Giacinto Palmieri: Italian misfit

And then the last days

2011-08-29T18:02:00.002+01:00

Here I am, back in London. As always, the end of a Fringe run leaves you with a feeling of emptiness, but I'm also very happy about the experience. The last three days have been very good, with audiences that really seemed to love the show. On Saturday we did the recording, my performance was a bit more nervous and imprecise than what had become the usual of late, but I got some big laughs. Yesterday before the show I had the feeling that it was probably a day too many, but the show itself went very well, it was a good way to finish. I think this year I learned a lot, in particular I developed my performance skills, becoming much more relaxed, free-form and interactive. I know recognise that the reviewer who last year described my performance as "stiff" might have had a point. Challenging yourself is a matter of balance, too little and you learn nothing, too much and you learn nothing either since you're too terrified to experiment. Last year I never felt free to try new things, which instead is something I did in abundance this year. And I was quite stimulated in terms of the writing too, in fact my set at the end was five minutes longer than it was when we started. Not forgetting that I really liked performing with Alice and Cecilia, who also really did very well. Yesterday Alice was suggesting the possibility of doing a London "postview", so maybe we'll do the show once more, but to be honest I think we all feel much stronger and ready for new challenges. My own challenge will be to try to transfer as much as I can of my newly found performing confidence to my next one hour show. For what the writing is concerned, I have a lot of ideas buzzing in my mind, I'll start trying them out as soon as I have a chance. And for all of this I need to thank again the fantastic audicence we had in the course this month, even when the numbers were small they were always ready to laugh heartly and to love this show. I love you too.

Strange days

2011-08-25T23:13:00.003+01:00

Indeed they have been strange days. After two weeks of almost constant good audiences we have been hit by abysmal numbers, mainly due to the fact that we had finished the flyers. Yesterday we decided not to flyer at all in order to save the few remaining flyers for Saturday, when we'll record the show. As a result we had five people in, so today we decided that flyering was essential and we got 1,000 more printed at an extortionate price. I did a hour of flyering and the other two did the same, so we were quite shocked when only a couple turned up for the show. We were telling them that we were going to cancel when the Waitress arrived. I talked about her on Facebook, normally this blog is all about comedy, there is no reference to my "private life". Thinking better, this also happens to be true for my comedy. During this festival I had some emotional "turbulences" and, for the first time, I included some references to them into my set. I realized with surprise that this was an absolute first and how "disembodied" my comedy had been so far. I don't think I'm going to turn into a confessional comedian, but there is probably room for talking a bit more about what makes me happy or makes me suffer, beside what tickles my cerebral cortex. Moreover, it's very difficult to keep comedy and private life separate when you have only three audience members, one of which had been the subject of some semi-serious romantic fantasizing over quite a long string of traditional Scottish breakfasts. So we decided to do the show anyway, in my case mainly because I didn't want to disappoint her. She seemed to enjoy it and we had an absolutely lovely chat over drinks and a long walk to her bus stop, but she didn't want to come to dinner or to another show. To make things more complicate, I had started thinking and writing about her mainly as a potential source of comic material, intrigued by the idea of a "love story" where everything happens within the strict limits of an exchange of orders and food between a client and a waitress on one side and within the much less strict limits of the client's imagination on the other. The fact that she really came to see my show and that we went for a drink for me was already a cross-over between fantasy and reality almost as surprising as the one in "The purple rose of Cairo", if you have seen the film. Have the walls started to crumble? Is it life that is trying to get into my comedy? Or is it the other way round? I have done quite a lot of comedy this month, I'm afraid that "doing" a bit of life too will be the only way to find out.

Mid run blues

2011-08-16T17:13:00.001+01:00

The delay in my upddates reflects the feeling that the last few days have been quite uneventful. When you do a long run the mid of it is probably the most difficult moment. You don't have the eagerness (and the fear) of the start nor the energy rush of the last days. The show is in its shape and although it can still get better the biggest improvements have probably already been achieved. What else can we get from this show? A second review would be nice, but free collective shows are probably at the bottom of every critic's pile. And Saturday we're going to record the show so a good recording would be nice too. And I need to remember that every audience members sees us for the first time, there is no mid run blues for them. I'll try to feed on that thought.

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A day with a sold out!

2011-08-13T22:27:00.002+01:00

Apparently the God of the Fringe is listening to my prayers. I was hoping for a lesson on how to deal with a much bigger than expected audience and, hey presto, we had just that today. The content of the lesson, however, was a bit disappointing: apparently all you have to do is standing outside of the door during your show partners performance while turning people away, which of course was heart-breaking. I hope some of them will try again tomorrow, but doing my set in front of a packed and very reactive (although, thankfully, not in hacklery kind of way) Saturday audience was just great. They welcomed every single joke with big, warm, understanding laughs (yes, not just the pissed kind of laughs: I know what you were thinking) and they were very generous at the end with their applause, compliments and money. Yes, just great.

A day when nothing special happened (all details below)

2011-08-13T10:40:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I felt highly energetic all day, maybe because it wasn't raining. I'm starting to think that the mood boost offered by the weather conditions is all relative: a covered day without rain in Edinburgh gives you the same boost as a sunny day in London or a pleasantly breezy day in Italy. I did a lot of flyering and at the end I was a bit disappointed by the audience size, but they were very appreciating and we had a good gig. Our performances seem to have become constantly good.

A day with a good audience and a relatively good review

2011-08-12T10:30:00.003+01:00

My blog posts seem be to like our show, at least according to the review we got from ThreeWeeks: the title says it all. Yes, I know what you want to know: it's a three stars. As I said, it's relatively good one: Cecilia treats the audience with "some beautifully quaint and charming acoustic music", Alice is "exuberant and perfectly pitch" and my "academic" investigation into language is "at times fascinating". That's all I got: five words. And I find really strange that, out of the three of us, I was the one to get the adjective "fascinating". But we can't complain too much and the review refers to the second performance, while the show is much better now. And yesterday we had a very good audience in terms of size, at the beginning it was a bit silent but we managed to win them over at the end. Onwards and upwards.

A day of tiredness, rain and small audience

2011-08-11T12:03:00.002+01:00

That was yesterday, I was even too tired to update the blog. Today instead I feel tired, it rains but I haven't done the show yet. It was such a change from the previous day. Probably the main difference it's that the rain didn't allow us to do proper flyering (which doesn't bode well for today). The title is really working, normally I get a big laugh with just repeating it, with 9 people out of ten thinking that they can be really original and witty by adding "You are the one from Slough, aren't you?". Sometimes it goes so well that I feel entitled to add: "If you are laughing so much now, think how much you would laugh at the proper show!". But all that is not possible when it's raining so we had six people plus my friend Adrian, who will never believe that I had a full house just the night before. He is here to share the flat with us for a week and I'm very happy about it, one of the reasons being that he was him who made me discover the Fringe (back then as a member of the audience and not particularly interested in comedy) five years ago. Considering that I was feeling tired and that I often don't deal well with small audiences I was really worried about my performance, but at the end I was happy about it. There was a moment when I let the show develop into a little discussion with the audience and it felt quite fresh and Fringy, if you know what I mean. Adrian found that I looked a bit pissed off about the audience size, but I was reactive and present and there was nothing of the "depressive" reaction I had on the first night so overall I thought it was a huge improvement. Can we move to the next lesson, Mr.Fringe? Maybe how to deal with an audience much bigger than than what you were expecting?

Two (days) for one (blog entry)

2011-08-10T00:24:00.003+01:00

I know, yesterday I didn't update my blog, but the latest two days have been two tickets for one in the paid for venues so here is a two-for-one blog entry. Actually that was a concern in my mind as somebody running a free show. If you had a week or less at the Fringe, would you choose to see a free show, that is always free, over the rare opportunity of a two-for-one offer? Maybe you didn't think of it, which is exactly the reason why I'm mentioning that offer only now that is finished. It's all fine and dandy to bare my heart in this blog, but I need to ask myself: how is what I'm saying going to affect the show? Focused, I need to keep focused! Ok, now I'm exaggerating, but at least you understand how you feel when you are promoting a show at the Fringe. Fortunately that worry seemed to be unjustified, since we have a very good audience yesterday and a great audience today, with big laughs all the way through. Today at the exit a promoter from Wales asked me for my details, it was that kind of good. It was the "I wish there was a reviewer in the audience" kind of good (no, that review hasn't been published yet). It's my first year in Edinburgh when I don't have the impression of going in circles but I can see my performances going steadily better every time. It's too early to say that it's my best year, after all I can still break a leg due to the unlucky combination of well wishing friends plus a God that doesn't understand the concept of metaphor, but I can easily say that it's the best first week I ever had.

An (almost) perfect day

2011-08-08T00:40:00.002+01:00

Was it really four days ago that we started the show in front of two people? Today I had to move twice to make room for more and more audience members. At one point Alice looked me and asked: "How did that happen?". You never really now, but it was probably a combination of the rain, the cumulative effect of the heavy flyering in the past three days, the festival getting into his full throttle and maybe a bit of word of mouth. And we didn't waste this opportunity, we had a very rewarding show. The day hadn't started that well for me. While having breakfast in a café I had bumped into a German comedian friend of Alice who had come to see us the night before, somebody who never performed here but apparently is big in Germany. I made the worst possible error a performer can make: I asked him what he thought of my set. First he struggled to say anything at all, then he just said that my attitude was "too aggressive", while failing to say anything about my material apart from the truly deflating "you'll get better lines during the run". Now, a "normal" person in a "normal" situation would have probably forgot the remark, but there is nothing "normal" about the Fringe. It's such a demanding experience that your confidence is constantly exposed to anything that might even vaguely affect it. More than one person told me that there should be a counselling service for performers, and probably there is, but at least we comedians have a great advantage over other types of performers: we can say whatever we want on the stage and we can make a joke of whatever happens to us. This year I have decided that whatever affects me will find its way into the show, not only because it's best way to deal with it, but also because it's the best way to keep the show "true" to how I'm feeling in the moment. So I cracked the quite easy but at the end very effective line "I have been told that my stage attitude is too aggressive... by a German", got a big laugh and, with it, a fully restored confidence. With a big "Fragile" written across it, just in case.

A suitably manic day

2011-08-06T23:27:00.003+01:00

Today we had the best show so far. The audience was decent in number and very nice, Cecilia and Alice were in great form and I found the right level of energy. I interacted a lot with the audience, got some big laughs and really enjoyed performing. Strangely enough I think I was helped by the crazy way I had spent the previous four and half hours: queueing to spend 5 minutes with a journalist from the Scotsman! It was in fact the day of Meet the Press I'm not exaggerating at all: I joined the queue outside Free Central at 1.30pm, when inside I joined the Scotsman queue straight away and I finally had my five minutes at 6pm! I was of course tired and angry of the total pointlessness of all this, but at another maybe slightly masochistic way I really enjoyed the experience. It's just amazing to see so many people, some in their scene costumes, spending so much time to have their chance to explain, for instance, that "Hitler - The Musical" was really a good idea (I didn't make it up, they were in front of me). It's a spectacle to behold, something like the canteen scene in Star Wars. And the atmosphere of camaraderie among the performers was really very nice. With the show starting at 6.30pm I had to rush to the venue straight after my five minutes of press attention, so I did the show and I then rushed to see another show straight afterwards (the always brilliant Alex Horne). As a result I had the first food of the day at 10pm, apart form a cappuccino and a croissant in the morning and an endless string of cokes while queueing (and while resisting to the temptation of the free beer offered by a sponsor, which I knew would not be good for my performance but which never the less contributed to the general gaiety of the situation). Now I will need to understand how to keep that energy, or summon it at will, without having to stand for four and half hours and getting high on sugar and caffeine every day for almost a month. Or maybe not.

Two shows and two reviewers in one day

2011-08-05T23:41:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I was wishing for more energy and more pressure and today my wish was granted. First in the afternoon I took part to Ivor Dembina's "Desert island jokes", a panel show about comedians' favourite jokes and what makes them funny. It was a very enjoyable experience, I particularly like the way the audience were involved in the discussion. In the audience there was a reviewer from ThreeWeeks, although I wonder how you can review what was just a discussion. Then I did a lot of flyering, helped but the good weather. And it worked: the audience's size was much better than yesterday. And fortunately so, given that in the audience there was a (different) reviewer... from ThreeWeeks! Are they out to get me? Weird being seen twice in a day by the same the same pubblication. ThreeWeeks claims to review every single show, I have always been sceptical, especially since they failed to review me two years ago, but now I'm starting to believe in their claim. My performance was much more focused and energetic than yesterday's, although some of the jokes got a smaller response than expected. It was some sort of highly demanding, slightly jaded festival audience. Oddly enough, at some jokes the critic was the only one laughing. I hope it wasn't some sort of very highly sophisticated double bluff, but it was a much better evening than the one they came to review last year (and Cecilia and Alice were very good too), so the only way is up.

First show done

2011-08-05T04:51:00.002+01:00

Here I am, using a brief insomniac moment at 4.52am to catch up with my "daily" blog. So, after a very pleasant day as a member of the audience we had our first show. During the day I did some flyering, but I had nothing of the manic energy filled by fear and desperation that last year propelled me around Edinburgh like a crazy bullet. On one hand I was happy to have a more relaxed experience, on the other I was missing that energy. But maybe the God of the Fringe is already at work to find a solution. In fact, we started the show with TWO audience members! During the course of the show it went to NINE, a massive 450% increase. Both Cecilia and Alice did a sterling job with the human material at hand, to the point that when it was my turn I commented that if the Hammersmith Apollo had the same ratio of hilarity per person the theatre would literately crumble... "take that, Michael McIntyre!". They were both confident and focused and I was really proud of them and of the role I played in putting the three of us together. Unfortunately when it was my turn I had a lacklustre performance. It was a bit of a surprise since I was coming from three very good London previews. But in London we had big audiences, which always gives me a great boost. It's not the first time tI notice that I'm not that good at facing a small audience. After having seen a healthy audience in the same room at 2.45pm (so, no excuse there) I was really disappointed to see that our was much smaller and I probably never recovered from that disappointment. There are also some changes I can do to the material, in particular I'm getting too early into the language stuff, so I should introduce myself a bit more. But I'm very happy that Cecilia and Alice were in top form and enjoyed their gig and I'm even more confident that we have a lot of potential this year. And after this experience I'm pretty sure that, from tomorrow, that manic energy will probably be back.

The quiet before whatever will come

2011-08-02T20:59:00.002+01:00

Responding to great popular demand (thanks, Adrian) I'm resuming the daily schedule of this Edinburgh diary. Here I am, in the city itself. After an uneventful journey I arrived at Haymarket station, where my showmate (and now flatmate) Cecilia came to escort me to our new temporary home. The flat makes a huge difference from the cesspit where I stayed last year, it's bright and feels very clean and fresh. We soon went to check out the venue and to verify that the posters and fliers had arrived as promised. The confirmation that they did came as soon as we entered the venue, given that the staff recognised us from the posters. We had a look at the room itself and I found confirmed all the drawbacks I remembered from watching shows there, above all the passage to the kitchen and the ladies toilet. Somebody from the stuff told us not to "take the piss" out of the people going to the ladies, which given my interest in idioms gave me a lot to think about. We also went to Fringe Central, where I met the always supportive Ivor Dembina, the first familiar face I have seen this year. He very honestly agreed with my analysis that last here I overstretched myself and I'm grateful to him for this. I have now come to terms with that recognition and I'm really looking forward to a festival in which I can feel more confident and relaxed. Or at least this is how I was feeling until I saw a HUGE poster of Frisky and Mannish, a duo that shared with me the stage of the Hackney Empire final two years ago. Now, I don't know why that should impress me, they were already big back then and as a cabaret act they are not somebody I can feel in competition with. But I couldn't help thinking that they probably don't have the problem of their room being crossed by the passage to the ladies toilet. For a moment I thought of Edinburgh as some sort of school reunion, where it's almost impossible not to compare achievements, disappointments and belly sizes. But it was just a moment. This year I feel that I have my strongest set so far and that I can both enjoy myself and demonstrate something to the others. If that requires a bit of staff-disapproved piss taking... well, let it flow.

