A little comedy

Despite the lukewarm reception to the previous Terry The Stand Up's Comedy Night at The Willoughby Arms, the prospect of cheap tickets with a free drink thrown in, and having nothing else to do on a Friday evening, tempted three of us back for another go.

For some reason the function room was set theatre style with lots of seats packed in, rather than the more usual cafe style with a loose arrangement of chairs and tables. This made getting to a seat harder than it should have been and also made the twelve of us in the audience feel like even fewer people than that.

The compere was different from the one at my two previous visits and that was not a good start to the evening or a good omen for what was to follow. Reading lame jokes from your phone is never a good idea and warranted the "Get off" suggestion from my friend.

The first act picked up the pieces well and told some genuinely funny stories in a genuinely funny way. Loved the one about the musical slippers.

Sadly the next act was a disaster. Some excuses for it being her first outing but she had no idea of what she was trying to do and jumped from story to story without completing one or being funny along the way. At one point she read out a real love letter that she had found. No idea why she did this or what reaction she expected from us. She got embarrassment.

A huge leap forward with the next guy whose irreverent set had a poke at some dead people and the Royal Family. What's not to like? The second interval was then taken with a sense of optimism with just the headline act to come.

I was expecting another stand-up comedian to close the evening but we got a man with a guitar doing some comedy songs instead. They were OK but songs do not tend to have punchlines so they amused without prompting much laughter. To be fair, the rest of the audience seemed to enjoy it more than I did and I thought that he was all right.

So we had two good, one all right and two, er, less so. On balance that was just about good enough to get me to go back again, but it was close.