I Heart Comedy.

I love comedy. It's my favourite C-word nearly and I still love it to pieces. If I could only bring one thing on to a desert island it would be comedy and a big gun. I've seen a lot of brilliant comedy recently that has restored a tiny bit of faith in this shitty medium. Go Faster Stripe are a fantastic company that make DVD's of shows that marketing penises wouldn't touch with a ten-foot Mock The Week promotional barge pole (they exist). The production values don't exist but the quality of the material released on Go Faster Stripe's DVD's are excellent. Robin Ince's is very funny, very all over the place and lit with every light bulb in the world. You can practically see Robin's skeleton, thoughts and self-loathing. What's great about these DVD's is that they are in front of a very small audience and are filmed over two gigs in the same venue. Therefore, the people sitting at the front are constantly changing due to editing. It's a really odd thing to see. I just watched Richard Herring's fantastic Menage A Un and started his book, Bye Bye Balham. All this plus watching Screenwipe and Peter Serafinowicz, with Johnny Candon shouting out ideas to make them better ("Blow everything up and then have tits!"), has meant that I've actually had a pretty high quota of good comedy. It's out there. If you look. You have to look hard, there's a lot of Peter Kay in the way. In fact, I went into HMV this morning to buy the latest Futurama DVD (Hey! That's a comedy too!) and right next to it was Keith Fucking Lemon's Fucking Annoying Cringingly Unfunny Tour Of His Own Ego, so, you know, be careful.

Robin, Richard, Screenwipe, Serafinowicz, HIGNFY (that's short for Have I Got News For You so you don't have to go to all the trouble of writing out Have I Got News For You), Superbad, Curb Your Enthusiam and The Dark Knight. That's basically all I've done in the last 48 hours. Not very productive but at least I've seen a lot of quality comedy as opposed to watching Celebrity Juice just to wind myself up on purpose. OK, The Dark Knight's not strictly a comedy but the bit where The Joker disinfects his hands before blowing up a hospital is hilarious. Plus the christmas gig last night in Southampton was very good. Great line-up too. Paul Sinha was fantastic, Tanyalee Davis (who I'd never seen before) has the best Seabiscuit joke ever and The Raymond & Mr. Timpkins review were their usual brilliant selves. I often think they're far too good for our little circuit and if I think that then you can pretty much guarantee that their career is fucked. They are amazing so, you know, they'll be signing on in no time, if they're not already doing so. I'm a little dissappointed that last night's gig was as nice as it was because I was relying on it for my daily vitriol. Fucking stupid nice audience. I hope they're all dead, the selfish, appreciative bastards. Still, got five more nights here. I'm bound to get punched or have a wheelchair thrown at me before the weekend. If not, can you recommend some shit comedy for me to watch and waste my time with? I know you can...