A Meeting of the Minds

So last weekend, upon noticing that the 1st of August (opening night) was drawing nearer and nearer, we finally set about the task of constructing the show. Ben has to travel to us from York in order for us to really set down to writing together, so our writing meetings are shamefully rare and brief. But once we get together, oh boy, you can be sure as sure can be that we get some serious writing done, as well as ample amounts of pissing around.

I go by a simple philosophy. When you remember a joke from the simpsons, tell people,

So we set ourself to a few basic tasks. We met hor half of Friday and all day Saturday. Friday was a difficult but successful day, because we realised that being apart for so long our ideas about the show had taken very different paths, some of it more theatrical, some more basic stand up ideas. Basically, we needed to decide on an overarching structure for the show itself, we had a title, and a few ideas, but now we needed to decide what the show itself should be. Myself, Ryan and Ben, are stand ups with a great backlog of infinitely hilarious material*, but we decided in order to give the show a fresh angle, and to stay true to our theme as closely as possible, it was important to write new material around the stimulus. But how do you get to writing an hour long show?

Well, we decided, if we have to teach the audience how to be awesome at everything, the first step is to define what it is we mean by 'everything'. So we forced some word association or general thinking about anything that anyone could want to learn to be great at, and we came up with a list, THE list, of about 139 different things that we could write about. Then we set to it, picking some topics at random and devoting 5 minutes to the task. Ideally from this, we'll be able to get a comprehensive list of over a hundred different jokes on nearly every subject anyone could hope to mention. The idea then being that at one point in the show, it would be possible to throw the question open to the audience 'what do you want to be awesome at?' and be prepared to answer any response with a well polished high impact bit of funny.

Okay, changing batteries right, you want to be awesome at 'changing batteries', I got this...

Thoroughly happy with our progress, we had some sandwiches, then retired for the day to meet again tomorrow. Saturday, however, got off to a less productive start, whereby we spent about 2 hours as soon as we got together just talking about video games that we all like. We all sort of had this feeling like we were being unproductive, but it was the siren call of procrastination that makes everything so appealing when you know you've got work to be doing.

Our main objective for the day was 'design a skeleton structure for the show', and 'put some meat on those bones'. Which, eventually, we did do reasonably successfully, with some different writing exercises as well as long creative thinking about how we want the journey of the show itself to proceed. All in all, it was a reasonably successful meeting for us all, if a little inefficient. And every time that we meet up, the energy that we generate helps the show to come along leaps and bounds at a time and that thought gives me a lot of hope for how the show itself will play out whilst we're up there together. With another writing meeting scheduled in for the weekend after next, a cowardly man would say we're running out of time, but us brave boys of WMD Comedy are more than up to the task of designing the raw hell out of this show.