Can't wait

2011-07-17T11:13:00.000+01:00

Even before it opens, this year’s Edinburgh Fringe has already taught me the first, precious lessons. The previews are going very well and I’m really enjoying doing them. This might sounds unremarkable, but for me it marks a striking difference from where I was at this stage last year and it makes me think about what went wrong back then.
This will be my third as a performer. Two years ago my debut was a half hour free show that was received very well, earning me, among other things, a very good review from The Scotsman’s Kate Copstick, which I have been quoting at every opportunity ever since. Last year I decided to do a paid-for one hour show and it was, to use a nice English expression, a completely different kettle of fish. I really struggled to get decent audience numbers, I lost a lot of money and the reviews’ range spanned from the very bad to the quite bad. The reasons very multiple. One was that I tried to make my show “thematic”, but this meant that I had some parts that sounded too big-headed, while other parts were just not funny enough. And the pressure I felt meant that my performance was often quite stiff, I wasn’t really “playing” and I wasn’t really enjoying myself.
This year I decided to revert most of last year’s decisions. First of all, I decided to go back to doing a free show. Given Edinburgh’s level of competition, if you are not a big name doing a paid-for show means almost certainly that you are going to struggle. To make things worse my show was overpriced. For a venue’s promoter having ten people paying £10 or twenty paying £5 is the same, but for a comedian it makes a lot of difference, given that comedy needs audience like swimming needs water. I managed to have decent numbers only by giving every day a number of tickets for free, which doesn’t make any sense when you are paying for the venue, it means that you are actually subsidising people to come and see you. And last year’s well deserved nomination of Imran Yusuf’s free show to Foster’s Best Newcomer award was the sign that the prejudice against free shows is now a thing of the past.
Secondly, I decided that I don’t really need a theme. Themes are good if they “emerge” from the jokes themselves, but they are bad if they are imposed over them. One day I would like to do a thematic show about language, but only when I’ll have enough strong jokes on the subject for the show to become thematic “per se”. The same applies to having “a message”: as a comedian your message is the puzzlement and amusement towards the world you express with your jokes or maybe the pleasure and intellectual freedom you communicate with your word play and paradoxes. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: the jokes medium is the message.
Thirdly, I’m not going solo, but I’m sharing the hour with two other comedians, actually comediennes: Cecilia Delatori and Alice Frick. We met on London’s comedy circuit and I was really impressed by how energetic, intelligent and funny they are. Sharing a slot is not only a way to avoid overstretching your material, but it’s also a great occasion to get continuous feedback from people who can see every step of its development. Not only, but you feed on each other’s energy and enthusiasm. Edinburgh can be a very stressful and lonely experience so I’m really looking forward to have somebody with whom I can share the highs and the inevitable lows.
In other words, I’m confident that this year I will really enjoy my Edinburgh experience and, hopefully, as a result my audience will enjoy their experience too. Cant’ wait.

“An Austrian, an Italian and someone from Slough” will be at Laughing Horse Free Festival @ Meadow Bar, 6.30pm,4-28 August (free with voluntary donation at the end).

BREAKING NEWS: Giacinto announces his plans for the next Edinburgh

2011-02-05T15:20:00.005Z

It's the beginning of February and the plans for the next Edinburgh Fringe are starting to take shape. So, here are the news: I will do a free show with Cecilia Delatori and Alice Frick. In a sense I'm reversing almost every decision I took last year: free show instead of paid for, three hands instead of solo... the only decision I'm sticking with is doing the full run. So, is this an admission of failure? Have I survived only one season in the Premier League? Part of me feels that way. But on the other hand, last year's show was such a struggle that I really need to relax a bit more, invest less money and go back to having fun. The Foster's nomination won last year by Imran Yusuf has hopefully removed once and for all the stigma against free shows. And running a solo show all by yourself, I mean without a production and promotion team behind you, is really hard work. I'm really looking forward to working with Cecilia and Alice, they are of course comics I really like, they are at their first Edinburgh as comics (although Cecilia has a lot of Edinburgh experience as an actress) and consequently very enthusiastic and motivated. I really hope that the interaction between us can be stimulating for everybody. And, above all, that we can enjoy ourselves, a goal so easy to forget in that crazy pinball that is the Edinburgh Fringe.

I'm dissertation material!

2011-01-31T15:18:00.006Z

An Italian student, Umberto Costa, honoured me with the request of an interview for his dissertation entitled "The language of satire and its development in the era of new media (Analysis of techniques, jokes, gestures and the processes that influence the public’s mind)". He also kindly agreed for the interview to appear on this blog, so here it is. Thanks Umberto for your interest in comedy and in the opinions of the humblest of its servants.

- Hi Giacinto, tell us a bit about yourself, your studies, your travels and what brought you to comedy.

- I studied Philosophy and I have been working in IT since graduation. I have now been living in London for ten years and it's here that I started to become interested in comedy. Comedy is huge in the UK, it's bigger now than ever before, so it's almost impossible not to bump into it in a way or another. One evening I discovered by chance one of those comedy clubs in the function room of pubs and I was mesmerized. I was simply amazed by the level of energy and creativity. But at first I really struggled to understand the jokes, even if I had been living in the UK already for five or six years back then. Comedy is full of topical and cultural references, puns and exaggerated accents. So I started going to comedy clubs as a challenge and as a way to improve my English comprehension skills. With the time I started to understand more and more and so to enjoy it more and more. Meanwhile I wrote a short satirical piece, a mock anthropological study on the British tradition of the corporate Christmas party. I wanted to send it to a friend called Adrian but by mistake I sent it to the MD of the company I was working for, also called Adrien. He liked it very much so, instead of firing me, he read it in front of everybody during the actual Christmas party, getting big laughs in response. He said that he had received it from an employee, but he thought it was better non to say who that employee was. I was flattered by the response but I also felt deprived of the rightful recognition. So I thought: why not writing this kind of stuff as a stand-up material set and perform it myself? I put two and two together, the discovery of the comedy clubs scene and the discovery of my comic writing instincts. The only thing I needed was the confidence to perform, so I joined a stand-up comedy course, after which I started doing my first open spots.

- How did you chose to do comedy in English?

- I think the explanation is in my previous answer. It's in the UK that I discovered comedy, it's in the experience of being an Italian in Britain that I found my first source of inspiration and it's in the comedy clubs of London that I performed my first sets. So I can say that English is my comedic mother tongue. Actually one of the subjects that interest me is what sociologists call "reverse cultural shock", the fact that going to live abroad changes you to the point that you actually struggle to adapt back to your own country. For me a clear example of this is that I would really struggle to do comedy in Italy and particularly in Italian. I did comedy in Italy once, but it was in front of an international audience and it was in English.

- What are, in your opinion, the main differences between the Italian and the English-speaking comedy scene? Some time ago I saw an interesting discussion in which Italian culture was described as a “culture of images” while British culture was descibed as a “culture of words”. Do you agree that this is the case?

- Yes, I think that's an interesting way to put it. Once I took part to a gig where the MC asked the audience to take part to a limerick writing competition. I was staggered by the number of people who did take part and by the quality of the limericks. Can you imagine the audience of Zelig competing with each other in writing the first "stanza" of a "sonetto"? Here people are educated to play with words since they are still very young, for instance through nursery rhymes. Newspapers readerships are in the millions. It's easy to make fun of the English tabloids, but their existence is the proof of how is spread newspaper reading is across all the social classes. The reason why Italy doesn't have tabloids is not that their readers are more sophisticated, but because the kind of people who would constitute their natural market simply don't read at all. It would be very strange if this stronger focus on verbal communication and especially written communication didn't have any effect on the type of comedy that the British are able to produce and to love.

- In our exploration of satire we have analized comics such as George Carlin, Emo Philips, Ricky Gervais, Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks. Has any of these inspired you or influenced your style?

- Not directly. My comedy education consisted in watching people on the London live scene, trying to learn from comedians who were just two or three steps above me and who were playings the same type of room as me. It's only recently that I have started watching the DVDs of the great masters and to go to proper theatres to see the big names.

- Regarding satire, do you think that Italy meets the right political and social conditions for satire to flourish?

- This is a difficult question. I don't think that the political situation in Italy is bad for satire, you could argue that it couldn't be better, in the sense that it couldn't be worse. What worries me is the attitude of the audience and the the influence of television. There is a predominance of character comedy and sketch comedy, often based on catch phrases. This seems to be what the audience expect because it's what they have been fed through television for ages. Here in the UK the live comedy scene is so big that most people develop their taste by watching live comedy and even TV comedy needs to imitate it in some way. In Italy, I think, it's the other way round, TV has created a taste for repetition and easily recognisable characters. There doesn't seem much room for comedians who simple say what they think, speaking as themselves. I'm not saying that you can't do satire through characters (Cetto LaQualunque is a good example), but you also need to be open to people who can challenge your patterns of thought by simply speaking their minds.

- Watching some clips from your shows I noticed that, despite your long residence abroad, you still have a strong Italian accent. Is it intentional? And what are the effects on your English-speaking audience?

- It couldn't be less intentional, it's the only accent I have got. They say that in comedy you should always address "the elephant in the room" and my accent is my elephant, along with my unpronounceable (at least for the non-Italian) name. It helps to set the scene, to introduce my themes, which are national identity and the difference between languages. And it might also make some jokes funnier. Of course the danger is not been understood, but if I stick to well rehearsed material I don't have big problems. At least not in London and during festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe. I noticed that I tend to struggle more to get a good response in provincial England and the fact that people there are less familiar with foreign accents might be one of the factors.

- Do you think that satire can evolve in this media-dominated world? Or is it stuck at tackling the same problems in the same ways?

- I'm a great believer in the superiority of the live scene, where comedians are really free and where audience responses are really spontaneous. In Britain it's possible to make a good living as a comedian without ever appearing on television, which is something that in Italy and in many other places is probably not possible. This restricts freedom, since of course television has much stricter rules and is more conditioned by politics and business. But you don't need to make a living out of comedy, for instance I don't. I hope that in Italy and everywhere else people will set comedy clubs in bars, schools, restaurants and so on just like people here in Britain do in pubs, charging few euros or nothing at all and enjoying the total freedom that comes with this kind of choice. As I said, what worries me most is the question on whether the audience are actually ready for this.

- What are your project for the immediate future?

- I'll keep doing short sets in comedy clubs and I'll do something longer during the Brighton Fringe in May and the Edinburgh Fringe in August. I'll probably share the bill with one or two comedians in both cases though, I did solo shows in Edinburgh for two years in a row and I need a break. At least if you do the show with other people you can share the chores, such as flyering, which in Edinburgh is a crucial task. And I hope that the interaction with other comedians might also stimulate my creativity, as well as being good fun. Let's see.

Mackenzie Taylor, RIP

2010-11-20T12:38:00.005Z

Last August at C Venues. among so much theatre and some comedy sketch groups, the only solo stand-up shows on offer were mine and Mackenzie Taylor's two shows. I didn't know him, but I got in touch before the festival and he came to see my first performance, answering my cry of help for the presence of two critics. I met him only briefly at the bar afterwards, thanked him for coming and mumbled something vaguely apologetic, to which he didn't reply, probably charitably so. The day after I went to see one of his shows: "No straitjacket required". It was the story of his battle with manic-depression and his attempted suicide and I found it compelling and moving. It was at moments very funny too, although it was wisely listed in the "Theatre" section of the program. I must admit, however, that it reminded me of what Ivor Dembina once told me about his own take on "not for comedy" subjects matters: you need to be careful of not being "too real". Probably the reason why the show wasn't listed as comedy is that it was indeed still "too real". Of course it might be the advantage of hindsight, but I got the impression that Mackenzie's wasn't too confident in the possibility of the irony and laughter to do that much for his pain, a lot of it was just laid bare on the stage, making sometimes for difficult viewing. This made it a truly unique type of show, in theatre proper in fact you know that every is fake, while here you had the sincerity of the best confessional comedy, but performed sometimes without the emotional safety net that comedy usually provides. Mackenzie was also running a second show called "Joy", with the intention I guess of offering a more upbeat take on things, unfortunately it clashed with mine so I couldn't see it. But I saw a short extract from it during the C Venues opening showcase: a funny and masterful comic magician's trick that did indeed show me a more playful side of Mackenzie. The idea of running two solo shows everyday for almost a month filled me with awe, unfortunately a week or so into the run I overheard some venue's staff discussing the scheduling for the rooms and saying something like "now that Mackenzie Taylor is dead". I asked them what they meant and they told me that they didn't mean it literally, but that he had some sort of breakdown and cancelled his run. And I didn't hear from or about him until yesterday, when on Facebook his sister announced from his account that he had "lost his battle with the demons in his mind". I cannot claim to have really known him, our paths crossed only briefly, but through his art he gave me and so many other people a truly deep glance into this battle. As cliché as it might sound, I'm very sad for him but also happy that he found peace at last.

ComedySubs

2010-11-02T15:13:00.004Z

As a diary of my Edinburgh experience(s) this blog doesn't see much action outside August and the months leading to it. Instead, it's becoming a dump for my (failed) contributions to Chortle. This time it's an interview with the founder of ComdeySubs, a group of people who volunteer their time to write Italian subtitles for English language stand-up comedy DVDs. Unfortunately the editor of Chortle found that the subject didn't meet the requirement of being of sufficiently general interest (in his words: "it would interest only you and Giada Garofalo"), so here it is instead. One thing I didn't say is that I'm now collaborating with ComedySubs myself (I have just finished my first complete DVD translation, not released yet, and started on a second), in fact I didn't want the article to sound too self-referential. On the other hand, self-referentiality is practically mandatory in blogs, so I'm saying it here instead. Staying on the subject, on the ComedySubs website you'll find an inteview with me (in Italian), with a link to this blog. Be careful of not being caught in an infinite loop!

---

Every cloud, they say, has a silver lining. In my previous
contribution to Chortle I wrote on how disappointed I felt watching a
documentary on how one of my favourite Italian comedians, Daniele
Luttazzi, had stolen most of his material from English speaking
comedians. That same documentary, however, made me curious about the
people credited for adding Italian subtitles to the clips from
American and British comedians used to show the extension of those
“loans”. I had a look at the website www.comedysubs.org and I was
amazed to discover a community of people so passionate and competent
about English speaking comedy to volunteer their time to write Italian
subtitles for many of the most classic stand-up comedy shows available
in DVD. Users can download the subtitles file for free and display
them along with their DVD on their computer. The catalog is impressive
and include the greatest names of comedy, such as Bill Hicks, George
Carlin and Billy Connolly. I then decided I wanted to know more and
share the news, so here is a brief interview with the founder of
ComedySubs, Roberto Ragone, aka ReRosso.

- How did you come up with the idea of ComedySubs?

A couple of years ago I was watching “Zeitgeist”, a web documentary
that includes George Carlin’s routine about the "Invisible Man". I
thought "Hey... this is a routine by Daniele Luttazzi, how come it's
in English?!". So I did some research and I found out about Carlin. I
had never heard of him before, in Italy he's not famous at all. When I
watched his version of the Invisible Man routine, I was awestruck. It
was so much better than Luttazzi's version! I just had to translate it
and share it. So I I added subtitles to the video and shared it on my
personal blog. After that, I translated other bits by Carlin, then
Bill Hicks, Billy Connolly and Ellen DeGeneres. My audience enjoyed it
and so, with the help of a friend, I decided to make the subtitling
project autonomous from my blog. And ComedySubs was born.

- Some people think that stand-up comedy is impossible to translate.
Your experience seems to demonstrate the opposite, doesn’t it?

I'd say that sometimes comedy is indeed impossible to translate. It's
really hard to convey a comical idea in the small space of a subtitle
line, especially when it involves a cultural background that is really
far from the the viewer’s. Most of the times we pull that off quite
well, but sometimes we have to resort to using annotations to
"explain" the cultural references behind a joke. We try to keep the
amount of these explanations to a minimum, but we prefer doing so
rather than going too far in the adaptation.

- Who is your audience? Do you think there is much interest in Italy
about stand-up comedy in English?

Our audience is made mostly of comedians and comedy authors.
Apparently Italian comedians love us because we allow them to gain a
deeper understanding of English language comedy with little effort,
for them ComedySubs is like a library where they can go and study
comedy techniques. Of course our audience also includes "normal"
people, who don't work in comedy. Italians, however, are not really
subtitle fanatics - we like our movies dubbed - so I'd say that our
target audience is some sort of a niche, but it's growing fast.

- I hope that this time those Italian comedians will not borrow so
heavily from the library! Actually, some people think that the
internet is making stealing jokes easier, but I think it's opposite,
you can't steal a joke if people know its real paternity. Do you
agree?

