Melting Pot at The Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh
As well as being a vintage loving, pinup adoring wife, mother and cake enthusiast I am a comedy writer.
I have been writing short stories, long stories, poems, diaries, songs and scripts for many years. Some horrendously cringe-worthy, others not too bad...and some...well....quite good.
I should probably point out that I am also a published poet - I won a doll and had a heartfelt poem about my Uncle's puppy published in Twinkle comic circa 1987. Since then, I've written down everything from lists of who I hated at school (with illustrations) to horrible teenage poetry about why I was such an outsider and how no one understood me.
Then, a few years later I decided to take it more seriously.
I had two short plays performed at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre and when I heard the audience laugh along with my character's mishaps something fell into place. In 2012 I realised that comedy was what I enjoyed writing most. The more OTT, the more crazy and ridiculous the better. Which brought me to my monthly night stand at Edinburgh's top comedy club.
Melting Pot has been running at The Stand Comedy Club for years. It's a monthly sketch night where new (and established) writers submit sketches of around five minutes long on any subject (and I mean ANY) and a troupe of actors perform each sketch.
There are ten sketches performed during Melting Pot and at the end, the audience votes for their favourite. An extended version of the winning sketch is then performed the following month.
There are four actors each month, and around eight in total so there is a good chance that if you submit a sketch you will see it being performed by a few different people which brings a new perspective, changes the characters slightly and keeps things interesting.
Melting Pot is run by John MacIsaac who is also one of the actors, and the compere Susan Morrison whips the audience up into a frenzy with her madcap crude banter before the show even begins.
My first submission to Melting Pot was in 2012. It was a sketch called Cut Price about a robbery in a hairdressers and the police intervewing the suspects and witnesses. The characters didn't speak English - they spoke broad Scottish - so one of my characters was an interpreter who translated the Scottish slang for the benefit of the police and the audience.
Cut Price won Best Sketch of the month and then later went on to win Best Sketch of 2013.
You can see Cut Price here:
I have submitted seven sketches in total and I've won three times and also come runner up which is really encouraging for me since I did become very lazy about my writing and went through dry periods where pen just didn't touch paper at all.
My sketch The Trailer was a tongue-in-cheek film trailer also written in broad Scots, I also wrote Talent which focused on young Pinky Palmer, a talent show wannabe. Buddies for Old Biddies was about a patronising volunteer in a residential home who was scared off by a feisty old woman and Film Buffs featured a competition winner who won the chance to review films on TV - despite not having seen any of the films.
Name Dropping was my runner up and one of my favourites that I've written. This was shown twice at Melting Pot and received raucous cheers because it's rather crude! Two seemingly posh ladies having afternoon tea and trying to outdo each other by name dropping all the celebrities that they are friends with/have slept with. 'Noel Edmonds is my f*** buddy', anyone?
My other winning sketch is Babies. This sketch probably got the best response of all of them, the audience laughing and wincing in equal measures as one of the characters goes into labour on stage and her friend regales her with horror stories of death - and worse - in the delivery room.
You can see Babies here:
Melting Pot is such a gem of a show and has been invaluable to me for getting my work seen, performed and reviewed.
That's why I am so sad that the January Melting Pot will be the last one.
It really will be a sad loss to new comedy writers like myself as well as the audiences who pack out the venue each month.
But with the energy of Susan the compere, the genuine comedy talent of the actors and of course the weird and wonderful hilarious sketches, Melting Pot will definitely go out with a bang.
Laura Dolly Cupcake xxx
