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Richard's time on our Feeling Funny programme..

Feeling Funny

As a volunteer reporter on a website telling stories about how to stay mentally well I was more than happy to report there about how being on the Feeling Funny course made me feel about myself. A fellow reporter told me about it and has since filmed all the shows so far as well as making a number of audio reports about how participating on the course has helped him. They are all on the website this was my contribution.

We have another instalment of the Feeling Funny showcase for you to enjoy. Feeling funny is a six week course of Stand up comedy training and run by the Comedy Trust. It is financed by Liverpool CCG with the goal of tackling poor mental health and is to run for three years. To be eligible to attend the course you need to be a little bit mad; I can say that because I have been both on the course and de-facto I am a little bit the other. But here I go, skirting round the issue, when this kind of approach really doesn’t help gain an understanding of what mental health really means.

Comedy has a rich history of shining a light on things that people generally find uncomfortable. A joke delivered at pace can take a while to be processed and can allow the comedian great licence in saying the unsalable and get away with it. This type of comedy is known as satire and I believe contributes massively to our society ability to function civilly.

The Comedy Trust tutors are Sam and Anne and between them they take a group of fellas on a crash course on how to get away with it, a very useful life skill. You will see the fruits of our endeavours on the video. We all arrived on day one with little if any material to perform and together we began to grow our performances to a length of between two and seven minutes. This is no mean feat and individually I am pleased with my own achievement. But genuinely I believe that collectively we achieved a lot more, the whole being greater than the sum of our parts. If you watch the video and of course I hope you will you will hear something of the journey that I have been describing. From the organisers, Sam and Helen(who is the project manager) you will hear about their methodology but from the likes of me you will get another take all together. You will see a number of performers name checking fellow performers, accounts of funny moments experienced within the training sessions that indicate how much fun we had in creating and crafting these stand-up routines. All this with a fine coating of fear and panic at the thought of how it could all go horribly wrong. Well it didn’t and as we left the Albert Dock on that windy night I feel to my bones that we all had a warm glow of pride keeping us a bit warmer that night.

So what next?

We had a number of past participants from Feeling Funny course 1 and 2 in the audience cheering us on and Our current group will be meeting up in the New Year to chat about how we thought it went. The three year run of the project will have two more years to go so there may be untold surprises in store. Watch this space, or then again, why not give the course a try yourself.

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