I totally agree. By popularising this material we also make it very
hard to steal from it. We are very well known in the Italian comedy
industry so any comedian copying from shows we published subtitles for
would be exposed by their colleagues from the very start.

- So far you have translated mainly American comedians. Did this
happen by chance or by choice?

A bit of both. Even though the USA are further away than England, in
Italy American culture, society and politics are more widely known.
It's because of Hollywood and the American TV shows, which are very
popular... well... everywhere. This makes easier for both the Italian
translator and the Italian viewer to grasp the cultural references.
Moreover, American comedians don't use the same amount of wordplay as
the British ones and jokes with wordplay are probably the most
difficult to render. In any case we're trying to improve our British
catalogue.

- You provide only the subtitles, inviting your audience to buy the
DVD. I noticed that you are very careful about never promoting file
sharing, but I got the impression that this is the way most people get
hold of the video anyway. Can you confirm?

Yes, of course people do a lot of downloading. We don't support it but
it's their choice. Personally I think that in a perfect world ideas
and art would be shared freely but there is a law and comedians of
course need to make money out of their job. So we invite people to buy
DVDs. I think it can work, for example many of our followers bought
Eddie Izzard’s DVD collection because it comes with Italian subtitles.

- Which brings me to my next question: I heard that you are trying to
enter deals with DVD production companies to include your subtitles on
their products, Can you confirm? Maybe you can launch an appeal.

Yes, we made some cautious approaches but it's not easy when you don't
know which door to knock on. So, my dear copyright holders, if you'd
like to open a brand new market for your products, with 60 million
potential buyers, on a very small investment, just contact us
(http://www.comedysubs.org/contattaci/).

Good luck with that. Thank you Roberto for your answers and thanks to
all the people who collaborate with ComedySubs for giving me, at last,
some very good news from my native Italy.

The Fringe and the FA Cup

2010-09-09T14:45:00.002+01:00

Here is something I wrote for Chortle's Correspondents section. It will not be published since Bob Slayer got his article published before mine and he makes some very similar points. So here it is, exclusively for this blog's readers:

---

There has been a lot of talk recently about the Fringe becoming too
professionalized and monopolised by big name comedians, for instance
in Harry Deansway’s contribution. I’m now going to argue that these
reports of the Fringe spirit’s death are greatly exaggerated.

We all agree that what makes the Fringe great is its openness,
especially at its the bottom end. Less known acts need to have the
chance to access it. The increasing availability of free slots in the
past year has actually made things better from this point of view.
When I did my free show last year, for instance, I found a slot
despite being on the circuit for less than one year and never having
had my a paid gig yet. Moreover Imran Yusuf’s best newcomer nomination
this year demonstrates that it is not true any more, if it ever was,
that doing a free show will condemn you to be overlooked by critics
and prize panelists.

Its openness at the top end, however, is in my opinion equally
important. The reason is that it makes the Fringe something similar to
another great British institution: the FA Cup. Taking part to it for a
less known comedian is like taking part to the FA Cup for a small
provincial club. You might end up playing at Stamford Bridge and in
that case you would of course be expected to be defeated, and
typically you are, but playing there instead of your usual crap ground
is already some sort of victory. In the FA Cup case this “trickle down
effect”, with ticket sales and sometimes TV right shared between the
teams, is probably more easily recognisable than on the Fringe, but it
cannot be completely written off in the latter case either. Big names
after all bring more visitors and more media and promoters’ attention
to the Fringe as a whole and everybody can have a go at taking a bite
at this bigger pie. Moreover, like in the FA Cup, there is still the
possibility of being the "giant killer". I think the Fringe is broadly
meritocratic, you can still be a big TV name and have a bad run, while
people like Daniel Kitson can sell out a big room at at 10.30am
without a single TV appearance or a single DVD under their name.

Without the big names the Fringe would stop being the FA Cup of comedy
and would just become another minor league. We less known comedians
don't need that, we are already playing in a minor league all year
round. For at least one month of the year it's great to have the
chance to walk with the giants. It's well worth the danger of being
crashed under their feet.

What next?

2010-08-30T20:29:00.001+01:00

I have accepted that offer to do a gig in Italy during a congress on translation organized by the University of Bologna, even if unfortunately it meant canceling my partecipation to the Manchester Comedy Festival. I'm really intrigued and not only because it will be my first performance in Italy, although still in English. I'm also intrigued by the academic settings, after all many critics niticed that at times my show sounded like a lecture in linguistics. This might also indicate a line of development, some new jokes have sprung to my mind during the festival's run and they all happen to be on the subject of language. I originally thought of doing a show on language for this Edinburgh, but I didn't have enough material so I added the part on becoming British and tried to harmonize these two parts under the umbrella of a reflection on national identify. This forced marriage probably wasn't a complete success and I must admit that the part on citizenship tasted a bit stale in my mouth. I'm now ready to let it go, so I'll work on replacing it with new material on language with the goal of finally writing that language-centric show in time for Brighton in May. After all it's the only subject that is winning me invitations to literally festivals and prestigious universities. More importantly, it's the subject that feels "mine" to me and that gives me the greatest pleasure.

The last performance

2010-08-30T19:15:00.001+01:00

Today Edinburgh was very quite and I was worried of breaking my no cancellation record but at the I had a small audience but I had an audience. And I managed not to get too nervous or discouraged about it. After all confidence is a form of memory, it depends on having enough good experiences to remember when you are having a difficult one. This run has given me exactly that so there couldn't have been a more fitting finale.

It's almost over

2010-08-30T12:36:00.001+01:00

Just one more performance. I feel quite sad but also satisfied. Two weeks ago Ashley told me: by the end of your show will be a different show and you will be a different man. Am I? I do feel different, I don't remember doing anything else in my life that required so much resilience, such a continuity of effort and concentration. I never had a day off, never cancelled a performance, I never gave up on the promotion. And I had people in my audience who really loved this show. There will be more reflections, balances and projects from the train home but for now I'm enjoying this nice feeling of achievement.

A twist in the tail

2010-08-29T19:00:00.001+01:00

Today it went really well, the audience loved the show, laughed loudly and clapped enthusiastically. Such a difference a day makes. Pity I didn't register today's show, but maybe it was the camera that made me nervous yesterday. And, I discovered afterwards, there was a critic from FringeReview, so the last critic word on the hasn't been said yet. I'll be curious to see what a critic says after seeing a good performance, no justification this time. But no critic can be as severe as I was yesterday witj myself after my horrible performance and I'm happy that I came back from that. Tomorrow is the last show and the start of the countdown to the next Fringe.

Learning the hard way

2010-08-28T19:40:00.001+01:00

Maybe I should have gone to bed earlier yesterday, expecially since I got the time of the tour wrong by a hour and I managed to catch only the last ten minutes. And when I arrived home at 3.30am I couldn't find the keys and I had to phone and wake-up a flatmate. Today I felt fine but at the end I gave one of my worst performances so far. The audience combination was quite unfortunate, mainly local week-enders with some non resident Italians, with no Londoner and only a couple of foreign UK residents. I know, classifying the audience by geographic origin goes against the very spirit of my show. Whatever the reason, they reacted very weakly to my opening gambits and the vicious circle of the bad show started again. When things go well now I'm pretty good at milking the laughter with a pause and sometimes a facial expression, but when I get silence I just rush towards the next line. What I need to learn is how to milk the silence, how to extract laughter from the jaws of silence with a pause and an expression that says: you can take your time, I'm waiting for you but I'm not anxious, I know you will join me. Otherwise you are telling your audience that you are giving up and even the few members who are laughing will start to think that they are the ones who are getting it wrong, given that their laughter is often covered by your rushing nervously to the next line. While I'm writing these lines I'm quite happy, at least, by the level of consciousness I managed to achieve. I will probably not show today's recording to anybody else, but I'll watch it myself in order to become even more conscious of these mechanisms.

Fringe binge

2010-08-27T23:08:00.001+01:00

Today I felt physically tired but I was surprised to my find my performance quite energetic. The wise thing to do now would be to go to bed early, given that tomorrow I'll video-record the show, but few days ago I bumped into Arthur Smith, who was really nice with me and invited me to this year's edition of his legendary alternative night tour of Edinburgh. I read about these crazy, almost dadaist events in his autobiography and I was really fascinated. Arthur even told me that I should play a part, probably involving speaking in Italian only. The only problem is that it will start at 2.45am! I voiced my dilemma to Ashley Frieze, who told me that it will be an experience I will never forget. He is probably right, besides I'm a little ashamed of having these doubts while the man running this event is much older than me, is diabetic and survived a near-death experience. So, fuck it, I'll see a "Dracula" at midnight, then I'll probably go to Late 'N Live (it starts at 1am and finishes at 5am!) and then to the tour. Tomorrow I'll pray Dr Theatre to give me, again, an extra injection of energy.

Never had so good

2010-08-25T20:11:00.001+01:00

Everybody around me seems to be counting the days to the end of the festival, but I'm really enjoying this tail. I feel so much more confident and relaxed about this show and I'm having an absolutely lovely audience. Today at the Pleasance I gave a flyer to these two guys, a Scot and a Belgian. We started talking and I offered them two free tickets, but they accepted only one while promising to buy a second. And so they did. After the show they waited for me at the exit, complimented me warmly and, again, asked to take a picture with me. They told me that they met at the Fringe many years ago, when apparently there was also an Italian girl involved, and kept meeting here every year despite living afar. Now I'm part of their Fringe memories and of course they are also part of mine.

In your face, critics

2010-08-24T19:07:00.001+01:00

Today I had another very good show, with big laughs. This morning I was down because of the review, but at the end I managed to pull myself up and I gave an assured performance, maybe with a bit more of anger than the usual, which seemed to suit well the more polemical bits of the material. The only negative side was that there was this sweet old lady on the front row, a student of Italian, who seemed to be disappointed during the second half, the one about becoming British. I know why, she is an example of the typical elderly English italophile who perceives my journey as a betrayal. But other people seemed to connect very well. I also gave an interview to an Italian radio and agreed another with BBC Worldwide for Thursday, which will include extracts from my show registered on the same day. They are all part of the fallback from the Guardian's article, it's amazing how much the media world feeds on itself. Quite a lot to savour for a day.

Comments and reviews

2010-08-24T15:11:00.001+01:00

Once again some very nice comments from members of the audience have come to my rescue in a difficult moment. Thank you very much Murray Brady and all the other people who enjoyed my show, your "stars" are the most precious.

The last review

2010-08-24T12:02:00.001+01:00

Here it is:

http://www.festmag.co.uk/reviews/558-giacinto_palmieri_trying_be_italian

There are a couple of points that really annoy me. First, of course I don't answer my own questions on identity. Funny enough, the very same publication in their preview article about my show wrote that this is typical of all good comedians and I even declare it in my publicity, albeit of course in an interrogative form. And my favourite definition of a philosopher is: somebody who has a question for every answer. Maybe I should say during my show, although I don't want to call myself a philosopher. The other point is that I don't make enough fun of stereotypes. It's what Henning Wehn does brilliantly but I'm not him and I'm not interested in doing the same things. This kind of expectation, however, might indeed been erroneously suggested by the publicity. Of course what hurts more is the allegation that my jokes might simply be not strong or sophisticated enough. I need to remind myself why I believe in the opposite, hopefully before 5.35pm.

It's how you hold it

2010-08-23T20:06:00.001+01:00

My exercise in reliability is going pretty well. Today I was worried since, despite having gone to bed early, I overslept and woke up very sleepy. It seems to happen on rainy mornings, so I came to the conclusion that I'm more meteopathic than I thought. It's of course a very dangerous thing to be in Scotland, although it has been quite a good year from that point of view. But my performance was good and I got laughs all the way true. I'm also experimenting with ways of holding the microphone. Ivor Dembina told me that leaving it on the stan would help me to avoid looking down and loosing visual contact with the audience, but I love to move on the stage and I don't want to do like Lewis Schaffer, who walks around with mic and stand. So I'm now holding the mic with both hands, as if to project an ideal stand in front of me. For some strange reason this seems to force me to look high while also allowing for freedom of movement. Please send your Freudian interpretations on a postcard.

Best show so far!

2010-08-22T19:28:00.001+01:00

After my unusual night of sleep in "normal" hours this morning I woke up full of energy. In fact I bumped into Giada who asked me why I looked so cheerful. And I did a showcase slot just before my show, not just after. It went less well than the other ones but that was because it worked as a warm-up to my show instead of the other way round. My performance was very energetic, I did feel hot but I actually enjoyed my sweat as the proof that I was giving all, as if I was doing some physical workout. And I never lost visual contact with the audience, which had been one of the problems in my past performances. Audience that, on their part, really seemed to enjoy it, with a couple of people even waiting outside to congratulate me. All this, however, makes me also a bit angry with myself. If all my performances were like today's this show would have been a great success instead of the struggle it has actually become. I guess this is the real distinction between the pro and the non-pro, professionalism after all is mainly about reliability. But at least now I know what I can achieve on a good day and I discovered a reserve of performing energy I didn't even know I had. My next challenge will be to keep it flowing.

A bad one

2010-08-22T09:50:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, after a string of good performances, I had a really bad one. I hadn't slept well, I discovered that going to bed late and waking up late doesn't really do for me, so
last night I went to bed at 11pm and this morning I woke up at 8.30am. So rock-and-roll. The heath in my venue was also particularly unbearable and chance had put together an audience mix that seemed to react weakly to even my strongest jokes. It's very difficult to say to what level is your performance and what level is the audience, since what happens in these cases is some sort of vicious circle, where a weak response to something originally delivered reasonably well makes you loose confidence and concentration, leading to a weaker delivery and an even weaker response. Of course the right reaction would be to do the opposite, to step up your game in front of the adversities, but I guess this is one of the things I'm here to learn. Today I feel more rested so let's see.

Sorry for the delay

2010-08-21T10:21:00.002+01:00

Here I am again. I was quite busy with my parents in town on top of everything else. I enjoyed their company and they loved Edinburgh and the Fringe atmosphere. They came to see the show, which was a bit weird given that they don't understand English. Fortunately it was a good show so they could at least see that the audience were laughing. The only moment of embarrassement was when my mother started to clap a bit too early. I came out to the stage after the show to greet them and this German woman was absolutely enthusiastic, she told me that she had been looking for a long time for a good comic treatment of those questions of identity and that she related completely to the spirit of the show. She even took notes to send to her friends and yes, before you asked, she also laughed heartly. It's encounters like this that make the all thing worthwhile. And yesterday I received an invitation from the University of Bologna to perform my act as part of a conference about translation. I'm really honoured, I just hope they'll not say afterwards that it sounds more like a comedy show than a lecture .

A day full of events and people

2010-08-17T23:49:00.001+01:00

First of all, a media event I have waiting for ages has finally happened. The Guardian has published (for now online, tomorrow Wednesday on paper) the interviewed I gave to Brian Logan along with other foreign comedians:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/aug/17/edinburgh-overseas-comics

It's a good article and I think I come out pretty well. And it's the Guardian. Wow. Roll, presses, roll.

And at the show I had some very important guests. First of all, my fellow Italian comedian Giada Garofalo and her partner Nelson. Since I did the Brighton festival with Giada she followed with interest and partecipation the development of my show so I was looking forward to her opinion. I wasn't disappointed at all, she gave me a lot a food for thought, for which I'm really grateful.

And Ivor Dembina came too. He is a comedy legend and a personal hero of mine, I loved his show "This is not a subject for comedy". Later I pumbed into him on the Royal Mile and he gave me a lot of advice. In particular he advised me to keep more often the mic on the stand. The amazing thing is that I had just read on Stewart Lee's autobiography how he learned that technique from nobody else than Ivor Dembina. I mentioned that to Ivor and he said: "yes, but you are even worse than he was back then". Well, I can live with that. Here was somebody who remembered when Stewart Lee was bad and taught him to become good and who now was giving advice to me, as if me and Stewart (as I feel entitled to call him now) were pupils in the same class. Amazing, only in Edinburgh. This is one of the reasons why is great to be here, you are fighting shoulder to shoulder with so many good and great comedians that not learning something from them is almost impossible. Especially with somebody as generous as Ivor.

