You might remember that I am a Comedian as well as an Author.

If not, here’s some proof. It’s a picture of me doing comedy, at Wise Guys Utah.

See, some of us writer types do go outside. Don’t listen to the memes.

I felt strangely at home in America. Over 90% of my readers live in various states (of disrepair), and almost all my traditional publishing has been American too. Some months, I can have over 60% of all book sales traced back to California. I have friends there, but I’ve never physically been, even if my psychic friend thought I lived there when we first got speaking.

I’d like to do a gig there sometime.

But where am I gigging right now?

Back in 2023 I put a show together titled AWKWARD RE-ENTRY which was a mix of Stand-up comedy, Sci-Fi, and Poetry. It was a solo stand-up show about what it means to be human, all the weird mistakes we make, and how we relate to the wider universe. Here’s an image of the first show.

The show lasted two days, and was a lot of fun.

Somehow, Phillipatine returned.

Yet, unlike modern Star Wars, I like to think this show is well-written. I’ve done a lot of rewriting and chiselling, from visiting Utah to tell jokes, to a comedy course, a work in progress gig, having an audience meowing at me in my home town. I will cover all this and more in detail in a future post, for now the headline is that the gig is back, and you might be able to see it, live.

The Awkward Re-entry show returns this year, in 2026, to the UK and hopefully online too. It is bigger and cleverer. The first gig is in Buxton.

Awkward Re-entry is a comedy show about what it means to be human, how modern people relate to the universe and each other. Topics include dating apps, sucking door handles, alien abductions, parallel universes, and my giant forehead.

You have a few days on top of everyone else to go grab tickets before I announce them on social media. Only 38 tickets are available for this one (two have already gone to Press), but more dates and venues may be announced. Tickets are £7.50, or £5 for concessions (old people and benefits cheats allowed). These prices exclude tax, which I do not understand.

The first gig is

• The Buxton Fringe

• Sunday 12th July 2026

• Lee Wood Hotel, Buxton, Canyons room

• 18:30pm (with bar across from performance space)

• There is an elevator to this level from ground floor

Buxton Fringe

If you are Press, you can get a free ticket if you want to watch and review. Just comment, or email me at Press@realphillipcarter.com

I am also looking for Press connections for other projects, from poetry to Lego statues.

Any ticket sales help me to realise the reality of being a full-time storyteller. Everything, from short story sales, shirts, gigs, and streams all come together as part of a wider world of storytelling, which is why I will also be selling and signing books on the night at a heavily discounted rate for ticket holders.

If you can’t afford it and are nearby, talk to me about it.

And if Buxton is too far, don’t worry, other shows will happen.

I have scheduled some announcements for social media, but if you are reading this on 04.04.2026, you are ahead of everyone else.

Click the big orange button above to get your tickets.

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Subscribing is free.

I get my writing money from selling books and telling jokes.

• A photo from my most recent Comedy gig

• A little clip from the show

• A short list of some of my favourite modern writers

Two nerds walk into a bar.

Pictured below is my latest open-mic gig, in which I was briefly hired as musical comedian Grant Curnow’s mic stand. You might suppose two Sci-Fi comedians at the same small venue was part of a ‘diversity drive’ by an alien superintelligence, but in reality we both knew we would be welcomed here, so here we landed.

The gig is called Smiley, and is hosted at 99 Reasons in Chorlton once every two weeks, typically by my pal Hannah Knowles (linked at the end of this post). The timing and location means that there’s always some new faces, often students who live nearby, who come to try out comedy. For me it feels like a new canvas each time, somewhere I can continue to be a newb, even if I am working on something a bit bigger than the five minutes performers are allocated. It’s also not in the city, which makes me happy. And the staff are very nice.

Why it works.

The Smiley gig works because whilst the performers are all different, we have a shared goal: to be funny. It does not matter if you’ve been on TV, done your own comedy special, or if you’re just starting out. If your goal is to make the audience laugh, so their lives are a little bit funnier by tomorrow, then you are welcomed and you fit in.

