Gig diary - Smiley Chorlton

Feb 22, 2026

This post contains

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.