years in various venues near Angel, Islington. It was set up by such comedians as Lee Hurst and Alan Davies in order to try out new material, and is the longest running new material night in London. Until recently, it was situated at The Camden Head in Angel (not Camden). I had visited there a number of times and was always struck by the venues disinterest in the club. There were never any posters, or even an arrow pointing up the stairs, and the staff never seemed to know when the show started or even if there was one.

The first time I came here, the show didn't go ahead as there just wasn't anyone there. Another time, Milton Jones and Tony Law amongst others performed to just two of us. Anyway, a month or two ago, it was announced that The Camden Head were no longer going to do entertainment, so The Fortnight Club were on the move. This, I thought had to be a good thing. I was not keen on that particular pub as either a bar or a venue, and recently a new comedy club in Angel, The New Red Lion Theatre has opened, which to me seemed like an ideal venue.

This was announced on Facebook and I managed to win a couple of free tickets. I took my friend Richard, who had been to this venue before to see Richard Herring, probably because it's less than 20 seconds walk from his house.

Announced on the bill tonight were Fortnight Club stalwarts Mary Bourke, Tony Law and around 7 others. The compere was the fantastic Ronnie Rigsby (aka Logan Murray). As it turned out I was disappointed that there was no Tony Law, and poor Logan was ill, however that was made up for later.

I had two awkward moments before the gig. The first was when I wanted to visit the loo. The only signs to tell me which was which was a picture of a lion on one door, and a panther on the other. I looked from one to the other before confidently striding into the panther door. I quickly left! (Richard pointed out to me later that the panther was probably a lioness.)

Outside I met Nick Helm outside having a cigarette: "It's Nick isn't it?"
"Andy" he said
"Good to see you again Nick"
"No, I'm Andy"

It was getting confusing.

I said "Sorry I thought you were Nick Helm"
"Who's he?"
"A comedian"
"I'm a comedian called Andy Onions"

Well that was the second awkward moment of the evening. I said hello to Mary as she walked in and she mentioned that there was something in her set inspired by me. This was worrying and I wondered which of my idiotic Facebook updates she had seen!

Simon Clayton took over as compere for the evening and introduced our first act, Dylan Bray. I had seen Dylan before and enjoyed his set, especially the joke where he said that he didn't mind if his unborn child was a boy or a girl "just as long as it was straight". He explained that this joke went badly yesterday and made two girls cry and spent some time explaining the thought processes behind it.

Simon introduced a comedian by the name of "Adam Tempest" - I whispered to Richard that he sounded like a superhero. He was a rather tall skinny lad in glasses that didn't quite fit the name but he was rather funny.

Sanderson Jones (and Richard)

Jo Romero was up next but I couldn't take my eyes off her boots. I really don't want to be unkind but I did whisper (very quietly) to Richard that it looked like she had forgotten to take the back half of a pantomime horse off. However, her material soon distracted my attention from the boots! Luke Benson closed the first half with what I think was a very funny set. Unfortunately his Geordie accent was so incredibly strong that I probably only understood about 3 minutes out of the 10 he was on stage for! I have no problems with Sarah Millican or even Ross Noble, but I found that I really had to concentrate hard.

After the rather uneventful break things moved up a notch with Tony Cowards. Not someone I'd seen before, but he rattled off a host of one liners that Milton Jones or Gary Delaney would be proud of.

Ivor Dembina. Not a name I was familiar with, but certainly an unusual performance. Not many words were spoken at first, but he looked round the back of each side of the curtain, before slowly coming back to the microphone and declaring "Well I don't know where Maddie is.", then putting comedy to one side and lecturing the audience about how Live At The Apollo is filmed and why comedy audiences were stupid to go to DVD recordings and pay for the privilege. An interesting, if one sided discussion punctuated by one man standing up, muttering "Fucking shit" and walking out.

Mary Bourke was up next and had come up with some "mum cusses" as she didn't think the ones that the teenage boys on the bus told were good enough, mentioning one that she had heard where one boy claimed his friend's mum had "wooden legs and real feet". At a previous gig she had applauded the wit of the boy, but since I had pointed out on Facebook to her that it was an old Steven Wright joke, derided him for his plagiarism.

Marian Pashley was the penultimate act and she certainly tickled Richard with a quip about her retort to mothers with pushchairs ramming them into the back of her ankles: "Do that again and I'll punch your child in the face."

The Fortnight Club, and I'm sure other new material nights, are great places to see comedians that you haven't seen, or even heard of before, trying out new material. Yes, some of it isn't polished; some of it might not work. but it's a chance to discover people that you'd willingly go to see again. So far at this club I've stumbled across both Tony Law and Mary Bourke and tonight I have found another great comic to add to my list. Sanderson Jones.

Sanderson Jones

He was our headliner tonight and as soon as he came on had the audience in stiches. He remarked on his remarkable resemblance to Jesus and even got Richard to be his lectern (for no apparent reason) to hold his notes. We spoke to him after and in October he is planning a big gig in October at Union Chapel with no tickets advertised in the press, no tickets available on the phone, no tickets available on the internet. The only way to buy a ticket is through him directly as he will be flyering his own show. Now I don't know if I've broken a rule of comedy by telling you this or not, but I didn't sign any contract.

Now, on an unrelated note, if you've read this before Wednesday 2nd March you have no excuse not to go to Los Quattros Cvnts at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square at 8pm to see LQC (The Trap + Michael Legge) with special guests Joanna Neary and AL MURRAY ! For only £7. And they even give you £2 off if you say "Bum" at them on the door!

And go and see Sanderson Jones some time.