It works because we have a shared goal, a culture.

There’s no push to gather a certain number of certain types of acts here, which means people feel genuinely included, rather than commodified as they are at some other gigs. I am not my labels here, I am just someone telling jokes. That is how I want to be, so this is one of my favourite gigs.

It must be hard work running an open mic. But Hannah does a great job of it. It’s not often you return from a comedy show with an idea for a Substack post, a poem, and a bit of dialogue in a novel.

My set

Grant went back in time and retroactively returned the mic stand favour by filming my set for me. He did a fantastic job. There’s a lot I need to work on in this, but considering it was all new material, I think it went okay.

I opened with a bit on simulation theory, then moved onto why aliens don’t visit us any more, which I’d like to expand some more.

The full recording isn’t available because there’s a lot of background noise in other bits that I’m struggling to edit out, but I will do this set again sometime.

I wrote the ‘Drake’s equation’ joke in my mind outside the bar before walking in. I actually don’t like it (for reasons I’ll get into in a longer writing post), but the audience do, and my opinion on my writing has been wrong before.

I also gave out five free copies of THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION since I had them in stock and I’ve stopped doing the ComicCons for now, whilst I am writing and learning, so quite happy to give them away.

@realphillipcarterSome #sciencefiction #standupfor you all. They only let me stay on Earth for diversity reasons. #memes

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Alien minds.

I wanted to show you some people whose writing I have read and enjoyed recently. We have some fiction, non-fiction, a bit of poetry, and comedy.

(substack)

(substack)

(substack)

MBlackrane (X / twitter)

Sohail Ahmed (X / twitter)

(substack)

Shows like this are where I can truly be myself. I enjoy the open mics, but what I am really good at is having more than five minutes, and mixing my surreal sense of humour with odd, sometimes educational, anecdotes about what it means to be human.

Religion, spirituality, the afterlife, time travel, are just some of the topics that came up. Sort of like my books.

So how did it happen?

Roughly a week before, my pal Zuza informed me that a local comedian had cancelled their booked slot at the pub. They were practicing for the Edinburgh Fringe (as I would have been, had I not been saving up for bigger, weirder things) and she said she trusted me to make good use of the time, knowing I did the Manchester Fringe in 2023.

So I signed up. We had about eight days to put the show together and advertise. Nonetheless we had a modest crowd of between four and six people who were passing the pub on the day of the event, and two more who actually made the pilgrimage to see me deliberately! (Hi Kath, hi Ash).

Ash is a comedian friend I met at Bright Club Comedy, and Kath found me through listening to ALLfm radio, where I am sometimes a guest or host. Kath wanted to buy some books from me and had struggled to get them in Waterstones (an issue I am still working on) so I brought her:

The Cosmic Comedy Collection, Who Built The Humans?, and The Cosmonaut Who Died Twice.

And I signed them all.

I then started to tell jokes. I did my Bright Club time travel set (designed to be read to history students and other such nerds, but now reformatted to suit a pub better) and I meandered my way from that onto religion and spirituality, which opened the Mormonism door, which in turn gave me space to do my Mormonism jokes from Wise Guys Utah (April 2024). After these I read some comedy poems, one of which was from 2015, and was my first experience at standup.

That’s right, I started standup comedy as a Sci-Fi poet, at Edge Hill University’s ARTS BAR, just opposite their Rose Theatre. My first poem was about sentient ice, and my second was about free speech. I didn’t realise until recently that both of these have been important to me for a while (be nice to your ice).

The full STORIES FOR LIZARD PEOPLE show lasted about 90 minutes.

A full 90-minute video of the show will turn up somewhere eventually, but for now I am looking into getting someone to clip the suitable bits into soundbites for instagram and tiktok. I might do it myself, as I am about to take my other life as a Minecraft Streamer (which is ultimately, another form of storytelling) to the next level.

