Frog and Bucket

Last night was a change from the usual proceedings regarding Warped, instead of going to the Burlington we headed to the Frog and Bucket on Oldham Street. Every Monday they have a comedy night in which amateur comedians get five minutes in which to impress the audience with their jokes. Three members of the audience have a green card, and if all three cards are raised within five minutes the person has to leave the stage. However, if they manage to last the whole time they are considered to have “beaten the frog” and go into the final at the end, which is where they line up all the contestants who got through and then let the audience choose the winner for the night based on the loudness of their applause/cheering. Apparently this club is where Johnny Vegas launched his career, although I’ve never been overly impressed with his brand of humour.

We’ve been to the comedy store once before as a group in Warped, but this time was special because one of our number, Robin, was going on stage to perform. Although he had a blank point at one moment he recovered well and lasted the full five minutes despite the fact that Warped didn’t have a card to hold on to and therefore ensure that he stayed on. He also deserves a great deal of respect for actually having the courage to get up onto a stage by himself and try to entertain a large group of strangers.

The rest of the acts were a lot better than last time, with only one or two getting voted off and there were none that made me want to fire a couple of rounds in their general direction because they were so cringeworthy. Unfortunately there was a group of drunken firemen heckling in one corner of the room, but they were “asked to leave” during the first break which made things a lot quieter and more enjoyable.

The Compere (the person who introduces all the other acts) was also brilliant, although I did feel at some points that I was the only person laughing at his jokes because of the actual content rather than the topic, as he kept making references to Doctor Who stories—I imagine most other people were laughing at the fact that he knew all this rubbish rather than understanding the joke itself. I’m also sure I’ve seen the guy somewhere before, but it can’t have been at the Frog and Bucket (last time the comperes were just boring and relied mostly on lewd jokes going down well after everyone had downed a few pints) so I don’t know—perhaps he reminds me of someone off television.

When it came to the end of the show Robin was narrowly beaten to the pole position, but to be fair the woman in question had been doing this for a while (she was there last time we went) so I think he did pretty well to get that far. Unfortunately the prize this time round in the competition was a table for four on a Friday night (apparently they charge admission then and the comedians are better), so it wasn’t worth attempting to win it like we did with the bottle of wine last time.

Other amusing incidents from the night included the two more experienced comics, who were there to entertain and not to beat the frog, taking the mick out of the firemen who didn’t seem to realise that it’s generally a bad idea to heckle with someone who is used to that sort of thing and has plenty of retorts up their sleeves. There was also a couple on a date who foolishly sat right near the front and therefore got quite a bit of stick, plus the woman looked rather bored which led to Jon egging me on to go and “rescue her” (think Zaphod, Arthur and Trillian in the recent Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film). Rachel’s guinea pig (which allegedly looked more like a gerbil, but I can’t tell the difference) also kept moving around as Jon and Eddie grabbed it each time she left the table—although of course I was the first suspect because apparently I was grinning manically (honestly, you try to smile a bit and suddenly you find yourself getting blamed for everything ;).

One of the MUGSS called Gareth also apparently works in Sainsburys and got jabbed a few times about him looking down on customers, but it was all in the name of comedy and he took it quite well. It must be difficult for comedians though to know how the audience members will react to being put in the spotlight, most will probably take it in good form but there must be times when a particular joke touches a nerve and either offends or upsets the person in question. I guess you just get a knack of spotting what’s appropriate and when to back off after a few times of performing though.

Overall it was a good laugh and a fun way to spend a night out as opposed to sitting around drinking in a pub somewhere (which is nice but gets a bit repetitive after a while because the same topics of conversation come up every week).

Revision

It’s that time of the year again when exams suddenly creep up on you (or not for a few weeks yet depending on your subject – shakes fist at Arts students in general, and specifically Ancient History ones 😉 and that dawning realisation of “bugger, I can’t actually remember half of this stuff” hits you like a twelve ton UK North bus after it’s decided that red lights actually mean “go” rather than “stop”.

My exam timetable doesn’t look too bad, it works out as one exam a week for the next fortnight, then two exams in the next week and a final one the week after. I’m not as worried about them as I was in January, but I don’t know if that’s because they’re still a couple of days away or just that apathy has set in, as it tends to do so towards the summer, and I just can’t be bothered.

The problem with revision is that I just can’t seem to motivate myself to sit down and do it. If it’s a subject that I enjoy then I’m probably reasonably confident already so I sit round thinking “I already know most of this”, and for boring subjects I just can’t sit there and read the notes because it drives me insane. Whenever I’m revising the thought at the back of my mind is always “this is such an unproductive use of my time, I could be doing something much better/more interesting” which is really demotivating. I managed okay with operating systems and Z last time because I could sit there and condense the lecture notes into about ten pages of A4 which I could revise from, plus copying out the notes made them sink in a bit better, but with things like software engineering I can’t do that easily and it makes me feel like I just want to throw all the notes in the bin and forget I ever took that blasted module.

Anyway, revision rant over for the time being, no doubt there will be a post later this week about how the first exam went, although I’m going to see Revenge of the Sith (episode three of the Star Wars saga, for those of you who have missed the build up to one of the most anticipated films of the year) more or less straight afterwards so that should cheer me up (or maybe not, depending on how much George Lucas has destroyed my idea of what the films should be like—he certainly did a good job of that with the Phantom Menace). In fact I’m going to see it twice, once with people from my department and again later with some of the Megalomaniacs, so hopefully it won’t be too bad.

For the moment though it’s back to the grindstone tussling with the “joys” of UML, unit testing and all that other wooly waffle that is Software Engineering II. Good luck to any other poor buggers who are doing this module.