Stephen Moss's night as a standup comedian



'Oh yes, I'd love to have a go at that," I stupidly said when I was given the chance to try my hand at standup. It took just one meeting with my comedy coach, Marc Blake, to make me realise this was going to be bloody hard. Leicester comedy festival organises an annual event with TV channel Dave, where journalists learn to become comics and do a short set in front of a live audience. This year's show was planned for an Indian restaurant on the opening night of the festival. I would be one of the four acts. Humiliation beckoned.

I had a very clear idea about the sort of comic I wanted to be, and before we had even met presumptuously sent Blake an email spelling it out: "I definitely need a disguise – hat, odd outfit, drag. I am essentially rather shambling, cynical, world-weary, clapped-out etc, so feel this should be part of the persona. I anticipate much sighing. The comedians I like are the ones who never get round to telling a joke – Frankie Howerd, Daniel Kitson. Is that a kind of anti-comedy? The idea that you can't make the audience laugh."

"Don't worry about a persona," he emailed back. "We will find it." A few days later, Blake, a former standup who told me he had got sick of travelling to far-away gigs for minuscule fees ("It had become a driving job") so had turned to writing and lecturing, came to see me. He was a natural comic – small, dynamic, quick-witted, expressive voice, good mimic. He saw immediately that I was an unnatural comic – too tall, posh voice, knew nothing about the art of standup. He spelled out the challenge: "You'll need five minutes of material. There'll be about 80 people in the audience. They'll be very civilised – for Leicester, obviously."

The main thing I had to do was write a script. I stitched together a few anecdotes from my journalistic career, some attempted jokes about tall comedians and a device involving playing a clip of someone I found on YouTube reciting the longest word in the English language – the chemical name for the protein titin, which has 189,819 letters. "If the act goes badly," I said in this first draft, "my fallback plan is to play a lot of this." More a theatrical device than a piece of standup, but that seemed to be my shtick.

I sent the script to Blake, and it did not go down well. "You are adopting some very high-risk strategies for your first gig," he said in an email. "They are quite liable to self-sabotage. The first thing any comic has to do is to be liked, even if they are coming across as angry or difficult. The metatextual and self-referential stuff is quite a big ask for a small Leicester audience. It's alienating. But don't be put off. Writing comedy usually takes a long time. I spent six months writing before I went on stage."

I had about a fortnight, so was panicking. I had another go at the script, stealing a few jokes off the internet and adding them to my own. This one went down better. "Still very much comedy about comedy, which is a rookie thing, but generally improved," said Blake. "There is easily five minutes worth here." We were in business. He wasn't very happy with my internet plagiarism, but I tried to pacify him with TS Eliot's remark: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

With a week to go, we had another meeting. He explained the two main types of comic: high status and low status. The high-status comic is in control and mocks the world; the low-status comic is not in control; the joke is on him. I was definitely low-status. "It's much harder to be low-status because you're a figure of fun," said Blake. I didn't care. This was going to be an ultra-low-status act. He showed me a YouTube clip of an Irish comedian called Michael Redmond. Redmond performed in a mac, had a slightly startled expression, spoke very slowly and deadpanned brilliantly. He was terrific and, while I could never match him, he would be my model.

Blake and I went through the script, reducing it to about 750 words – comedy is the act of stripping away, paring back to the essence – and I read it aloud for him a few times. It came out at three-and-a-half minutes, but I said I would play up the pauses. They had to be better than anything I was going to say. He then left me, telling me he would see me in Leicester in a week's time and that it would be all right on the night. All I had to do now was make a final edit and memorise the damn thing.

Miles Jupp gives Stephen Moss some tips. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Three days before D-Day I had a comedy tutorial with standup Miles Jupp – he was spending a day as a journalist on the Guardian in a kind of exchange deal. He disliked the YouTube gimmick – too messy – so that was abandoned. I read the script in a flat monotone. He made lots of practical suggestions, including adding half a dozen jokes of his own, and said I needed to change the delivery. "The way you did it was audiobook-esque," he said, not unkindly. "Jokes require a certain inflection." He suggested thinking about them in terms of Q&A, with each punchline coming as the answer to the setup. When I ran through it for a second time, he stood in front of me conducting, trying to coax different pitches and rhythms from my unresponsive voice. He also told me to relax and not to gabble. "The audience at a small comedy club is often nervous and self-conscious, and the more at ease you are the more at ease they will be."

When I at last summoned up the energy to memorise the script, I found it surprisingly straightforward – it only took about four hours. I started with football (Leeds United – that was the joke); had a few digs at the Dave channel ("The re-runs of Top Gear are so old, Jeremy Clarkson was driving a chariot in one"); mocked Leicester's National Space Centre and the British space effort ("remember Beagle 2!"); had a section with a religious theme, basically an excuse to recite a long list of religions with odd names – Zoroastrians, Rosicrucians, Elamites; had another long list of diseases, the "joke" being I had to read out lists to fill the allotted time; explained my commitment to anti-comedy (which I suggested I was demonstrating pretty conclusively); talked about my journalistic triumphs (a much shorter list – principally rambling naked in Epping Forest); and ended with a joke pinched from the internet.

After those initial four hours, which I spent reciting the script in front of a mirror while holding a pen as if it was a microphone, I would occasionally run through it in my head, usually on a train or in bed. To my surprise, I forgot very little of it, though one night I had to get up at about midnight when I couldn't remember one of the illnesses – erectile dysfunction, as it happens. Cirrhosis of the liver was also a problem. I refused to let my brain engage with any other subjects in the days running up to the gig, fearing that bits of the script might be dislodged.

