I’m a funny person. I know this because my friends tell me so and because people I meet when I speak at a variety of events tell me so.

It’s not the “an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a pub and the barman says, Is this a joke?” kind of funny but I do have the knack of seeing the absurd in most situations and coming up with witty one liners. So when Lynne Parker, founder of Funny Women, suggested that the3rdimagazine should host a comedy challenge in Scotland naturally I was up for it.

The essence of the event is that six businesswomen are trained by Lynne and her team to help them prepare 3 minutes of stand-up to be performed in front of an audience. I agreed to handle the logistics, specifically recruiting the six businesswomen, and since I wouldn’t ever ask anyone to do something I wasn’t prepared to do myself, I agreed to be one of the six.

How hard could it be? It’s just 3 minutes.

My laptop takes longer than 3 minutes to boot up in the morning. And I’m a child of the 70′s and I knew from the public service films of the time that you could unscrew all your doors and make a perfectly serviceable nuclear shelter well within the 4 minute warning you would get of the coming Armageddon, so I figured 3 minutes was about the time it would take to find a screwdriver.

But it is hard. I’m writing this as I sit on the train bound for Edinburgh and part two of the training workshop. Part one was fun and if you get the chance to go to a funny women workshop then grab it. It is much more about presenting yourself with confidence than it is about being rolling in the aisles funny. So even if you don’t fancy yourself as the next Jo Brand you’ll get loads out of it.

I’m writing this blog partly as a record of the day but mainly as a work avoidance tactic as I’m writing this rather than writing my stand up script.

Writing a 3 minute script – or “set” as we in the business call it – is hard. Much harder than I thought it would be. Try it. Thing of something that you feel strongly about and try to write a 3 minute presentation. Now make it interesting. Now make it larger than life. Now make it funny. Now say it out load. I guarantee that even if you thought it was funny in the first place then it will lose its appeal after 50 repetitions. I don’t know how the professionals do it. They tell the same jokes every night of a tour and still laugh at themselves. I’ve seen Eddie Izzard do his routine live in Glasgow, seen the video of him recorded in London where he does the same routine and heard him on the radio performing the same routine in some city in the north-east of England. And each time he laughed at the punchline.

I suppose Jack Dee is the exception. Maybe I could be Jack Dee. Maybe I will be Jack Dee.

You’ll just have to come along on Thursday to find out for yourself. In the meantime, since I’m already at Edinburgh Park, I’d better get back to my homework.

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