Shitting myself...

A memorable night at the Malarkey, especially for me (more on that later). First up, doing a last-minute set, was naughty-but-nice local comic Caroline Jones.

Caroline was nervous before she went on as it was a real last-minute gig, but the nerves didn't show on stage as she delivered a short five minute set, including a great line in "Gay or European?"

Next on, making his debut at XS Malarkey, was - er - me! Neil Smith, aka Spider who does the door (and website).

Suffice to say I was absolutely SHITTING myself as Toby did a rather long intro to build things up for me. When I got on stage, however, the nerves pretty much disappeared as I was too busy remembering my set to worry about nerves. Once the laughs started I really started to enjoy it. You don't realise until you get up there how nice the Malarkey crowd is. I got through the ten minutes and thought it went better than I could have hoped.

Next up was a young man who's played XS Malarkey a few times now, Steven Law.

Steven delivered a decent, confident set, with material about crocodile man Steve Irwin and a form from the STD clinic. He seemed to go down well enough with the audience and got plenty of laughs, and has definitely improved since his first gig at XS.

After Steven came a young man who's making a name for himself on the local circuit, the man with the biggest hands in comedy, 'The Magic That Is' Danny Deegan.

Danny has some cracking material (the scallies on hijacked planes bit in particular) delivered in a confident style (even though when I asked him if he still got nervous before gigs he said yes - I suppose most comics do). Wouldn't mind seeing him doing a bit of compering. Went down well with the crowd.

Penultimate act of the night was the very odd Mik Artistik.

Mik had ten minutes of pretty funny stuff mixed in with twenty minutes of frankly weird shit, and subsequently overran his allotted time by at least ten minutes. By all means get up there and be surreal but don't make other acts cut short because you've overran. By the time Mik was in the final third of his set the audience were shuffling uncomfortably and starting to get chatty.

Luckily we had a great headliner to rescue the show in the form of Markus Birdman.

Markus had a high energy, animated set, which was great for waking the audience up after Mik had nearly killed the night, and he has surreality down to a tee (asking an audience member what the biggest thing they've ever eaten is, completely out of the blue, for example). He came back for a well deserved encore in which he invited the audience to ask him questions. Luckily by this time the audience were well up for it again.

For the most part a good night, I think.

Spider.