The show itself was not bad, the audience was small but there was an Italian young lady who laughed at every punchline, serving as a cheerleader for the others. The critic must have thought that she was a "plant", but I swear she was "real". Regarding the critic herself, I regret to report that she never laughed and smiled only a couple of times. She spent most of the time scribbling as if she was going to publish a verbatim account of of my show. Let's see.

And my parents have arrived in town, of which I think I'll write more tomorrow.

Never count your chickens

2010-08-16T18:54:00.001+01:00

When you think that you cracked the code, there is probably a bad gig just around the corner. Today the omens weren't good. I didn't sleep well since I had just forrgotten to have dinner, it can happen at the Fringe. Then I went to a showcase at 12.40am to discover at the last moment that it was a show for children. I panicked, thought of removing the swear words but realized that it would be pointless so I chickened. The MC was forced to pull the show since I was one of the only two acts who hadn't cancelled. And it was a paid show. At the end I think I did the most professional thing, it was more serious for the audience to get the money back than to witness the wrong type of show. And my solo show got a weak reception. No I need to understand why, but the truth is that there is probably no code you can crack once and for all.

It's all about me

2010-08-16T12:15:00.001+01:00

I was reading another comedian's blog where I was mentioned along with many other people and I realized that I have hardly mentioned anybody else in this blog. Maybe it's not a bad thing, at least I'm not in danger of damaging or hurting anybody else. I'll make an exception for a critic: yesterday I bumped into Kate Copstick from the Scotsman, who last year wrote a very good review of my show. Not only she recognised me, but she remembered my name and even pronounced it correctly. We then went on having a conversation in Italian, she told me in fact that she spent some years in Italy. That reminded me how much comedy is about connection and how that applies both to audience and critics. The critics who speak well of me are those with who I establish that connection, those who don't are those with whom that connection fails. This thought should help me to relativise both criticism and praise. She also asked me about this year's show and she told me she'll try to come, although I felt obliged to tell her that this year show is "an extension" of last year's, meaning that I repeat quite a lot of material, so it's probably unlikely that she'll come. Let's see.

Safety in numbers

2010-08-15T11:11:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I had 31 people in: 8 paying full price, 1 senior, 12 half price and 10 for free. It's a good example of market segmentation or, in more socialists terms, from everybody according to their possibility. Income for the day: £155. Having a 2/3 full house: priceless. The theatre companies at my venue seem more comfortable with small numbers and less desperate to increase head count by any means, but stand-up really needs a good audience. Yesterday I had my best show so far, my delivery was lively and relaxed, I got laughs all the way through and I added new bits of bantering and audience interaction. I now understand how important it is to get the audience relaxed about me and me about the audience. Every time I add something new or I change something I wish I could move the clocks back and start the run again, but that is always the problem with learning from experience. And as a spectator yesterday I saw two amazing theatre shows at my venue, one so powerful that one member of the audience fainted and another after the show was sobbing in the arms of the actress. I love the Fringe.

And up again

2010-08-14T18:44:00.001+01:00

I know, this up and down thing must be sound a bit cliche by now, almost formulatic. I must have learned on a blogging course. But today I had a fantastic show. I really pushed hard on the promotion, it was a Saturday and as a tesult I had an almost full house, a lovely, responsive, laughing audience. I hope to defeat the cliche and stay "up" for at least few more days.

A very tough day

2010-08-13T19:43:00.001+01:00

Today for the second day in a row the Half Price Hut failed to display the name of my show. In order to compensate I paid a girl to flyer for two hours in front of it explaning to everybody that the show was indeed available inside. But she didn't seem to understand the task, I was going back to my venue when I saw her going in the direction of the Royal Mile, so I had to stop her and send her back to the Hut, feeling a bit like some sort of Fagin. At the end she did spend two hours there and she gave away a shitload of flyers, probably all to random passers by, given that I didn't sell a single half price ticket. At the end I did a show in front of 6 people, 3 paying plus 3 from another company. There were some tantalising moments of laughter, an indication that a show very strong in all his parts could have worked never the less. Instead these moments were alternated with moments of embarrassed silence. Afterwards I felt as deflated as after the very bad review, with a feeling that the very small audience had made me face for the first time the limits of my show.

Storms and stormings

2010-08-13T12:43:00.001+01:00

Yesterday the weather was really stormy, with violent showers that made flyering very difficult. After the show I faced one this shower to go to another showcase. Afrer the gig rhe MC said "you stormed", so this time you don't have to take my word for it. I guess what's happening is that I'm cashing the dividend in confidence from dealing with an audience on my own for almost a hour in a dark and sweaty room. Doing a short set in a club now feels like a walk in the park. If this is true and if this extra confidence is going to stay then this festival has already succeeded in making me a much better comedian.

It's never too early

2010-08-12T13:56:00.001+01:00

A couple of ideas for next year are already buzzing in my mind and given that apparently this year I wasn't brave enough they are suitably both quite wacky. The first is doing a solo show called "Giacinto Palmieri doesn't even mention that he is Italian". Apart from playing with the paradox in the publicity, I will indeed never mention a single time the subject of my nationality, but I will maybe allude to it, almost-say it but retreat at the last moment, play with it as with some sort of taboo elephant in the room. I might market it as a social experiment on the readiness of the British public to accept a foreign comedian who talks about something different from his nationality and it would also represent a logical next step from the cosmopolitanism I advocate in this year's show. Moreover the constraint would force me to write all new material. The second idea is to run also an evening free showcase called something like "Bad reviews support group" or "Badly reviewed anonymous", where comedians are invited to get out steam and vitriol about the bad reviews they had. I might offer the option of doing so publically or with a KKK-style "hat" (what's the right word?) over their head. The problem with bad reviews is that the rational behaviour would be never to mention them at all, but as with all negative experience a problem shared is a problem halved. And what better way for a comedian to deal with a negative experience than making fun of it? I would really love to hear from you what you think of these two ideas.

Healthy numbers

2010-08-12T11:00:00.001+01:00

You might remember that I wasYou might remember that on Tuesday I was worried about having pre-sold only two tickets for Wednesday. So I released tickets for the Half Price Hut and I went to flyer there, but I found it less busy than I hoped. I didn't have a chance to check the sales report before the show so I waited backstage for the audience to come in fearing an almost empty house. When I was called to the stage I was very pleased to see a relatively well populated house. I checked the report afterwards and discovered that I had sold 21 tickets, only 8 at half price, for a total of £130. Not bad at all, given how competitive the festival is this year. Hopefully it means that the word-of-mouth is taking off, but is also due in part to C Venues having an excellent year, with an almost costant queue at the box office. I had my doubts before but now I'm happy of having chosen them, they have always been helpful and the venue has a very nice buzz about it.

"Good enough" is good enough

2010-08-11T14:29:00.001+01:00

Chortle's review is out:

http://www.chortle.co.uk/shows/edinburgh_fringe_2010/g/18365/giacinto_palmieri_is_trying_to_be_italian/review

Now, let's put all this in perspective: I took the mic for the first time only two years ago. I'm pretty sure that many of my comedy friends, and a big part of me, thought it was simply mad to do a one hour show with so little experience in the most competitive festival in the world. I know many people who are very good but are still far from doing a hour. And I do comedy in my second language and in my spare time. I hope to get more praise and many more laughs, but for today "Good enough" (Chortle) is something I'll write proudly on my inner flyer.

Thanks for the comments

2010-08-11T10:46:00.001+01:00

Just a quick note to thank you all for the very nice comments you are leaving. I haven't replied to any of them so far only bacause I haven't discovered how to do that with the app I'm using, but I'm savouring every single word of them.

And jumping...

2010-08-10T19:25:00.001+01:00

...which is probably the best way to prepare yourself for a new fall, but for now I'm enjoying it. The show today was a real cracker, the 2x1 audience was numerous and they laughed heartly all the way. Unfortunately tomorrow we'll be back at normal prices and I have sold only 2 tickets so far, but it's the first day of the Half Price Hut so I have released 20 tickets for it and I'll push them like cake or sliced bread or whatever the right expression is. Now I really, really, really want my show to be seen.

And galloping

2010-08-10T10:09:00.001+01:00

Indeed I had fun at my how. The audience was very good in number and they seemed to enjoy themselves. Three Italian girls came backstage to give me feedback, the UK-resident among them loved it while the visiting friends confessed to have understood very little. This made me realize how much I was missing the immediate feedback I had last year when I didn't have a backstage where to hide, so maybe I might decide to thank the audience at the exit. After the solo show I rushed straight away to do ten minutes at a showcase, which made me feel very professional: no time to loose here and no need to rest either. The audience was young, nice and responsive. Then I switched my phone on and discovered that a critic from Chortle, the industry's main website, had been to my show. It was probably a good thing that I did not know it in advance, but I'm now happy that he was there and I'm looking forward to the review. I don't mean that I expect only praise this time, but Chortle's reviews tend to be quite articulated and alwayd an interesting reading. Regardless of the review, however, I think I proved to myself that the show is something I can be proud of and that my presence here is not a waste of time, money and energy but a small contribute to one of the most amazing events in the world.

Back on the saddle

2010-08-09T16:08:00.001+01:00

Sorry everybody for the gloominess of yesterday's post. Apparently what I was supposed to after the "fall" was to get straight back on the saddle. I was helped in this by the fact that today at lunchtime I was on a panel show based on the theme of skepticism and rationalism. It was good and I got some of the biggest laughs. I always thought improvisation wasn't my strength but now I think it's a side I should develop more. But above all the experience reminded me that the Fringe is about having fun, only that way you can bring other people to share it and have a successful show. I then went straight to do some flyering. Doing promotion after a confidence crisis feels weird, but it's also the best thing to do: you repeat so many times how brilliant you are that you end up convincing yourself. Which, by the way, makes me a bit worried for the guy flyering beside me, who had the brilliant line: "my show is rubbish". And today tickets are 2x1, it's raining after a glorious morning and the venue is packed with people. It's the right day to have some fun.

*

2010-08-08T21:21:00.001+01:00

The first review is out and I got a real trashing. If I had to write a parody of a bad review exaggerating its harshness for comic effect the result wouldn't fall that far from the actual words of that review. It has left me feeling completely broken. I dont't know what to do next. Going to see a show? What, a brilliant, well reviewed one? A bad one one in which to see the reflections of my fears? Every poster or flyers around me celebrates brilliancy and success. I have just be given one with five stars, for Christ's sake, some people have no shame. I feel like somebody dropped by his girlfriend on Valentine's Day. In Venice. On a gondola. And everywhere I look I can only see teddy bears and heart-shaped cushions.

Busy days

2010-08-08T11:04:00.001+01:00

For yesterday I was planning to take it easy and focus on the preparation, but I forgot that it was the day of Meet The Press. It's an event that seems to exist to remind you of how difficult it is to get any attention from anybody and how fierce the competition is. I queued 1 hour to get in, half hour to talk to BroadwayBaby and 2 hours and a half to talk to the Scotsman. At that point it was time to go to my venue for the show. I felt knackered and not looking forward to standing for another hour. Fortunately being physically tired helped to relax, the delivery was precise and animated and the audience laughed all the way. It was the first performance when I thought I was getting the result I was hoping for. In the evening I took part to a very funnily wacky talk show hosted by Robert Commiskey. It was nice, as it also was Electric Cabaret on Thursday in front of a packed audience who rewarded me with big laughs and a couple of applause breaks, that holy grail of comedians. I'm happy that this year I have been invited to quite a few of these events, not only they are a good chance to promote your show and socialize with the other comedians but they are so much easier than the solo show and they help you to recharge the confidence batteries when it's needed. And on Friday night I watched Richard Herring's show "Christ on a bike", very clever and very funny. Now I have finally got the C Venues pass so I'm planning to see more shows. Stay tuned.

First lessons learned

2010-08-07T00:32:00.001+01:00

Today it went much better. I had around 15 people, I kept the audience light on and that helped a lot, I got many more laughs and the visual connection with the audience helped my confidence. But I forgot a couple of bits and I finished earlier. I came to the conclusion that in these two days I dedicated too much energy to the promotion of the show and too little to the show itself, maybe because I had only 0 and 2 tickets sold. For tomorrow I have got 6, so I will resign myself to the possibility of having exactly that number and concentrate on script alterations and on the preparation of the delivery. The most important thing is that your audience leave happy, regardless of how small it is. Otherwise even the best promotion becomes a lie or at least an unkept promise.

The baptism of fire

2010-08-05T20:54:00.001+01:00

I'm in Edinburgh and I have done my first show. I arrived by train at 12.35 and went straight away to the venue to collect my flyers and print some complementary tickets. The reason for such haste was that I had two reviewers booked in and no ticket sold for today, despite a quite healthy sale of 54 tickets in total. I printed 20 tickets and went flyering like crazy in front of the Fringe box office, fighting for attention with Ivor Dembina and Lewis Schaffer. I mananaged to "sell" all my tickets to people who looked truly determined to come and in fact at the end I did a show in front of probably at least 25 people. Problem is, I have never heard people NOT to laugh so much at a comedy show. I had few chortles but norhing more. Strangely enough I had quite a generous applause at the end. It would be tempting to ask whether they knew it was comedy, but it's never the audience, it's always the message you send them. I think the biggest mistake was not to leave an audience light on. The room is narrow and deep so I could only see a couple of rows, which made impossible to interact with people. My delivery was ok, without any major setback apart from skipping a bit, but I didn't move enough in the space, which is a mistake I make often. Not, after all, errors impossible to correct. Problem is that I can now expect a bad review from ThreeWeeks and The List. Aside from the psychological blow bad reviews can just be ignored, but the "opportunity cost" is big, there aren't so many publications likely to see you after all. It's the revenge of that anonymous "source" who criticized my venue for allowing critics too early, to which I replied in my usual cocky style: it's up to us to be ready. Yeah. And I don't think you'll have a chance to vote for me in future editons of that "Who Is Your Comedy Comedy God?" survey, given the Foster's panelist was in today too. Not so bad, after all if it wasn't for Stewart Lee who would remember Frank Chicken?

Who are they?

2010-07-07T16:57:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I received from C Venues my first tickets sales report, showing that so far 11 tickets have been sold. I know that this probably will sound hardly impressive to most people, but these tickets are the very first I have ever sold for a solo show so I can't manage to be all professional and blasé about it. Considering that my friends are waiting for complementary tickets, the question is: who are these people? Who decided to pay money with so much advance to be sure they will not miss out on my show? Who is, for instance, that single person with a Senior concession who will come to see me on the 24th of August? Given the advance, they are probably all Fringe regulars who receive the program at home, so there is a good chance that some of them might have seen last year's show. Or they might be people who have seen me on the circuit, maybe at the Hackney Empire, after all there were 2,000 audience members there. Or maybe people who were just made curious by the ad and the entry on the program. In any case, I can't help finding it a good omen. As I said before, I have most respect for free shows and I'll do for sure more free shows in the future, but I must admit that the idea of somebody at home taking his credit card out of his pocket to pay for my show (meaning my jokes, meaning my words, meaning my ideas) is just perfect to titillate my narcissism. I know, this reveals just how much of a beginner in this business I still am, I'm pretty sure that Michael McIntyre doesn't try to figure out identity and motivations of every single person who books his 02 Arena tickets, but for now I'm really loving this "first time" feeling. I just hope I'll also have a chance to become jaded.

One month to go

2010-07-04T16:37:00.004+01:00

Tomorrow it will be exactly one month to the kick-off of my next Fringe experience. Maybe it's because I feel much more confident about the level of preparation of my show, but my attitude has recently switched from "shit, only one month" to "shit, still one month". I thought of why I feel so much longing for the Fringe experience and that famous poem by W.B. Yeats came to my mind: An Irish Airman Forsees His Death. I know, the title doesn't sound well wishing for my comedy show, but the feelings the Airman in that poem expresses about war make me think of my feelings about the Fringe. After experiencing something so intense, "The years to come seemed waste of breath / A waste of breath the years behind / In balance with this life, this death". I know, that's a bit extreme, we are not talking life and death here, but whoever has felt the elation and desperation of the Fringe will probably recognise that it's not completely off the mark.

