Sailing the Good Ship Comedy at SLT

Our regular quarterly stand-up comedy night returns on 16 March. It’s a great night out, and SLT members can buy discounted tickets until 29 February. Host Ben Van der Velde, a West Norwood local, also runs the club and gives us the background to it.

Good Ship Comedy was started in a music bar of the same name in 2005 by an enthusiastic comedy fan called James Everett. It was one of the first stand-up nights in London I ever attended, before I’d performed my first gig. The venue was spectacular. It had a pit area where bands and comedians would perform, a piece of architecture hung over from when it hosted boxing matches in the 1950s. The rest of the audience would be perched all around, giving it an electric atmosphere.

It might sound incredibly egotistical, but I remember looking around the venue on one of my first visits thinking “one day, all this will be mine.” I inherited the club in 2014, after it had been passed down through a series of other comics. Sadly the original venue closed in 2017, but since then Good Ship has grown to include venues in Holloway Road, Battersea, Leytonstone, SLT and beyond. We are even the bookers for the British Naturist Association, and put on a show at the main stage of Nudefest 2023. But that’s a story for another time…

Almost all the acts I book are ones I’ve worked with on the circuit. I regularly get emails requesting gigs with YouTube clips of the performers, but I’ll never book someone I haven’t seen live as that’s the only way you can really tell the quality of an act.

I do a lot of MCing. It means late nights and long shows, but also means I get to watch a lot more talent than when I just do a set and dash off home. Booking is my favourite part of the job of comedy promoter – like playing fantasy football with the line-ups so I make sure I have a strong, relatable opening act, someone a bit different in the middle and then a powerhouse closer who, I hope, will take the roof off at the end.

My first introduction to comedy was listening to Spike Milligan being a hilarious buffoon on the Goon Show. My Dad had hours of their shows, so it’s no surprise that I went on to idolise Eddie Izzard. I also love Ross Noble and as a shaggy-haired daft Geordie I also share his improvisational style. I’ve got a fair amount of anecdotal stuff, especially since I had kids, but my favourite moments in stand-up are when I’m riffing off the audience, making up gags that can only ever work in the moment.

A sense of playfulness from the acts and the audience is at the heart of it. Just like at the theatre – whether it’s a serious drama or a pantomime – the audience is coming to see the actors play, not work. The best comedians make it seem like they’re coming up with their ideas in the moment and there’s electricity in the air. While comedians don’t welcome hecklers (that’s usually because they are disruptive and mean-spirited), but when an audience member joins in with a playful contribution, that can often be the heart of what makes a show unique. This is not to encourage your audience to shout out – but best to only do that if they are absolutely sure in their gut what they are about to say is funny. (And even then….don’t!)

The other thing is diversity. This is partially about the acts. Even when I started stand-up 15 years ago, the overwhelming number of bills were just four straight, middle-aged white men. The same perspective is dull, so it’s really important to me to make sure my bills represent a diverse range of voices across gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Diversity of style is also key. I always want to make sure that the acts I book are giving the audience a real mix of styles, so they can enjoy gags, stories, surreal stuff, crowd work, physical comedy, every flavour of the delicious comedy pie.

Hopefully it represents everything I was just talking about. Our headliner Larry Dean is one of the funniest men I’ve ever met, and probably the best storyteller of my generation of comics. Being from Glasgow is effectively a performance-enhancing drug when it comes to being a comic, but he uses his accent, experience and background as a gay man growing up in Glasgow to enormously powerful effect.

Joining him are Abigoliah Schauman, who is a tough, no-nonsense comic from Ohio. She has lived several lives less ordinary and always gets a great response for her outsider’s perspective on British life. This time round I’ve added two newer acts in the middle section instead of one. Jenan Younis is a surgeon who, bafflingly, wants the additional stress of being a comic. She’s sly, deft and subversive in her comedy. Alongside her is Benjamin Patterson, a terrific new act who carries on the Great British comic tradition of being very intelligent and very silly in the same sentence.

Good Ship Comedy returns to SLT at 8pm on Saturday 16 March. Buy tickets here (SLT member /supporter discount applies until 29 February)