Right now I type this on a computer which is beginning to struggle, and which has some delay issues with the space bar. This has made editing WHO KILLED THE HUMANS pretty frustrating, but it will all be over soon, as I am nearly done with the genetic testing for my vast new supercomputer.

The poem.

I wrote this poem a little bit over ten years ago. I’ve been a comedy poet for ten years (on and off) and this is still a fan favourite.

21:04 20/03/15 finished 22:33 on the same day
The first poem I performed at Arts Bar Edge Hill Uni, on the night I became a comedian.

Phone Sex

I woke up one morning, cold and alone
Saw an ad in the paper, picked up the phone
Cost me three quid a minute, I only needed four
I had never been talked to like this before
She told me to do things, asked me to beg
I imagined myself humping her leg
And my flatmate came in, prised me from the chair
Asked me how long it had been since I last washed my hair
I told him I didn’t know, but that I was in love
He said there were complaints from the flat above
My telephone love making had worked its way into night
And they said they could hardly hear themselves fight
So instead they held hands and their relationship was fine
I said sorry for putting their misery on the line
The woman had apparently been filing for divorce
Winding him up all these years, now had to use force
I heard one last thud and off she went
To some far off land like Spain, or Kent
So I picked up the phone and started to dial
But my flatmate said I should stop for a while
He took me aside showed me the bills
I needed to pay in, but got the chills
I wanted to call her to ask for advice
But he took the phone, showed me the ice
It climbed up the window and into the bed
And soon enough it would get in my head
He said we had only enough for the bills in the account
So I asked him if he was sure of the amount
He nodded, and I knew that at last
I had to decide between my love and the gas
It had gone too far my chances lost
I had to find a way to cover the cost
I called her again, this time for an hour
Spent it all on her voice and needed a shower 
My flatmate said I should get on my feet
Otherwise I’d be out on the street
So I rang the number one last time
Now I too work on the flirting line 
My love has since quit to go back home
But I’m happy here, talking on the phone

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I’ve had a few more adventures since, but I think that will do for now.

I also wanted to thank Anja for picking up WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?

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This first one is a big one.

If for any reason you can’t load the poster, the information is below.

I should probably make my book covers more like this.

STORIES FOR LIZARD PEOPLE

A chilled work-in-progress alt comedy thing

Includes: Jokes about time travel, a funny poem about door handles, some more jokes, a short story about death, another silly poem, you get the idea.

Upstairs at Britons Protection Manchester (near Bridgewater Hall)

Friday 25th July 8pm-9:30pm

Price? Free. Just buy a drink at the bar to keep the pub going!

There will be a break in the middle to get more drinks as well. And you’re free to meander around if you like.

So, how did this happen, and why so short notice?

Earlier this week, I bumped into a friend at an open mic (I am testing out new, clean material for a big audition) and we talked about gigs. I said I wished I could do the Edinburgh Fringe this year, but that even after having saved up, it still feels very expensive (and if you’re going there hoping for a ‘big break’ you are gambling).

She told me there was an open slot from 7pm to 10pm at a local venue in Manchester. Someone booked it, then had to pull out. My friend then needed someone she could trust to fill it with weird, good comedy. So, this was going to be someone’s work-in-progress slot, and now it is mine.

It’s right near the Bridgewater Hall.

So whilst I am not doing the Edinburgh Fringe (I might go down to visit friends, but I’ve not got my own show this year) I will be out and about in Manchester to tell jokes.

If you missed 2023’s AWKWARD RE-ENTRY show at the Manchester Fringe, this is the unofficial sequel to that. As I wrap up development on WHO KILLED THE HUMANS, as well as put together several standup sets to rehearse in prep for getting more paid gigs, STORIES FOR LIZARD PEOPLE is my laboratory in which I will test a bit of everything.

And it’s free.

Note: I have the room from 7pm to 8pm. I’ll also have Andy Wolfe, a local and very good comedian, as my opening act for 7:30, with probably a short break at 7:50 and my bit at 8:00pm.