Back to previews

2010-07-01T08:32:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I did the my preview after Brighton. It was for a group of people called Italian Meetup, mostly made of Italians in London and people who want to practise Italian, so I knew it was a particularly suitable audience. Script-wise I had decided to remove all the part when I pretend to be a comedian who pretends to be me, I like the idea but it didn't really work, while of course I added more parts since my target this was 50 minutes. At the end I did 45 minutes after forgetting to do a 10 minutes bit. Considering that I have at least 5 minutes of cuts to do I'm pretty much on target. There were some moments, however, when some weak bits were met by silence and confusion, hence the cuts. But generally speaking I'm satisfied. The links seem to hold much better, the show looks more like a show and less like a patchwork of routines and this is helped a lot by the fact that there are more callbacks. The theme is simpler and much better introduced by a new opening, even if there are still some moments when it carries too much weight. Now the next preview will be in Manchester and it will probably be in front of a less forgiving audience. At this stage, however, what I needed was mainly encouragement and I got plenty of it. There is still work to do but I'm now looking forward to the next previews and of course to the "real thing".

On a positive note

2010-05-16T22:02:00.004+01:00

I think I have hit on a new note in my writing. As I said, the show in its Brighton form was a bit too abstract, so I'm now trying to inject more life into it. On one level this means trying to tell more episodes from my life that might contribute to show, instead of merely explain, what I want to say. On another level, it means to dig deeper into my text and my performance, looking for the "emotion" behind those ideas and for the "attitude" to express them. In a previous post I mentioned one of these emotions, my intolerance for any narrative of "collective identity" and, above all and most topically for this show, of national identity. This is indeed an important emotion to play with, but I have now come to realise that it's just one colour on the palette. Along with this negative emotion, there is also a much more positive one, the great sense of freedom and elation that I felt when I moved to Britain and I discovered that I could re-invent myself. Being funny with positive emotions is always more difficult. How many people, faced with the "rant or rave" exercise they always propose during comedy courses, choose the "rave" option? But of course it's not impossible, for instance you can always exaggerate your hopes and turn them into some utterly surreal, wildly utopian heaven on earth for us all. The challenge is to induce people to laugh at this comic surplus while sharing for a moment the truly felt hope behind it. I guess it's one of the reasons why comedy feels so liberating to both the audience and the performer: nobody asks you to be sensible and moderate in comedy, on the contrary you are invited to follow whatever you feel or think to the their most hellish, heavenly or paradoxical consequences. So, I will indeed rant against nationalism, stereotypes and pigeon-holing. But I want this show to be a faithful account of my experience of moving abroad, which has been by and large a very positive experience. I will also rave, then, on self-determination, individualism and cosmopolitanism or, better, on the experiences that made me feel a bit closer to these grand ideals.

At least 40th Best Stand Up Ever (I should better be)

2010-05-08T15:17:00.003+01:00

I'm finding very difficult to decide what I can and what I can't write on this blog. Problem is, I'm a very open person and I want to use this blog to let out steam by expressing my hopes but also my concerns. But I'm not alone any more, I'm going to run my next Edinburgh show with a professional organisation that even has PR people and I don't want to piss anybody off by saying very un-PR things. I'm sure that Gordon Brown feels exactly the same. By the way, I'm very good at ignoring my own advice, so let's proceed.
My venue confirmed me the definitive timeslot and ticket prices. The timeslot is not bad at all: 5.35pm. It's late enough but not too late, which is good for my "sober" style of comedy (in the sense that it works better when the audience are in that state). But I'm worried about the ticket prices: £8.50 on the first two days, £9.50 on weekdays and £10.50 on weekends, with £1 less for concessions. I really started panicking when The Stand published its program: on weekends my show will cost £0.50 more than Stewart Lee's! I expressed my concern with the venue and their first reply was that this pricing was, according to them, the one better likely to lead to "revenue optimisation". I then pointed out that audience optimisation was equally if not more important for comedy, and they promised to help me with running promotions. Let's see. Well, if I needed extra motivation to work hard towards a really good show now I found it. Besides, I take fewer and shorter pauses and I repeat my lines much less frequently than Stewart Lee normally does. That's better value for money, isn't it?

Of ideas and sentiments

2010-05-05T10:52:00.002+01:00

I have been thinking a lot about the supposed lack of emotional engagement in my show. I think I pointed out the cause for it. I have always thought that behind every idea there is a sentiment, so in a sense all thinking is wishful (or fearful) thinking. I know, for instance, that the only way I can justify my atheism is on the account of my desire for the kind of freedom I can only enjoy in a God-free world. Getting clarity about your ideas is important for your content, but understanding the sentiment behind them is important for your performance, since sentiments can be acted out (theorists of comedy call that “attitude”) and can indeed resonate with the audience.

In the specific example, my idea can be expressed roughly this way:

“Nations are an outdated social constructs that tend to pigeonhole us by means of the prejudices and stereotypes associated with them. Fortunately we can move abroad, embrace a new culture etc. and by means of this contamination we can, at least partially, free ourselves from the burden of our national identity and gain more freedom in determining who we really are”.

I have now realised that the sentiment behind this idea can roughly be expressed as:

“You can stick your fucking flag up your arse”.

Actually, I think that identifying the sentiment is not only good for the performance, but can help you with the writing as well. I have now written some material that sounds much less like a “sociological” lecture and much more than the kind of libertarian tirade you can hear from the like of Doug Stanhope. I need to be careful about that change in tone, I know that my persona is completely different, I don’t drink twelve bottles of beer on the stage during a one hour show and I don’t live in a caravan, unless living in Bethnal Green can count as a sign of bohemian lifestyle. But that “rebellious” spirit is indeed there and is as mine as my passion for philosophical speculation, even if sometimes gets buried alive under too much of the latter. As I said, I don’t want to change my comedy for the only reason of meeting the expectations from audience and critics. But if listening to their reactions and comments can help me to find a comedy that is truly mine at an even deeper level, and if by doing so I can even rediscover levels of myself I tend too often to forget... now THAT would be a great vindication of all the time, money and effort I’m spending in all this bloody comedy malarkey!

And here is the review:

2010-05-03T12:09:00.005+01:00

http://www.chortle.co.uk/comics/g/33594/review?id_review=1950

I think of course he has a point in the fact that my "lofty aims" are often too much enunciated than translated into comic material, which is exactly what has been troubling me all along. Which means, of course, that the least thematic routines are often the funnier. The lack of an emotional involvement is another interesting point, although I think I will always "speak to the head more than the heart". The only thing that really disappoints me is that you spend so much time writing and worrying about your writing, then you ad-lib a couple of location-specific asides and they end up taking a third of the review and risking to undermine your entire point. Well, of course there is a lesson there too, I'll be more careful the next time.

By the way, I'm very happy for Giada's review!

What a difference...

2010-05-03T09:59:00.002+01:00

...few days make! If my Birmingham preview was an underwhelming experience, my two shows at the Brighton Fringe went really well. I had a packed room and standing people on both days. That was quite surprising, since I didn't print proper flyers (only paper cut-outs that looked a bit like the Italian "santini", look them up if you like) and I didn't print a single poster. Most people came from the Fringe program and website, so there must be something right in the new title/image/program entry combination. Of course it helped that it was free, I didn't realize that free shows in Brighton represent a much smaller percentage of the total than in Edinburgh. In any case, the room was full. And the audience seemed to enjoy it, with some big laughs. All this, of course, didn't wash away my concerns completely. But yesterday I changed the finale slightly to make the conclusion clearer and it worked much better. There is a bit at the end that I find important for the theme, so I can't cut it out, but which still doesn't work that well yet. It's not funny enough and it's not clear (or confusing) enough. But on Sunday it worked better, so I'm optimistic that I can salvage it. I didn't know whether to consider these shows as proper shows or as previews for Edinburgh, hence the lack of promotion, but I must say that they worked in their own right. To the point that yesterday I was excited to have Chortle's critic Steve Bennett in the audience. Now, put these words in a closed envelope with the date on it: I have great consideration for him, I think he knows a lot about comedy and I like his very analytical approach. Ok, I said it, before of course knowing if the review will be positive or negative. In any case receiving some criticism at this stage would be very useful for the development of the show, so I'm really looking forward to the review. Stay tuned and you'll the first to know. One last point: I really enjoyed doing the show with Giada Garofalo. Especially yesterday she was in a great form and it was nice sharing the weight with somebody else. Her boyfriend Nelson helped us a lot too. So, in short it was a great experience, now I'm looking forward to Edinburgh even more.

A difficult ride

2010-04-30T13:38:00.003+01:00

There is no doubt about it: the preparation for my festival show is turning into a quite difficult ride. The main reason is that I made the task difficult for myself, not only by increasing the length from 30 to 50 minutes with the aim of re-utilising no more of 30% of old material (at the moment is more something like 50%), but with my “thematic” ambitions. The problem is, while I would have liked last year’s show if I saw it as a member of the audience, I wouldn’t have considered it one of my favourite shows. What I really like, in fact, are thematic shows like those that Richard Herring seems able to produce with reliable quality year after year. Not only, but the lack of any thematic ambition meant that there was a side of myself (better, a side of how I like to see myself) that was completely under-represented. I mean my “philosophical”, analytical side and the “quirkiness” of humour that represents in my opinion its best comedic expression. On the other hand, praise was often centred on my being the “charming” Italian, which I found actually quite surprising. Of course the tension between what you are and what you want to be, or between how you see yourself and how other people see you, is one of the cruxes of life. Even more so in an activity like comedy that is so much about been seen and been judged.
I think there was also a problem of “status” there. In this blog I once commented on an audience review that pointed out how my alleged problems with the English language were scarcely believable in the light of my education and profession. Back then I dismissed the criticism as nonsense, but now I realised that whoever wrote that reviewed was onto something. I mean, the role I unconsciously played was that of the low status foreigner/immigrant/outsider, which is of course the easiest role to play for an Italian in London. I didn’t know it back then, but Milton Jones in his very good book points out how low status tends to work better than high status in Britain and how in America, surprise surprise, seems to be the other way round. Problem is: is it how I see myself and I want other people to see me? Of course not. I’m proud of my ability to play with language and ideas and I do comedy because I like getting laughs by doing exactly that. If I want to be able to express that side of me and be recognised for that then I probably need to play a higher status. My new show, in fact, is written from the point of view of some sort of “mad philosopher” who tries to solve the most difficult questions of identity and free will in fifty minutes of comedy. I must say that I feel much better in that skin.
But will the audience like it too? Sometimes I fear that what I’m doing here is choosing not to be liked for right reasons over being liked for the wrong reasons. It’s probably what happened yesterday in Birmingham during my very preview. There was a group of people at the back of the room who chatted all the time and sometimes heckled me. They really hated my Italian-born London-based pseudo-philosophical smugness. I’m sure they would have loved me joking instead about my inability to pronounce the “h”. Well, you make your choices and you pay the price for them. Those people are clearly not part of my new target audience, I hope that in Brighton and Edinburgh (on the basis of them being festivals, not only of not being Birmingham) I will find a more sympathetic attitude.
Yesterday’s problems, however, were not only of a psychological or sociological nature, but were also due to some structural flaws in my show. The theme gets lost too often and some links are so weak that Anne Robinson would be spoilt for choice. The challenge now is recognising and addressing these problems but without loosing faith in the general approach. Nobody forces me to do comedy and I don’t need or expect to make any money out of it, so there is no point in doing anything else than what feels right. Hopefully I will also get some people to like it for the “right” reasons along the way, but quoting Coldplay: nobody said it was easy.

April is the cruellest month

2010-04-08T08:56:00.001+01:00

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Fringe program deadlines, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull scripts with fresh ideas.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with club spots.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Underbelly
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Urban Garden.
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. [to be continued?]

A surreal experience

2010-02-23T19:22:00.006Z

This was one of the most unexpected experiences that the comedy thingy has brought me so far. An agency I work with pushed me forward for a TV commercial, apparently to promote a satellite TV network, and got me an audition. The role was described as "FOREIGN" and the main skill required "a STRONG native foreign accent". So, I can't say that the reason why I accepted was that I felt flattered, I guess it was more to do with curiosity and the sheer novelty of the experience. So I arrive at the casting studio only to discover that my name isn't on the list. Not only, but the woman managing it at one point even suggests that I could be too old for the role! Great, I'm here to take advantage of ethnic positive discrimination and instead I get to suffer negative age discrimination! I'm already on the way to the tube station when the agent calls me to say to go back to the studio and mention a certain name. So I do and finally I'm in. The waiting room of a casting agency must be one of the weirdest places on earth. People are clustered in groups where everybody eerily resembles each other. At one point I ask when my turn will be and I'm told: "After four more David Bellamy(s)". Apparently it's not a measure of time but it has something to do with some elderly guys (no age problem for them, I guess, if not maybe in reverse) with big white beards. I wonder what the casting to play ME would look like. "Please have a sit with those five Giacinto Palmieri(s), but I'm afraid that your goatee doesn't look messy enough". Moreover, I'm asked to fill a form full of questions like: "Do you know of anything regarding you that could bring ridicule or disrepute onto the product?". "Yes, I once applied for a TV commercial", I think, but cowardly not write. After wasting an hour with a male/female script only to discover there is no female partner available ("the story of my life", I tell the casting people) I'm finally paired with an atypically timid French guy and given a different script, some sort of gangster scene. This is of course a positive turn of events, given that in my comedy I play quite a lot with the Mafia stereotype. We rehearse the scene few times and at last, two ours after my original appointment time, we are asked to perform it in front of the camera, first in English, then replacing the last two sentences with the Italian/French equivalent. How did it go? That's very difficult thing to say, given that I'm not quite sure of what was expected from me. If the point was sounding Italian, then I probably did, but I would have achieved the same result by reading the Queen's Speech. But I had quite fun doing it and it was for me a truly novel experience.

Raising the stake

2010-02-06T11:20:00.004Z

With the Empire final done and dusted, it's now decision time for my next Edinburgh. Actually the two things are related, given that a couple of "observers" from the C Venues came to see me in Hackney, liked me and offered me a slot. The C Venues are the biggest venue outside the "big four". One of my favourite comedian/comedienne was with them last year, to protect his/her identity I'll call him/her "a source". So I asked this source what he/she thought of the experience. At first he/she gave me a negative assessment, but for very interesting reasons. Apart from financial considerations, the main accusation was that they got the reviewers to see the too early, when it wasn't honed yet. Most of us at the Free Festival / Free Fringe struggled to get reviewers at all, and my friend Ashley got a good review at the end of his run, which must have been very frustrating. Being reviewed early is a good thing, it's up to us to be ready for it, sorry source. And then he/she told me a couple of things that really made me sway towards the "yes" side. The first is that performers have free access to all of the other C shows. I really want to enjoy the Fringe as an audience member as much as a performer and last year's C programming was excellent, with "The Trial" being my favourite show of the entire festival. The second was that the girls working at the venues are all very pretty. Oops, I might have revealed the gender of my source here, but hopefully there are enough lesbians in the comedy circuit to leave this quite open. So at the end I decided to accept the offer. This means that next year I will go commercial, if not pro. Part of me feels sorry and even slightly guilty for "betraying" the Free Festival / Free Fringe "movement". I want to make it clear that I don't consider myself in any sense "beyond" this kind of show, in fact I'll do a free show in Brighton in May. I'm still convinced that everybody who thinks that a free show is always a worthless show is an idiot, as not only big names like Robin Ince and Lewis Schaffer have demonstrated, but as I'm convinced that many of my friends will demonstrate again this year. But it's also true that the world is full of idiots and having a bit fewer of them to convince makes for a nice change. But I know myself well enough to be conscious that the main motivation in this decision is sheer vanity. And a very expensive vanity at that. But there has already been a positive consequence. After signing the contract I had an almost sleepless night, fortunately spent not at reading my bank statements, but at writing my script. I heard an interview with Jimmy Carr where he said that what really gets his writing going is fear. Apparently it works for me as well. I'm really raising the stake for this year's Fringe, both in financial terms and in terms of time and energy. Maybe I'll fly too close to the sun and I'll suffer a terrible fall, but maybe I really need this challenge to discover what I'm really capable of. Only time will tell.

And a positive review on Chortle!

2010-01-31T13:30:00.003Z

"The audience took a while to warm to Giacinto Palmieri, perhaps trying to work out if his very thick Italian accent meant he was a character act. But he established his authenticity, winning them round with some nicely quirky material about idioms, offering a unique view of the oddities of the English language. His nerves were his downfall, making him appear slightly uncomfortable on this grand stage, but he had some beautiful lines, including refreshingly biting observations on Italian politics. Palmieri’s brilliant closing line regarding Silvio Berlusconi is proof that there is lots more to come from this engaging comic."

