Stand-up Comedy Writing Course with Chris Head

STAND-UP COMEDY WRITING COURSE
6.30pm - 8.30pm, 7 x Mondays 11th September - 23rd October 2023
Plus New material showcase on Sunday 29th October 3pm-5pm at Angel Comedy

@ Theatre Deli, 107 Leadenhall Street, London, EC3A 4AF
A vibrant venue full of creative activity - and a bar!

£250 for the 8 weeks (7 classes and the show)

£225 repeat fee (maximum group size = 15)

My Stand-up Comedy Writing Workshops are friendly, supportive and inspiring. The sessions are for you if like to create new material and develop your stand-up writing skills. The course is for:

* Gigging acts,
* stand-up course graduates 
* anyone with other kinds of comedy experience
* or anyone who'd like to start stand-up with a real focus on the material...

I am a comedy writing specialist and a director so from me you will receive:

* writing techniques, inspiration and a forensic eye on the writing, homing in on how to make material work. 
* and a director's perspective on your performance of your material - for the material to really land you need to deliver it well and bring it to life.

On the course you will have a weekly forum to try out stuff in front of a friendly and supportive audience of fellow comics who will give you constructive feedback and you will receive notes and direction from leading comedy director and teacher Chris Head. You will explore your comedy persona and develop your voice, in order to inspire material that works for YOU. You'll learn explore fresh angles for coming at material, you'll work with a range of proven techniques for generating ideas and you'll get clear and practical feedback for how to improve your work. 

And you can return to the course and do it again as I am always refreshing the content and you will be working on new material.

Each week works like this:
- Everyone gets up on the mic three times - so there is no question of being left to just watch (unless you actually wanted to one week).
- the session begins with a quick writing exercise where you're given a subject, an angle and a technique to play with and you have 5 minutes to write something. Believe it or not, this does produce the beginnings of some good material.
- then you bring in the material you have been working on outside the class want to share to get feedback from Chris and the group (up to 3 mins each week).
- then at the end you come up on the mic and do a quick exercise to sow the seeds of new material to work on.

Between the sessions you will be working on a mix of material you started to develop in the sessions and other material you are working on - and as you'll be learning writing techniques you will be drawing on the class even when working on ideas that didn't begin there.

At the end in the showcase, in the brilliant Angel Comedy, you perform up to 7 minutes of new material.

Chris says, "I have a long track record of working on festival and touring shows, including shows at Assembly/ Pleasance/ Gilded Balloon/ Underbelly at Edinburgh, Soho Theatre in London and international festivals including Melbourne Comedy Festival, and I work with all kinds of comics from straight stand-ups to musical acts to impressionists to character comedy, and I bring all this experience to bear on the course to develop your own material whether for festivals or club sets."

“Head’s style is refreshingly breezy and simultaneously substantial. He offers practical insights: for example, audiences do not laugh at material, they laugh with or at the performer who discovers a compelling comedic self. In this remarkable manual, Head demonstrates what Horace Walpole once observed, namely that life is a comedy to those who think. And Head helps each comedic persona think.”
CHOICE (USA) on "A Director's Guide to the Art of Stand-up"

"His knowledge of comedy was captivating, encyclopedic."
BBC Arts Editor, Will Gompertz

"The idea person to nurture new talent."
The Guardian