All that mattered now was my date with destiny in the Kayal Indian restaurant, the upstairs room of which was to be the venue for the gig from hell. There were four victims: Sam Datta from ITN; Tim Clark from comedy website Such Small Portions; Andy McRobbie from FHM, and me. My rivals were young and dynamic. McRobbie, who is the spitting image of Mick Jagger, exuded confidence; ditto Datta; Clark was as nervous as me, and the two of us paced around outside the restaurant as the audience drifted in. Ian Stone, an experienced comic hand, was compering, and did a funny 15-minute set before introducing the tyros.

Datta was first and did OK, though he went on a bit too long. Clark went next, and his high-energy set went well. Then, suddenly, I was on, sporting a long black overcoat and a bowler hat. Once on stage, again to my surprise, my nerves disappeared. I had the mic in one hand, a beer in the other, and enjoyed it all hugely. "Own the room," Blake had told me. I don't think I quite managed that, but I enjoyed the badinage with the audience and found ad libbing remarkably easy, though I had to return to the script exactly where I left it because I found I could only remember it as a totality; I couldn't dip in and out. The performance lasted eight or nine minutes rather than the six I'd budgeted for. The audience seemed to like it, and when I came off Stone thrilled me by shaking my hand and saying: "Lovely work."

McRobbie concluded the show with a set that was also high on energy but a bit short on gags – he was hampered by the fact we were overrunning and had to axe about half his act. Then, as if making us perform wasn't bad enough, we were judged – this was to be a proper contest. One of us had to carry away the lovely trophy – a transparent plastic microphone. I was convinced I would win, but the three-man panel – Dave general manager Steve North, festival director Geoff Rowe and comedian Jonathan Mayor – chose Clark. Oh well, he was the semi-pro among us, having done lots of comedy reviews.

I bumped into Mayor in the street the following morning and asked him what he'd thought of my act. "You were hilarious," he said, "but the reason I didn't put you first was that I wasn't convinced you knew precisely why you were making people laugh." I had set out to be an anti-comedian and apparently succeeded, though Mayor said he was confused as to whether I was deliberately messing up or just messing up.

It was probably a bit of both, but does it really matter if the comedy is controlled or not? "It does," he said, "because the idea is that you can now go on stage tonight and do the same thing again." He wasn't convinced I could. "I'd love to think you could do that again, but it felt like a glorious falldown rather than a manufactured dance. You were hitting on laughter, but I got the impression the laughs were not coming where you really expected them. There were clearly some structured bits where you were expected to laugh, and they were reasonably funny, but what was really funny was the way you dealt with the immediacy of the moment. That was hilarious, but I think it was slightly accidental." It seemed I was the master of the accidental ad lib.

I didn't get a proper chance to talk to Blake after the performance – the post-show party took precedence – but he emailed me a day later with his verdict. "Your choice of costume was successful in making you into a comic character, who was comfortable with being laughed at rather than with," he said. "This counteracted being too posh and tall for comedy, and much of the material got the laughs we anticipated. I felt it was a hugely successful debut, although you did milk the teat of comedy and overrun – you have to learn when to get off." There was, though, a sting in the tail. "It would," he said, "require an immense amount of work to develop it into a professional set." It looks like the national tour is on hold. For the moment, at least.

Miles Jupp writing his article about Latin. Photograph: Guardian

Miles Jupp's day as a Guardian journalist

The brief was to arrive at 10am, and go straight into an editorial meeting. A combination of the school run and the traffic did for the former, and nerves for the latter. I'd assumed the meeting was for G2. It was actually for the main paper. I took one look at the glass room containing Alan Rusbridger et al looking rather serious on a vast and lurid yellow sofa, and refused to go in. Those were grownup people. They were probably talking about Syria or Somerset.

Instead, I was taken into the largest open plan office I've ever seen; rows and rows of identical desks, each bearing an apple monitor, stretched as far as the eye could see, like gravestones in a military cemetery. People were just quietly working. I wasn't expecting conga lines or orgies, but I did expect the odd bit of cheeky chat or improvised crazy golf using office equipment.

Tom Meltzer was to be my boss for the morning. "Are there any other unpaid interns here?" I asked him.

"We don't have any here," he told me.

"Really?" I said "But I'm an unpaid intern."*

"Do you mean trainees?" he suddenly asked, with the air of someone who has just remembered the company line.

Tom said he was "commissioning" me to write a shortcut on Latin, following Michael Gove's demand that Latin and Greek to be taught in all schools. "Whole thing should be 400 words," he said. "You've got until one o'clock."

Next was an editorial meeting for G2, gathering in the aisle between two rows of desks. I was briefly called on to say a few words, and made a couple of completely inaudible remarks, which turned out to be precisely what the situation required.

Then I discovered what journalism is all about: you sit down at a desk, and just get on with it. You have an idea, you write it down. You have a different idea, you write that down. Then you write down something else. Then you read cricket websites on the internet for 15 minutes. Then you start hammering away at the keys in a frenzy. Someone more experienced than you reminds you to save it. Then you cut some bits and rewrite some others. If it were a montage in a film, you'd do well to get more than 15 seconds out of it. But hey ho. Two hours later, the job was done. I had written a thing. In an office. To a deadline. Surrounded by people who seemed rather nice.

I can't quite remember what happened next – it's all a blur. But either there was a huge drinks reception and firework display held in my honour and attended by all the paper's staff as well as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden or I went down to the canteen and had a celebratory fishcake.

*Miles Jupp was paid for his piece on Latin. And for this one. He is currently on a UK tour; details milesjupp.co.uk

Dave Turns the Tables is an initiative created by UKTV for the Dave Leicester comedy testival, which runs until 23 February. Details: www.comedy-festival.co.uk