A night to remember

2010-01-31T11:08:00.005Z

Here I am, drinking coffee after coffee trying to overcome the hangover not only of the after-show drinks, but of a truly inebriating night. Yesterday I felt restless all day and and I went to the Empire as early as it was allowed, in time for the 6pm sound check. Not that I had anything to check, I din't even try the microphone. But apparently everybody else was feeling the same, when I arrived, in fact, most acts were already there. So we all spent more than two hours moving relentlessly between the stage, the green room, the dressing room, the water cooler and, above all, the toilets. At the end even those two very long hours managed to pass and the show began. My position in the line-up was fifth in the first half, an almost ideal position, not too "cold audience" and not too "tired audience" either. Performers were asked to wait in the green room until called backstage, so for me the first three acts were just an almost incomprehensible voice coming form a cracking speaker. Amazing how being part of an event means the opposite of having a privileged perspective about it. Even when I went on stage I couldn't see the audience almost at all. I finally realized how packed and beautiful the theatre was when after the interval I joined a friend of mine to watch some acts from the upper circle. It was a breathtaking view and I was happy of not having seen it before my performance. Which, by the way, went very well, I felt concentrated but not tense, did my set without any hiccups and got some big laughs, which I milked in quite a "professional" way with long, reassured pauses. Everything felt a bit detached and remote, though, such a contrast from the terrifying experience of the Comedy Store! So, after seeing two or three acts from the gallery, and enjoying the sight of the audience members pointing at me as an instant and (very) local celebrity, I went back to the Green Room, waiting for the moment when the acts were called back to the stage for the results. And when we did the organizers announced that exceptionally a fourth place would be awarded. Now, I must confess a moment of hubris here: I thought for a moment that a fourth place could be in my reach. At end it wasn't me, it was one of the acts I couldn't manage to see (Andrew Ryan), while the first three (Abandoman, Inel Tomlison and Frisky & Mannish) were truly fantastic acts who normally play two or three leagues above me. I know, if I think that not even a truly original and amazingly well crafted act like Jo Selby's character Tatiana managed to get a placement I realize that it was indeed a moment of madness. But if I wasn't a bit mad I wouldn't be doing this. At the end I had a fantastic night, in an amazing theatre and in front of a wonderful audience, in which I managed to do a performance that did myself justice and demonstrated, I immodestly think, that I deserved to be there. Surely a night I will remember for a long time.

Gong went the show

2010-01-25T23:21:00.007Z

No point trying to sleep, I still have to come down, this stuff should count as a class A drug! So let me update the blog instead. Where to start from? I arrived at the Comedy Store pretty early, I didn't know if it was already open to the public so I told the bouncer at the door: "I'm going to perform tonight". And he went all sarcastic: "Really? You are going to perform? Good luck, mate!". Great, heckled by the bouncer, such a start! The next step doesn't help you to relax either, the corridor in fact is full of all the pictures and the signatures of the greats who have performed there, people like Robin Williams. And when you enter the room you can't help noticing that the walls are plastered with newspaper cuttings, so many of them that the expression "press coverage" seems to assume an almost literal meaning. Are you trying to impress me, Comedy Store? Well, you did. I register and I'm told that I'm 10th in the line-up. I ask if I'm after the break and they tell me that they should manage to fit ten and more acts in the first half. I soon realize the implication: they don't expect many comedians to last long! In fact the show starts and the first couple of acts last around fifty second. Then Stephen Grey comes out and he does brilliantly, surviving the entire five minutes. Good, I think, it can be done. My turn comes and I start really well, the first routine goes brilliantly, with those "long laughs" that you can milk for what seem to last ages, a mixed bless at a competition where you only have five minutes but a total bless at a gong show where you have to buy time. Then the first heckles start and I fire the comeback I had prepared for the occasion. I'm not sure if I should tell this, given that I might "spontaneously" come out with it again in the future, maybe already on Saturday. But nobody really believes that heckle comebacks are really improvised, besides they are the "open source" of the comedy world, in the sense that they are the only jokes that are freely shared among comedians. So here is my contribution to the community. I shouted back at the hecklers: "I have no idea of what you said, we speak English in this country"! Thinking of it, I still can't believe that I had the guts to say that! But it paid off really well, I got a really big laugh and an applause. Then I moved to the idioms routine, the second joke has a long set-up so part of the audience became impatient and started booing. I became more and more confrontational, with jokes about me having "stolen" their job or about the opportunity of starting a fight with an Italian, every time going down a bit along the slippery slope of cheap stereotypes. Part of the audience were still with me, but the booing part were booing more and more loudly and it was more and more difficult to get the jokes across. When it became impossible for me to get heard the gong went off to liberate me from my misery. I had been on stage four minutes, maybe more, and I had one of the most amazing roller-coaster experiences of my life. For more than half of my set all went really well and I felt really close to the five minutes finishing line. I'm not sure what went wrong afterwards, not the being confrontational bit, that was more of a desperate effect than of a cause and the quite confrontational heckle comeback worked beautifully anyway. I'll think about it. In any case during the interval somebody came to me and said that he was the promoter of the Chuckle Club and that I was the only act of the first half he liked (sorry, others). So he asked my number to book me for a spot! I have just been to check their website and they have some of my comedy heroes on the bill, people like Milton Jones and Robin Ince. To whoever booed me tonight: what about THIS as a comeback?

On a roll

2010-01-20T14:15:00.002Z

Yes, these warm-up gigs are going really well. Actually, they are not jut a warm up, you need to take every gig as it was the most important gig in your life, especially if it goes well. Monday I did one for an agency that runs loads of gigs all over the country and towards which I was feeling a bit frustrated, since they only offer me open spots and not many of them either. It was a free gig so at first I struggled to get the attention of the casual and chatty audience, which seems to be a constant for me at this type of gig, I guess mine is not the stage persona that commands immediate attention from everybody. But fortunately I managed to recognise and address this particular elephant in the room. I interrupted a particularly chatty girl, who turned to be the same who had heckled a previous comedian by asking "Where is Quebec?". Yes, it was that kind of audience. So I said: "Ah, you are the Quebec girl", to which she weirdly replied: "How do you know?". So I replied back: "It's part of my job noticing what happens and making clever callbacks", which gained me a big laugh. After that episode I had the undivided attention of the audience. Lesson of the day: if you want attention from somebody you should first demonstrate attention towards them, maybe by showing that you noticed their lack of attention. I wonder if I can apply the same lesson to other fields of my life, but I'm digressing. At the end of the set the pub owner was enthusiastic, it was the third time I had played that club so he told me he had seen dramatic improvements and he added: "I'll tell the people who count", meaning of course the agency that sent me. Let's see. The next gig will be the gong show at the Comedy Show. I know it's probably going a massacre and I'm expecting the worst, but at least I have never been in a better fighting form.

The shape of Fringe to come

2010-01-09T18:39:00.006Z

Time flies like an arrow or and, as my Philosophy of Language professor used to say to highlight the Chomskyan notion that when you hear a sentence you are actively imposing a grammatical structure onto it, fruit flies like a banana. I'm still not sure to have completely digested my last Curry in a Hurry and it's already decision time, or at least ideas gathering time, for the Edinburgh Fringe 2010. January, in fact, is the month when the "venues" open their application process. So here are some ideas I gathered so far:

Last year it took a week to get the reviews and the word-of-mouth, so doing two weeks meant that I had to kill the show in its prime. Despite the bigger investment in time and money I will seriously consider doing the entire three weeks run.
Again in the logic of stepping up my game, I'll aim at writing a "full length" show, which normally means from 50 minutes to one hour.
Given the ambition of the project I need to get there step by step. To this purpose I booked previews at the Brighton Fringe in May and a preview to those previews in Birmingham at the end of April. They will probably be 40 minutes shows, leaving room for expansion in the following months.
I hope to write a show that will be at least 70% new, but there are routines from the last year's show that I'm not ready to let go yet. I will probably let go the phone call (I have always been very ambivalent towards it) and maybe all the part about the citizenship.
The writing of new material is proceeding slowly but steadily. Most of it tends to be about the Italian language v. the English language, so I think that language will become more and more the real focus point.
I'm conscious that I will probably change idea on every one of the previous points.

So, in a sense the adventure has already started... how exciting!

Where were we?

2010-01-06T10:37:00.004Z

I confess: I didn't keep the promise of updating this blog. In my defence I can say that it wasn't just laziness. It's more that the Fringe is such an intense drama, offering a classical narrative of a quest, difficulties and (in the best case scenario) the overcoming of these difficulties. All packed in two or three weeks. For a non-professional comedian, on the other hand. life after the Fringe is a more patchy business. I didn't want this blog to become a list of "I did that gig, it went well", "I did that other gig, it went so and so". Orson Wells once said that cinema should be life with the boring bits left out. So should be blogging.

So, why am I back writing this? Probably because I have the feeling that things are getting interesting again. The first gigs after the Fringe weren't easy at all. Before the festival I knew what my strongest 5-10 minutes were. After doing 20 performances of 30 minutes, however, I wasn't sure any more. I started picking up a different selection at each gig, some of which worked while some worked less, and in most cases the links were quite weak. Besides that, I kept doing bits that worked well in front of a festival audience but not in front of a club audience. As a result, I probably missed some important opportunities.

I probably found my confidence back when I had the chance to do bring my Edinburgh show to the Nottingham Comedy Festival. It went very well despite the small audience and I got a real kick out of it. Besides, some basic adaptation mechanisms started to kick in during my club performances and I resumed some "easier" bits, adding some new "idiom" jokes that seem to work very well. The pick of this process was doing a very successful gig at the Hackney Empire New Act of Year audition, which gained me the qualification to the final. It's something I'm very happy and excited about.

The same week that will end with the Hackney Empire final will also start with the Comedy Store gong show, so I will break twice and in rapid succession my personal record for the biggest audience I will have performed for. A period of almost Fringe-like intensity is going to start. Something with a story that is worth telling.

Max Turner, RIP

2009-12-09T13:11:00.002Z

In my entry for Tuesday the 25th August I wrote:

My "brother in open spots arms" Max Turner came to see me, I have great consideration for him as a comedian and he is a nice and clever man.

Tragically I have just heard that this nice and clever man passed away during the weekend. He will be greatly missed.

The next Wigan?

2009-09-28T01:04:00.003+01:00

Tonight gig was quite a sobering experience. The opening line about my name fell flat (I'm going to drop it), then I did my language material and it went increasingly well, so in normal circumstances I should have been quite pleased. But the truth is that I'm now playing in a different league, it was just 10 minutes but among professional comedians, so expectations were higher and comparisons less forgiving. I guess it's the shock facing every newly promoted team. Will I face relegation? Or, as a truly West Ham fan, will I save myself at the last gig with a joke not really mine and at the price of endless litigation from some Sheffield comedian? Or will I stay in the league and beat Chelsea one day?

My strangest gig so far

2009-09-14T23:00:00.009+01:00

Tonight I went back to the club ran at the bar of the Theatre Royal in Stratford. It's a gig completely different from any other I know: the bar is huge, the night is free and people sit at the tables drinking, eating and often chatting, so you really need to fight for attention. The demographic is very young, very black and very very noisy, with laughter alternated not with the usual silence but with cheers or shouts of protest, American-style. Well, I had the strangest problem ever: I did very few jokes because people were laughing too much and didn't let me continue! It didn't feel as right as you might expect, though, it wasn't exciting or rewarding but felt actually very scary. I guess what made it so scary was the lack of control I was experiencing, the fact that I was getting a different and a bigger reaction from what I had bargained for. Sometimes they were even laughing at the set-ups, so if was clear that the balance between "laughing with" and "laughing at" this time was definitively screwed in favour of the second. I guess it was the opposite of a laugh of recognition: the vision of a geeky, bespectacled, grey-haired Italian with the strongest Italian accent attempting comedy in the most demographically unlikely of places was probably already enough. But fortunately there was a moment when I felt I managed to turn the tables and take control. The MC had done some jokes about Nigerians doing announcements on the tube, so I did my "learning English from the tube announcements" routine adding this time that "the problem with that method is that you pick up a Nigerian accent". That brought the house down, it was probably the biggest laugh I ever had. Now that I think of it, it's as if I inconsciously realised that I was "laughed at" for being so incongrous with the environment and I reacted by turning that very experience into its comical opposite. After the gig, many people came to shake my hand and congratulate me, so I should definitively be very happy and proud of it, but I'm also still perturbed by the experience. It showed me a side of comedy I had never experienced so clearly before. And I wonder if I like that side and, if I do, what that says about me. As Nietzsche famously wrote: "when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you".

The cat is out of the bag

2009-09-10T21:17:00.003+01:00

I uploaded the first (short) extract of my Edinburgh video... click here.

Bipolar reviews and one more role model

2009-09-07T19:22:00.007+01:00

Today I found two more audience reviews: a five star and a one star! The five star is a little masterpiece of criticism that should be taught at school, here it is:

Well done Hyacinth, you've spotted most of our peculiarities that make us uniquely English. Welcome to the club, and thanks for an excellent well presented show. You certainly pulled it off.

This is what I call a happy customer! And now for something completely different:

Italian software developer with a master's in philosophy (sorry, you can't hide from Google if you put your life on LinkedIn and Facebook) complaining about English Grammar. Haha, doesn't understand why we say "fucked up" and not "up fucked". Not funny. Gets fake call from his mama. Sterotypes not funny. One star (cause he was free.)

There a couple of interesting points here. Regarding the fake phone calll, the only thing I have to say is that before talking of stereotypes she should meet my mother. Regarding , instead, the fact that my problems with the English language are not believable given my master's and my non menial job, I'll give the author one more arrow for her arc: I even got an "A" in the Cambridge Proficiency Exam, the highest certification available to non-native speakers. So? You need to know the English language quite well to be able to express its oddities and if I exaggerate my own difficulties I'm just using a classic comic device. To make a comparison that is fresh in my mind, yesterday I went to visit Karl Marx's grave. He was of course a very well educated bourgeois, but this didn't prevent him from giving voice to the sufferings of the working class, to the contrary it's exactly what made it possible. Maybe I'm giving voice to the billions of people who are really struggling with idioms and phrasal verbs and that for this very reason don't have a voice, at least not in English. Broken English speakers of the world, unite!

Looking in the mirror

2009-09-05T15:26:00.005+01:00

For three days the files of my recording have been sitting on my hard disk. The excuse for not watching them is that I was waiting for the DVD. Today the DVD arrived and I had no more excuse. What made me so terrified is that I remembered a good show, although a nervous and far from flawless one, and I was afraid of being disappointed. At the end I decided to take the plunge and I actually watched it twice. So, what's the verdict? I was definitively nervous, I stumbled on a couple of jokes and - the most serious flaw - I completely forgot the "pubs" joke, while leaving a callback that now seems completely meaningless. From a performance point of view, I was full of ticks and overplayed facial expressions, even if maybe that made me funnier. And for God's sake, I could have shaved, even if that shade gives me an almost Doug Stanhop-ish aria of neglect. I don't think I have ever looked at my own image for so long and so up close, comedy really is a journey of self discovery. By the way, the response of the audience was almost always very good, there is no dead bit and the end worked very well. Bron, the producer of the film, made a very good work. So what am I going to do with it? I still haven't decided whether I want to put it on YouTube or not.

I got booked for my first PAID gig!

2009-09-04T23:11:00.002+01:00

Yeah! This feels great... like a breakthrough of some kind. And all I had to do was replying to the promoter's ad including a link to Kate Copstick's review, which seems to open doors like some sort of magic key. It'a Friday evening, a closing slot and £ 40, not bad for a first paid gig.

The shape of things to come

2009-09-03T20:22:00.002+01:00

Apparently, there is (comic) life after the Fringe after all! In these few days back in London I have already a) booked a slot for another festival (Nottingham, 9th of November) and b) agreed the first line-up for my new comedy club in Bethnal Green (Gallery Cafe, 5th of October). I saw the last-minute vacancy for Nottingham in a forum on Chortle (the industry bible), I applied and discovered that being a non-free show it had to last an entire hour. So I proposed to Ashley Frieze to share the slot and he agreed! We are going to call it "The Anglo-Italian Job". So, my show will soon have a chance to see the (spot)light again. Not only, but I decided to book myself as the headliner for my new comedy club, so I will do 15-20 minutes out of it. Before Edinburgh I thought that I should play the truly professional promoter and book somebody better known and more experienced than me, but one of the reasons why I did the festival is to convince promoters that I could do longer slots and apparently I managed to convince at least one of them. Moreover, if I add a bit of schizophrenia to my egocentrism I can probably manage to become a bit more polycentric!

