Laughing Gas.

Like you, I got up extra early this morning to rush out to buy the Guardian and get my free copy of How To Write Comedy by Catherine Tate. I'm nowhere near as successful in comedy as Catherine so I thought it would come in handy to hear her points of view on how someone could craft the same fucking sketch week in, week out. The booklet opens with this handy piece of advice for any up-and-coming comedy author; "'Writing' always means 'not writing' to me". Thanks, Donna Noble! I used that as an example of the tips given by Catherine because that was as far as I got. And why? Because I'M NOT BOVVERED! Ha ha! Take that, Tate. I'm not even bovvered! That's all I read because I wasn't bovvered in the slightest. Do I look bovvered? No, I don't. And do you know why I don't look bovvered, Catherine? Do you? Because bovvered isn't even a word. Yeah! It's the easiest thing in the world to not be bovvered because you can't be bovvered because bovvered doesn't exist. You big shit. To be fair, Catherine does make a very good point; if you're not very good at writing then get someone else to do it for you. Luckily, she managed to rope in her comedy chum Richard Herring to do all the important work for her in this booklet. It's very well written with some very good advice like read as much as you can, look for real life interesting characters to write about, have a conversation with a child (not as creepy as it sounds) and don't lose control when dealing with hecklers. Yeah, the cunt could have told me that before I went on stage on saturday. But no, I had to fucking BUY his advice two days later. It's is genuinely good, by the way, and also features articles by Mitchell and Webb on writing sketch comedy, Jo Caulfield on writing jokes and Josie Long on writing with fuzzy felt and crayons. Give it a look.

I hope How To Write Comedy by Catherine Tate will come in very handy because yesterday we had our first Los Quattros Cunts meeting. I'm sure this is pretty much against everything Richard might teach us but we started with the name first and are hoping that by getting drunk sketches will miraculously appear very soon. Nope. Just checked again. There's not a word about that in the booklet. Hey ho. We came up with about six ideas that are basically just scribbles in my notebook but, with more booze, should blossom into some very impressive monuments to comedy pretty soon. So far we have; Let's break the Paralympics, song racing and reclaiming the word "master". I think the last one might be racist but I've just checked with the booklet and Richard says that racism is brilliant, so we should be OK with that.

Unfortunately, I got the booklet after a British Gas inspector visited my house today. If I'd read it before he arrived I probably could have taken his terminally dull constant jargon with good humour and written an hilarious sketch right there and then. Sadly, all I wanted to do was smash his face in with the back of his own head. How come when these sorts of people come round they talk and talk and talk and tell you things that you can't possibly fathom and expect you to both understand and give a flying fuck? I'll tell you how dull this cunt was; he chuckled when he saw my boiler's registration number.

SHIT! Just checked the booklet. That is actually in there.