12:24pm Friday 19th March 2010
By Charles Hutchinson
QUICKFIRE London comedy troupe Pappy’s Fun Club are on a national tour from January to April with one goal in mind: taking the record books by storm by attempting the impossible task of clocking up 200 sketches in 60 minutes each night.
“The odds may be stacked against us, but what we can promise is a host of outrageous characters, ridiculous sing-songs and more high-energy, uplifting post-sketch comedy than any show has ever delivered,” they say.
Pappy’s Fun Club member Matthew Crosby catches his breath for a quick word with Charles Hutchinson before mounting the record attempt in Leeds, York and Harrogate.
Sorry for ringing you five minutes late, Matthew. How many sketches could you have done in that time?
“That would be 20 sketches already.”
What qualifies as a sketch?
“This is the first time we’ve been asked that question. It has to have a joke in it and an ending, a punchline, and ordinarily there must be at least one character and one laugh. And if no-one laughs, then it doesn’t qualify…like if a joke is told in a forest and no-one else is there is it still a joke?”
Presumably, the laughs, not the jokes, are the key to beating the record?
“We’ve acquired the skill of finding laughs in waiting for a laugh, and the laughter doesn’t always have to come from the audience. It can come from us.
“The audience do 99.9 per cent of the laughs, but if they don’t we fill in the gaps.”
Do you warm up the audience before starting the challenge?
“For the first half hour we do our bonus sketches, so we give you the extras before we give you the main meal, doing the best of our sketches and some new ones to give an idea of what we do, and then, from an announcement backstage, we start the clock and off we go.”
Do the sketches speed up the more you do them on the tour?
“We’ve been getting quicker and it’s not so much the sketches getting quicker as the transitions between sketches.
“Like at Swansea, where there was only one door, so we were often bumping into each other…and when my trousers split, luckily I’d bought a new pair of H&M boxer briefs, so that kept everything in place.”
Does the venue have an impact on the show each night?
“We find the audience and theatre are almost as much a part of the show as what we’ve written.”
How important are props?
“We have a car boot of props in our Ford Focus, in which you can fit 200 Sketches…Plus Bonus Sketches And An Interval, all of which we made ourselves, so the show has a home-made feel.
“We’ve been described both favourably and unfavourably as being like children putting on shows for their parents, and all of us come from that tradition of doing that on a wet Sunday afternoon. I’m sure my eight-year-old self would be very proud of me.”
How much does the show change as the tour progresses?
“We get rid of sketches that don’t work or we grow tired of after one Edinburgh run and a tour, but what’s also good about this show is that if we don’t like one sketch, there’ll be another one coming along straightaway.
“One of the things we try to do each night is create something new, and we welcome the audience contributing to the shows too.
“They have to adjudicate on whether we’ve broken the world record and we’re dependent on them to keep us on our toes.”
Is there an official world record for you to break?
“We’ve had contact from the Guinness Book Of Records to say there’s no official record, though Tim Vine holds the record for the most jokes told in an hour [499 on October 7 2004].”
So, the stand-up jokes come quicker but how else does sketch comedy differ from telling gags?
“Whereas with gags the audience expect new ones all the time, with sketch comedy they like you to do sketches they know, and people will come up to you after the show and ask you why you didn’t do one of their favourites.”
And finally, Matthew, has York played a part in your career?
“I lived in York for about two months when I was rehearsing a play with some people from the University of York. That would have been in 2002, performing with a company produced by a friend of mine.
“It was a play called Tetragramaton, a telling of a series of Bible stories; not exactly the greatest thing I’ve ever done but it gave me my first chance to go to the Edinburgh Fringe.
“That was my starting point in Edinburgh and of course I’d always done sketches and comedy, which led to the first Pappy’s show in 2006. We’ve played York loads of times since then.”
Pappy’s Fun Club present Pappy’s World Record Attempt: 200 Sketches In An Hour (Plus Bonus Sketches And An Interval), at the Hyena Lounge Comedy Club, The Basement, City Screen, York, on Sunday at 7.30pm; box office, 0871 704 2054 or on the door from 7.30pm. Also appearing at The Library, Leeds, tomorrow at 8pm, tel 0113 244 0794, and Harrogate Theatre on March 29 at 8pm, 01423 502116.
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