Happy ending

2009-08-30T15:21:00.006+01:00

So, here I am, on the train back to London. The last performance went again really really well, I thanked the audience for these two wonderful weeks and the voice was indeed broken, but I avoided tears. I said goodbye to Ashley Freeze, who commented: "You have done so well this week, you should really be proud of yourself". Bless him, his support and advice have been really precious for me, I'm sure we'll meet again "on the circuit". I'm sorry that I didn't say goodbye to "Moz", his dark humor and hints of cynicism have been a nice corrective to my sometimes rose-spectacled view of the Fringe. By now he is probably celebrating not being a cannibal any more and he is probably called Michael or something like that. If you are reading this, please get in touch. After the show I felt completely empty, depleted of the purpose that propelled me like a bullet for the past two weeks. The sight if me might have been included into those "ghost tours" they sell to tourists. Which reminds me of the best piece of involuntary humour I heard in ages. Two tourists told me, completely staight-faced: "We went on a ghost tour but it was all hot air". By the way, if you want to see a real ghost in Edinburgh just look for a Fringe performer who has finished his run. That's why I decided to leave straigth away, I didn't want to be an undead in a place that saw me so concentrated and full of purpose. See you next year, Edinburgh, I can't wait. Regarding this blog, I decided to keep it alive, you might be curious to see what happens next. And I'm as curious as you are.

I was wrong: it's going better!

2009-08-29T16:47:00.007+01:00

One more broken record today: £ 65. I know, this is starting to sound like the Financial Times, but "Moz" did tell me: we should float you on the stock market! Behind those numbers, however, they are laughs, compliments, people leaving my show satisfied of having spent with me half-hour of their very precious Fringe time. I was particularly happy that today's was a good show since Anthony Dewson was in the audience, he is a brilliant comedian and a very good and enthusiastic promoter. Anthony, if you see Max Turner please tell him that I'm not a deluded man. That disastrous Monday performance looks so far away today, as if it happened to somebody else, but I need to remember "history" in order not to repeat it. As always with holidays, when things start to go really well it's time to go home. Tomorrow I'm going to thank the audience. I just hope I'm not going to break down in tears like an old drama queen.

It couldn't go better!

2009-08-28T14:52:00.003+01:00

Sorry for the delay in the updates, but I have been very busy. By the way, it's going really really well, today I broke my collection record: it's now £ 54. I know what you are thinking: you can never trust comedians, they are only in it for the money. But the truth is that money is the easiest thing to quantify, easier than laughs or (for a non-ticketed show) even people. And I have recognized a reliable correlation between the size of the laughter and that of the collection. Today the room was almost full, there were maybe 5 or 6 seats available. The flyer with the reviews stapled to it is working miracles, even if it means that I have to spend an awful lot of time cutting and stapling. Which explains the length of this post. Please stay tuned, anyway, now that my friends Laura and Luisa have left (thanks again for the great company) I'll try to update this more frequently.

"Giacinto has charm as Tuscany has wine" (The Scotsman)

2009-08-25T18:40:00.003+01:00

Hectic days... I have got a review from The Scotsman, in the person of Kate Copstick, who apparently is a very respected and influential critic. It's only free stars, but it's full of praise and quotable sentences. My show is "lovely" and "a charming, entertaining Fringe experience". Even if the opening seems to suggest that I'm not as smart as Jimmy Carr... I have never felt more offended. Anyway this review is great for me, all comedians consider Kate Copstick one of the biggest catches as reviewers go and it confirms three important things: 1) I exist; 2) I'm really doing a show at the Fringe; 3) my show is not a complete irrelevance. By the way, judge for yourself, here it is. And the four stars review for BroadwayBaby from Catherine Paver has been published on the first page of the printed edition. Catherine, if you are still reading this, thank you again and congratulations: you are now a printed critic. These good reviews came to save my show from the lowest point in its history, which was yesterday. I had finished my flyers and very few people came and I let an unplesant off-stage event just before my show affect my on-stage performance, something that many productions of "Pagliacci" should have taught that it's not supposed to happen. My "brother in open spots arms" Max Turner came to see me, I have great consideration for him as a comedian and he is a nice and clever man so I was sorry to disappoint him. I want to thank him for coming but I want to thank even more the bilions of people in the world who made the right decision of not coming yesterday. But after the good reviews, today I had an almost full room again and a good performance. And Mario Pirovano came to see it and he seemed to enjoyed it too. I have also 2000 more flyers and I stapled the reviews to some of them, thanks to the precious help from my friends Laura and Luisa who are here from Italy after having spent few days in my London flat. Their company is very important, it helps me to spend some nice non-Fringe realted time with intelligent and lovely people and to see things in a better perspective. I need to go flyering now... but things are really looking great!

Back to normality but loving it

2009-08-23T13:38:00.002+01:00

I was a bit worried about how I would take the climb down from yesterday's peak. Sunday is the toughest day for my slot and this morning there was nobody around. The audience was small, but better than what I feared, and they absolutely loved it. Equally importantly, I absolutely loved doing my show. And there was somebody taking notes all time, at least when she wasn't busy laughing, which makes for a very promising combination. The only drama of the the day was that when I arrived the room wasn't ready, all the chairs were on the stage and I had a hell of a time disposing them in rows. This happened because the show before mine was canceled. The saddest thing on the Fringe is seeing a show failing. Somebody made a mistake on the program with the ending dates, so Dough from "A sketchy show" had nobody coming at all yesterday and I guessed today he decided to pull the plug (but don't take my word for it, I don't want to add to his woes). There is no Schadenfreude there, we are really supporting each other, apart from the practical advantages of having a successful show before yours. Dough, if you are reading this, keep it up, it will go better next year.

Full house (almost) and triumphal show on the day of the recording... the God of the Fringe really exists!

2009-08-22T14:07:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I was sort of praying for something that would give this show a real boost. Well, one of the reasons why I don't believe in praying is that it stops you from working hard to achieve your objectives, so what I did instead was running the heaviest flyering campaign so far. The main stimulus was that I had agreed for the show to be video-recorded today and I needed a full house. And the strategy worked beautifully, besides maybe the famous word of mouth is starting to kick in as well. So I had an almost full house (only the front row was empty and few seats here and there), probably the biggest crowd seen this year in that room at any time, let alone at lunchtime. I asked the audience to wait five minutes longer because I didn't want any late comer, so when I went on stage somebody commented on the size of the audience and the long wait by shouting: "it should better be good"! As a result, for the first time in ages I was very nervous, which in a way is a good thing given that I'm not doing this for the comfort of safety, so unfortunately I ruined my opening line. But I recovered very well and the show was a triumph. Well, at least this time you will not need to take my word for it: I'm sure I will pester everybody I know (and many I don't, such as comedy promoters) with requests to watch this recording. To use one of those beautifully graphic expressions that the English language is so full of: I'm as happy as a pig in shit.

An expetional normality, friends in the audience and the wait for an (happy?) event

2009-08-21T15:45:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I wrote that things were starting to become really interesting, but today I'm worried that this blog might become quite boring. Truth is that I'm becoming reliably good. Today I had an audience of 15-20, which I learned to consider good even if not exceptional, and the show went well. The only event worth of notice was the visit of my friend and ex impro coursemate Fiona with her husband. Now, I really need to apologize with Fiona's Husband for never remembering his name, but my short memory with faces and names was pointed out during the show by an audience member after I asked her origins even if she had already told me she was an Irish woman living in Italy when I gave her the flyer. I was quick to reply: "I'm sorry, but with such a big fanbase...", which gained me a big laugh and even a hint of applause. By the way, Fiona and Fiona's Husband were very supportive, I know they are reading this so I want to thank them again. I guess to shake things up I really need that bloody review. If I'll ever have children I don't think I'll wait for the birth of my first child with the same trepidation. I hope that if and when it will come out it will not have too many stars missing, but I'll love it never the less. What are all these reviewers doing all day? I'm coming to the conclusion that the Fringe is some sort of Egocentrics Anonymous. Everybody in turn walks to the centre of the room and shouts: "My name is XXX and I'm at the centre". Then they look at each other and realize that they can't all be right at the same time. And they recover. Well, sort of, otherwise they wouldn't come back to the Fringe to rock the world again with their shows. And the fact that I'm an egocentric doesn't mean that the world doesn't really turn around me. The problem is convincing it that it does. One audience member, and one critic, at a time.

I'm (almost) a celebrity: never get me out of here

2009-08-20T13:43:00.003+01:00

No ifs and no buts, and no false modest either: today it was a triumph! I was very worried because this morning we had the heaviest rain so far. It seems to be this way every day: it rains in the morning, then the sun comes out after my show, the bastard. I was expecting an audience of frogs and snails or no audience at all. Instead I had a good audience, full laughs all the time, many compliments at the end and a collection of £38. Then the really amazing thing happened: after the show two people came to me with my flyer and a pen. I looked at them with a puzzled expression and asked what on hell they wanted me to do. Well, wasn't that obvious? They wanted me to sign the flyer! And so I did. By the way, I really hope there was a reviewer in the audience today. No, no review yet. Need to go now, I'm going to check on eBay the prize of my signed flyers. Stay tuned, things seem to become really interesting.

A good lemonade, some amazing people and a nightime adventure

2009-08-20T11:34:00.002+01:00

Yesterday (I'm posting this before today performance, so this is the delayed yesterday post) I had 15 in, but I think I really managed to squeeze every single drop of laughter from such a small lemon. People even asked if I perform in London so they can come and see me again! What they don't know is that another thing I squeezed to the last drop for this show is my material, but hopefully more lemons will come in the future Two fellow performers came to see me, including Ashley Freeze, a very clever comedian, he seemed to love it. The other performer was the guy behind the show "Moz and the meal" and I returned the favour by going to see his show, a one-man-cum-recorded-voices about the love pains of a cannibal with the habit of eating his girlfriends. Half of the audience walked out, but I found it very powerful, original and amazingly well done. He told me that he had nothing to do with theatre before, but sets himself a challenge every every, so last year was running a marathon, this year was writing, producing and interpreting a play. Amazing. Even more amazing is Lynn Ruth Miller, a 76 years old lady from California who is doing three shows a day, one of which apparently involving her doing a striptease! I saw her other show, where she plays a role more traditional for grannies, that of telling stories. It was beautiful and moving and the very existence of somebody likes her is a bell sounding cheerfully for all of us. Funnily enough, I had a (real) telephone conversation with my mother, who asked me if it wasn't too tiring doing a 30 minutes show every day! She always manage to be stranger than my comic fiction. By the way, the Free Festival is full of very good shows and I'm really proud of being part of it. Generally speaking, there is a very nice atmosphere among Fringe performers. Yesterday I danced in the street with the cast of some musical and they gave me a stick saying "I danced with strangers". I met again a couple of them today and they celebrated me as an old friend. And I continue to bump into Mario Pirovano, one of the most famous Italian actors. Yesterday we were discussing how our shows were going, a bit like Cristiano Ronaldo comparing football notes with the guy from the pub team. I have been pushing him quite a lot to come to my show, it would really be great, I have even some jokes prepared for the event. Let's see. And the other night a funny episode happened involving another performer. My hostel is composed of flats of four rooms sharing the toilet and kitchen. I arrived at the hostel at 1am and I confused room number and flat number, so I tried to open the door of the wrong flat and it got stuck in! Not only I couldn't enter my room, but given that 1am is very early for most people at the festival I was potentially preventing other four people from entering theirs! After I don't know how many attempts with the key the door of the flat opened and the comedian Jo Romero came out of it in her pajamas. She is a good looking woman, who appears naked on the cover of her show's poster, titled "Touched for the very first time". I explained the situation and she managed to unstuck the key, adding to my humiliation but also to my relief. I said that waking her up was my revenge for covering part of one of my posters with one of hers, she weirdly replied that if I found a poo on my bed I could be sure of the origin. Such a classy lady. It was like we were rehearsing for a double act and it was actually good fun. By the way, pity that the English language uses the act of turning a screw as a metaphor for sexual intercourse, unlike the Italian language, which instead uses the act of turning a key. I know, a metaphor lost in translation doesn't make much of a kiss-and-tell story. But this blog, after all, is all about sublimation.... sorry, I meant "comedy". Maybe I should do that show on Freud after all.

Small audience happens... and how to deal with it

2009-08-18T13:58:00.004+01:00

Today my audience was made of only 7 people, but I didn't let it affect my performance and they seemed to appreciate it, so I'm satisfied. Coping with a small audience is an essential skill to learn if your slot is at 12.45, you are at the first Fringe and nobody has ever heard of you. By the way, yesterday I stayed in my venue to watch Ashley Freeze's "Seven deadly jokes", a very clever and funny piece of meta-comedy about the different types of joke. I always seem to like Jewish comedians, so given also my longtime interest in Freud maybe I should write a show called "I wish I was Jewish. Or the envy of the circumcised penis". By the way, tonight I'll hook up with Anthea Neagle to support Phil Higgins at the "So you think you are funny competition". It will be a nice chance to catch up with the other members of the open spots class of 2009. Not much more to say for today... ah, still no review.

Back on a high... desperate self-promotion apparently works!

2009-08-17T15:22:00.002+01:00

Today I had an almost full room, people seemed to like the show, I was pleased with my performance and there was somebody at the back looking suspiciously like a critic (who, I'm afraid to say, didn't laugh much, but maybe he thought it would have been unprofessional). What turned things around was that yesterday afternoon I did a great promotion campaigne. I changed my style completely, with chat-up lines such as: [to people surrounded by flyers] You don't to seem to have enough flyers, do you want one? [to people reading the program] Let me guess... you give the impression of looking for shows to watch... right?... so clever of me. Stuff like that. Then I went on with a pitch about the show and with a bit of banter. They played along well, I enjoyed it very much and it seemed to work. In the evening I went to see Richard Herring's show (brilliant!), the queue was too long for the venue, they had to split it in two and they made a mess of it, so I shouted with mock rage: "These things don't happen at MY show!". People were curious, I did a self-deprecating pitch explaining why I didn't need crowd control at my show and gave a few flyers. What makes the Fringe so special is the desperation of the performers to promote themselves, which means that they (we, actually) are performing all the time, with every place becoming a stage and every crowd an audience. Going back to Richard Herring, as for all his shows he gave away a free program asking for donations for some charity. I couldn't even hear the name of the charity, but I was very happy to give my contribution to the promotion of the cause of bucket collections. Speaking of which, today it was £33, all in coins. My trousers are so weighted down that I get mistaken for a teenager. Sorry, I need to go flyering now... stay tuned!

Small audience, some awful comments and the meaning of "beer money"

2009-08-16T14:11:00.004+01:00

I have heard many times that the life of a Fringe performs is all ups and down, a bit like the city itself. And my God if it's true. Yesterday I finished on a high note: in the afternoon I met Dizzy High, a regular compere with Laughing Horse, and he offered me to play the experienced opener in a new acts gig starting at 11.30pm. I accepted, even if I was a bit worried of facing a rowdy crowd, and I really stormed it. It gave me a nice confidence boot before today luchtime performance. The audience was much smaller, 1/3 of the room instead of 2/3. Among them, there was a lovely elderly couple of typical English Italy lovers, those who in Italy were brilliantly lampponed by the comic Enrico Montesano, who played an old English lady in Italy who found everything "molto pittoresco", very picturesque. There were also two young couples who really seemed to enjoy the show. The performance was much slicker than last time, but I didn't manage to get full laughs. When I was dismantling my stuff I overheard a middle age woman, who stayed in the room for the next show, saying that "this one was awful". The Italy lovers came to me after the show and asked in puzzlement why on hell I decided to become a British citizen. They seemed to be very disappointed by those aspect that sounded un-Italian, probably to their ears even treacherous. Well, I have a Union Jack on the seat of my Vespa and I call myself Anglicized, what were they expecting? The comedic equivalent of "A room with a view"? Bloody Italy lovers, if they like Italy so much why don't they move there leaving this country to those who really like it? Maybe I will fund the NBNP: Naturalized British National Party. I'm sorry, they were a really lovely couple and they made the effort to come to my show, it's not their fault if it wasn't the right one for them. I did the collection (£20) and somebody by mistake put the first coin in a used beer glass and the other followed suit. Which, I guess, gives a completely new meaning to the expression "beer money". Boom boom. Well, what can you expect on a down day?

