Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus

I love stand up comedy. I have built up a collection of CD's and DVD's over the past few years of classic comedians like Richard Pryor, Dennis Leary, and the legend that is Bill Hicks, through to more contemporary performers like Greg Proops, Dara O'Briain, and Dane Cook, so it was with some excitement that myself and some friends trekked through to Jongleurs Comedy Club in Edinburgh on Saturday night. Jongleurs is a chain of clubs in the UK that combine alcohol, shite food, and comedy, to produce the perfect night out, or so they claim. The evening went something like this:

7:00pm - Doors open. We're shown to our table and the worlds worst bar staff do their best to force-feed so much beer, wine, and spirits down our collective necks that I feel like a foie gras duck at breakfast.

7:30pm - A 'basket' of steak pie appears before me. I've never seen steak pie presented in this manner before, but I ate it anyway. 'Steak Pie' was a generous description I felt. 'Leather pie' would have been more accurate.

8:30pm - Fat host bounds on stage and does a pretty good job of warming up the, by now happily drunk, audience.

8:45pm - Act 1: Quirky ginger Irishman. Observational humour performed well. 7/10

9:10pm - Act 2: Laid-back Cockney. Subtle humour that took a moments pondering before you got it. Very funny indeed, exactly my kind of thing. 9/10

9:30pm - Interval. Get as much beer as possible from the Why-Don't-You staff and que 3 deep at the toilet avoiding the river of piss.

9:45pm - Act 3: Black Londoner. Funny, until he broke the two cardinal sins of stand up. He turned on the crowd when they heckled him, and he stopped being funny. From that moment on his act actually improved as he got more and more angry. For having the balls to call a room full of pissed people a "bunch of cunts", he gets a 9/10 from me.

Jongleurs. Great in theory, pish in practice.