Comedy for the Cause
A month has passed since Call4Backup and Joker Comedy Club joined forces to bring the first event designed to raise money for Call4Backup with a Charity Comedy Night dubbed "Call4Standup."
The night started well and after some panicking that the room wasn't going to be full and we weren't going to raise much money for the cause the seats began to fill and the drinks began to flow.
Once the acts started at 9pm it was clear that it was going to be a night of aching cheeks and split sides as Ben Van Der Velde, who was the evenings compere, opened with lots of material which left the audience in pieces. Ben's great observational and situation humour did well to make him a great choice of compere for the night!
Ben soon handed over to our first act Jamali Maddix, who despite being incredibly non-P.C. seemed to tickle the laughter bones of a lot of the audience with his quick and original humour.
Tom Lucy followed Jamali and the hot tipped act found himself with a bit of a difficult audience with a heckler yelling out obscenities before falling silent when Tom pushed him to repeat what he had said. Tom continued his set professionally and left the stage to big applause after a good set.
Following on from Tom was the Laughter Academy, of which two of the three piece improv outfit knew the Trustee Rob Webber personally (Ali James being a family friend and Lee Tearell teaching Rob Drama at A-Level) the improvisational comedy had the audience crying, with different games played by the members of the Academy based on one liners handed in over the interval. Chris and Marcus jumped on stage from the audience to help in one of the games where they put the guys on stage in funny positions which they then did the dialog to. Very very funny.
The finally act was Gareth Richards, his music comedy was amazing, he was able to drag an already tired audience back to life to join in with his own song "Disappointing Towel" which even as I write this I'm singing along to!
A great night of comedy was ended with a massively successful Raffle, which was drawn by Rob Webber and Lee Tearell, where Steve won the Lego much to everyone's annoyance, and with a few words at the end by Rob the night ended there after raising £670 for the cause.
Thank you to everyone who attended, the comedians for their great material, and Laughter Academy who were amazing and refused to take their fee asking for it to be donated to the cause!!