Good audience! Big laughs! £37 Collection! Over the moon!

2009-08-15T13:50:00.007+01:00

So much for the suspense. Pity, I could have really played on it, since the day didn't start well at all. I didn't sleep much, I wasn't feeling in the mood and it was raining really very heavily. When I left my hostel there was nobody around, I had a first coffee in a bar that was completely empty, then I went to the Dome and there were only families waiting for the kids shows to start. I then decided to go to one of my favorite cafes, the Kilimanjaro, and it was packed with people reading the program and planning what show to see! Until then I didn't realize how close to my venue it was. So I decided to spend there the time before my show and to flyer every single fellow punter, stressing that the show was around the corner, apart from being free and at a suitable time. It worked amazingly well, my room was 2/3 full and it seemed as if the entire Kilimanjaro crowd have just decided to move to the Counting House! The show itself went well, even if I forgot the second part of the phone routine, the one with the self-deprecating joke. No prize for the first who mentions Sigmund bloody Freud. I got the laughs, received many compliments and ended up with an amazing collection of £37, that fellow performers told me it's exceptionally good. Now the sun is shining (really!), the birds are singing (I presume) and the Fringe is the most amazing event in the world.

Veni, vidi [to be continued]

2009-08-14T20:00:00.007+01:00

Here I am, sitting on a sofa in the Pleasance Dome, at the heart of the Fringe! I have being looking forward to this for so long that when I got off the train I was almost tempted to kiss the platform. Pity that, after what everybody told me was a week of sunshine, my arrival coincided with a day of proper Scottish pissing down weather. The queue for the taxis was too long, so I decided to walk to my hostel in Cowgate, where I took a couple of wrong turns, so when I arrived I was drenched. I found the room quite nice, but I just left my suitcase and went straight to the The Counting House, my venue. On the way I met Paul Foot, a well known and brilliant circuit comedian, so I said hello. I kind of remembered reading on the his website the sentence "I don't have fans, I have connoiseurs", but the word "connoiseur" failed me, so I found myself shaking his hand while saying simply: "I'm not a fan". Fortunately he is a clever guy, so he understood from my embarrassment that I was looking for something else to say and he volunteered the second half of the sentence. Not much later I met Robert Comminskey, an American comedian from my London entourage of open spotters. He was very nice and told me that he would come to see my show. I asked him if he had done any gig and he replied that he performed in a showcase run by two common friends, who after quite a few reminders from me had failed so far to offer me a slot. Well, I did write in my very first post that this is starting to feel like a community but that this doesn't mean that there will be no envy or jealousy! Grrrr. But meeting two people I knew in my first hour in Edinburgh was a nice welcome.

So I went to the Counting House and I really liked the place! In the bar I met the performer of the show "Katrina and the Wifes" and I decided to go and see her show in the Lounge, the very same room where I will perform mine. It's a little room but quite nice, "intimate" I guess is the word. It was quite full, but I was very surprised by the composition of the audience. They were mainly regulars of the pub downstairs, Scottish and probably enjoying their retirement. I hope I will get more festival goers. The performer was very good in the audience banter and made the most of the heckles, again something I hope will not happen too much during my show. I enjoyed the performance, even if her character material didn't really talk to me. I then flyered the audience of Lewis Shaffer and of another couples of shows and I put few posters on. Then I came to the Pleasance Dome to flyer here, I had a curry in one of the bars and decided that I was running like crazy and I needed a break, so I started to write this post. I really feel the buzz of Fringe. The next post will be after my first show... keep your fingers crossed.

Because I can

2009-08-14T10:36:00.010+01:00

Here I am, on my London Kings Cross originating train, feeling a bit like Harry Potter in his first journey to Hogarts or whatever it's called. I must admit that I don't have much to tell you that I didn't have last night, given that I spent sleeping most of the time in between, but it's my first journey with a netbook on a train with free Wi-Fi. So, it's a bit like that old joke that goes: "Why do dogs lick their own genitals? Because they can". I'm now entering Petersborough station, how exciting! Behind me there is a little girl that talks all the time with her ear-piercing high pitch. Once in this country they used to say that "children must be seen, but not heard". What happened to that? It's all fault of these bloody foreigners polluting the culture with their heart-bleeding liberalism. By the way, the train is full of people with Fringe programs and I'm almost tempted to point them in the direction of my show. And I'm happy that the train is so packed. The beauty of obsessions is that in their light everything starts to make sense. The greed of Wall Street bankers was a necessary step towards the creation of an environment more suitable for free Fringe shows. The increase in the number of new swine flu cases stopped jut in time. Global warming can only be good for Edinburgh. I'm still not sure how to explain the Iran crisis and the MP expenses scandal, but I'm working on it.

Trust me, I'm a promoter

2009-08-13T21:35:00.004+01:00

Here I am, ready for tomorrow 10am train to the city of the (often broken) comedy dreams. I have just seen a Facebook update from the comedian who has the slot before mine in the same room: he had an audience of 3! I hope that 45 minutes longer for people to get to the venue and a the display ad on the program that coasted me a small fortune will make a difference, but I intend to start flyering like crazy as soon as I arrive in Edinburgh. People who have never performed think that big crowds are scary, but of course in comedy a small crowd is much scarier, since you don't have the "critical mass" to get a proper laugh. And of course you do a festival because you want your show to be seen by as much people as possible. Let's see how it goes.

By the way, yesterday I wanted to email some comedy promoters with news of my show, so I did a Google search in that sense and I stumbled upon a Gumtree ad from a cafe JUST AROUND THE CORNER FROM WHERE I LIVE that was looking for somebody to organize a regular comedy night! They say that having your own regular night is the best way to improve, so I replied to the ad and I went to the cafe to meet the person behind it. The meeting went well, we are still waiting for the final OK from the bar owner but apparently things are looking good. We would start with a "pilot" night in mid September and see how it goes. I don't think I'll choose myself as the MC given that I don't have any experience in that role and that I'm not sure I'm cut for it, but I'll definitively book myself for a good slot. And I'm equally intrigued by the chance to exercise my taste in booking the other acts. Now I have one more mission to accomplish in Edinburgh, that of the talent scout. Comedians reading this, you should better brush up your act!

Meditations on an unpacked suitcase

2009-08-12T21:25:00.005+01:00

Starting to pack my suitcase for Edinburgh, I was suddenly hit by the realisation of my complete inability to fold shirts. Which, I thought, is not a great loss, since I don't know how to iron shirts either, so I don't have that much to lose by not folding them properly. Which, I then thought, is not a problem either, since I have a joke in my set about my inability to iron shirts, which wouldn't be credible if during the show I wore a perfectly ironed and folded shirt. So, I wondered, am I writing my jokes and then adapting my life to suit them? Of course it's more likely to be the other way round, I'm using as a source of comic material those aspects of my life in which, how to say that, the surface of my sometimes irritating perfection shows some utterly human and ultimately endearing cracks. But does this mean that I'm now condemning myself to never fill these cracks? Is this a Faustian pact where I accept the damnation of being laughable in exchange of the power to be funny? Is comedy the ultimate form of self-indulgence? And how many socks for two weeks?

My first review ever!

2009-08-11T23:14:00.009+01:00

This Catherine Paver (never met before) came to see my preview for the Italian speakers group and after the show sent me an enthusiastic and articulated email. It was already almost a review, so I asked her if she wanted to write an audience review for BroadwayBaby, a site dedicated to such things. And so she wrote what happens to be my first review ever. I quote it here:

Giac doesn't power-drill his jokes into your head or swear at you every nine seconds. His natural delivery just lets the jokes hit you all the harder. The only reason I gave this show 4 stars is that I think the best of this comic is yet to come.
If you're tired of being shouted at about bodily functions and you want something clever as well as really funny, go to this. It's like spaghetti served with laughing gas. Free. What's better than that?

Good points

I saw a London Preview of this show and laughed almost all the way through it. Intelligent, observant and true, the excellent material is delivered in a likeably relaxed way to the audience.

Bad points

A slight loss of pace in one section about a mobile phone call.
Apart from that, my only criticism is that I wanted it to go on longer! Two bowls of spaghetti are better than one.

Thank you very much, Catherine!

The story so far

2009-08-10T20:17:00.007+01:00

Still days of waiting (not my strongest skill). So, let's resume the recap where we left it last time. As you might remember, I had a half an hour slot booked for Edinburgh! Yeahh! Now the only little problem was to fill the half an hour, give that at the time I had only a 5 minutes set. As a punter I have always loved themed shows, like those that Richard Herring is so good at. My first thought, consequently, was doing such a show. I have always been interested in the subject of language and I stumbled across the idea of Globish, i.e. the idea that what non-native English speakers speak is not English but a completely new language, that should be taught as such. This idea has been formalised in a book called "Speak Globish, not English" by a French guy called Jean Paul Nerriere. According to this guy, even the native English speakers should start studing this new language if they don't want to remain isolated from the rest of the world! I found this idea brilliantly wacky so I came out with the project of a show where I would teach the poor native English speakers how to "unlearn" their own language in order to escape their pitiful linguistic isolation. Writing it now, I still find it a brilliant idea. But I wrote a routine about the subject, I tried it in front of some friends and it didn't work. The problem with themed shows is that you can't really split them in chunks of 5-10 minutes, so if this is duration of the slots you are given by comedy clubs you'll have no way to test and improve the material. I guess that the way Richard Herring and the other comedians specialised in themed shows overcome this problem is by doing a lot of full length previews. But when I booked my slot I didn't have any preview booked, at the end I managed to organize only three of them, one of which at a friend's flat during a party! Now I feel quite well prepared never the less, but thanks to the fact that in the meantime I changed my strategy completely. I decided to simply "sew" together my routines with the (quite loose) thread of identity. Not only this allowed me to reuse well tested material, but also to test the new material in chunks of 5-10 minutes. Writing a themed show from scratch was probably a challenge too far at this stage. Maybe I'll do it for the next Edinburgh, if I survive this one. So, amazingly, from the most narcissistic, solipsistic and megalomaniac of activities I actually got a lesson in humility. I just hope I'll not get too many more of those.

How did I get here?

2009-08-09T11:18:00.008+01:00

These are quiet days, I have no more preview and I will not travel to Edinburgh until Friday. So, given that this blog started in a quite abrupt way, I thought of using this time to do a bit of recap.

I have been doing stand-up comedy for a year, having started in July 2008. Everything started from the writing. I have always liked writing, including humoristic stuff. A couple of Christmas seasons ago I wrote a satirical piece about the British tradition of office Christmas parties, a spoof of a serious anthropological study. I tried to send it to a friend of mine from my work account, but instead I sent it to the MD of my company, who shared the same first name! Instead of firing me, he decided to read it in front of everybody during the Christmas party of my office. He said that it was something he received from an employee, but he decided not to mention my name, completely misjudging my desire for attention. He got some good laughs, which of course pleased me, but I was also irritated by the fact that somebody else was getting the laughs for what I wrote and the MD of my company, of all people, I mean on top of ripping the fruit of my day work! It was time to take control of the means of comic production.

Meanwhile, I was discovering the existence of comedy clubs: I could spend few quid and have a good laugh, at the same time stretching to the limits my English comprehension skills by being confronted with exaggerated accents, audacious puns and obscure cultural references . A friend of mine invited me to an open mic Wednesday at the Comedy Cafe in Shoreditch, so I discovered that there was such a thing. And I also discovered that I wanted to give it a try. By the way, a month ago I did play the Comedy Cafe and for me it was a very special night, since in a sense it was where "everything began". My God, I'm falling into every cliché of the "celebrity" autobiography! At least I'm not using a ghost writer.

So, I decided that to gain the required confidence I needed to join a course. At the end of my course I did a showcase, I got the first laughs and I was completely hooked. The next major step was doing the Laughing Horse New Act of the Year competition, where I reached the semi-finals. This gave me some visibility with Laughing Horse, so when I discovered that they were running the Free Festival I applied for a half a hour slot. And here I am.

Blowing my own trumpet

2009-08-07T20:16:00.026+01:00

Warning: the present post contains some shameless gloating and scenes of a self-backslapping nature. If you think this might offend you, stop reading now. On the other hand, if people were training for a marathon, would you tell them that it would be more considerate, healthier and more pleasant to have a gentle, short stroll? Now consider that the Fringe, with its thousands of one-person shows and everybody's constant struggle to get noticed, is the Olympics of Narcissism. With just few days to go I should practise the required skill, shouldn't I?

All this to justify the choice to copy here the amazing comments I got from some of those who took part to the other night preview. Here they are:

Excellent evening - the comedian was so witty and was even better than I had expected! He was a spot-on choice and made everyone laugh so much - lovely, clever jokes about language and culture. Fantastic fun.

Good venue, great comedian, definitively a good laugh!.

I particularly admired Giacinto's verbal virtuosity.

The stand up comedy was great fun. A huuuge THANK YOU! goes to Hycinth aka Jack for having delighted us with his comedy.

. And now the most topical of the comments received:

Compliments to hyacinth giacinto who iam sure would blow his own trumpet if he could reach it.

What can I add? There will be a time to come back to earth, exercise some serious self-criticism, maybe even some soul searching. And that time might come sooner that I would like, maybe already after the premiere. But bare with me for now.

Just like the Azzurri

2009-08-05T23:41:00.010+01:00

Before tonight preview I was in a very paradoxical psychological situation: I was worried of not being worried enough. This takes a bit of explanation. I'm probably one of few people who have always loved exams and job interviews, that kind of situation that really asks you to perform well. I'm a like the Italian football team, that always plays badly in the first round, waiting for the stakes to become high enough before really start playing. Generally speaking this is of course a blessing, since it means that your best performances also happen when it really matters. But the negative side is that you need to keep the stakes rising, otherwise you risk a drop. So, after last week preview, I wasn't really looking forward to do one more preview in front of a smaller crowd, made of people who were either Italian or studying Italian and without a microphone. At the end, it went very well, I was indeed more relaxed than the last time, but apparently not complacent, given that people laughed generously. The funniest bit was hearing people telling me afterwards: "It went well tonight, but would it work in front of a British audience?". So, I need to understand that, regardless of how much I like adrenaline, while I'm enjoying my high I'm probably looking too tense, while when I'm relaxed I'm probably looking confident. Doing sixteen performances in a row will be a good test in that direction. Besides, it would be nice seeing Italy playing well in that bloody first round, for a change.

Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!

2009-08-03T19:32:00.021+01:00

My poor friends, acquaintances and colleagues might have noticed an increase in the frequency of my Facebook updates, blog posts and Chortle contributions (more on which later). I guess the main reason is that after the preview I feel more confident about the show as such, so all my anxieties are now concentrated on the question: "will anybody come to see it?" (of course there is also a deeper explanation, given that I'm an only child and that there must be some reason why I like standing in front of a room full of people with the lights pointing at me and a microphone, but I'm degressing)

So, today I did something a bit desperate, which might even backfire. I used the "media contact list" received from the promoter of the Free Festival to send the following press release:

Italian comedian wishes death to Berlusconi

Announcement made during the London previews of the show "Giacinto Palmieri: Italian misfit" amid rapturous applause.

London-based Italian comedian Giacinto Palmieri started the previews of his Edinburgh Fringe show with these words:

"I don't have any joke on the death of Michael Jackson, but I have some brilliant jokes about the death of Silvio Berlusconi. I can't wait for them to become topical. Hopefully in time for my Edinburgh show. He is lucky that I'm not doing the first week".

The audience, which included many Italian members, demonstrated to be in tune with Mr Palmieri's wishes by laughing, clapping and shouting "Hear! Hear!".

The medical staff of Mr Berlusconi have yet to comment.

Will this cause me problems? Will I look desperate in my attention seeking? I don't know, but it's true that there is no such thing as bad pubblicity, as Richard Herring and Brendon Burns recently discovered (my envy was all too clear from my previous post, even if of course we play in different leagues), expecially when nobody has ever heard of you. Let's see.

Meanwhile, a much safer promotion has come from Chortle, which has published an edited version of my Friday post, with the details of my show at the foot of the article. Now I only have to hope that comedians and critics will be so busy with Edinburgh that my article will remain for a while at the top of the Correspondents section's links. Now, THAT was a bit too much!