Simon Keck’s Nob Happy Sock took home the Golden Gibbo at last year’s Comedy Festival. It was a beautiful show, perhaps a touch more heartbreaking than it was hilarious, but when it delivered its laughs it really delivered. And that’s saying something for a show about its author’s suicide attempt.
Let’s Write a Book also features suicide (on Sunday night, at any rate), but this time it’s fictionalised, and performed by a cat. And Jesus. If you’re starting to feel that Keck may have a dark streak, you wouldn’t be wrong – his explanation involves the horrifying German children’s books he grew up reading – but it’s his ability to take that darkness and swing it the other way that makes him such a likeable comedian.
Regardless, Keck has decided he wants to be a writer. If you’ve encountered his work before, this won’t seem like much of a career change, as he’s nothing if not a writer-ly comic. Anyway, Let’s Write a Book is an experiment of sorts in this direction. The show’s blurbage says the we, the audience, will each night co-write a collection of short stories with Simon, but this isn’t exactly correct. It’s more that we, the audience, get to vote – rather physically – on the short stories that Simon has already written, with the ‘winning’ stories forming a book by festival’s end.
Although, technically, he’s already written a book. It’s a lovely, old-looking thing, about A4 in size, and it contains said short stories. He selects several to read to us throughout the evening, different ones every night, all entertaining. It’s not the most novel (sorry) of show ideas, but it’s fun and Keck’s way with words and affable presentation is more than enough to compensate.
It doesn’t all work. There’s a voice-over component that’s not really necessary and a word game that confused one audience member with its apparent pointlessness (although I rather thought this was its beauty). And it would be a lie to say there’s no writing at all expected of the audience. The show begins with an exercise in collaborative fiction, with audience members asked to contribute a single sentence to a story, having seen only the preceding sentence. It’s a game many writers may have attempted before, but the results are almost always hysterical, especially if you enjoy non sequiturs. There are also numerous two-sentence stories, contributed via social media (submit your own to #letswriteabook) and it’s testament to the power of the word that several of these pack as much wallop as their longer literary siblings. How they fit into the ultimate book is unclear, though.
Keck is a fine performer, a masterful wordsmith, an assured comedian. He believes that we’ve all got stories to tell, and how we tell them – micro-fiction, Twitter, ebooks, over a beer, stand-up comedy – matters less than what we say. Let’s Write a Book aims to encourage us all to tell our own stories; it’s not quite collaborative enough to be entirely successful in this regard, but if you like words, you’ll dig this show.
BY MELANIE SHERIDAN
