Patrick Kielty guests as Scott and the team dissect a genuinely excruciating performance by Scott’s flatmate Fraser at the Comedy Store’s gong night – a man determined to heal the world through comedy who lasted just 26 seconds on stage.
The episode centres on Fraser, Scott’s flatmate who has decided his calling is to become a comedian in order to bring laughter and healing to the world. Patrick Kielty is brought in to review Fraser’s performance at the Comedy Store in London the previous night, where audience members hold up red cards to gong off performers who can’t last five minutes.
The team plays audio from Fraser’s set, which spectacularly fails almost immediately. He takes the microphone, delivers an opening line about the best way to tell your girlfriend you’ve got chlamydia (in what sounds like a deliberately affected gay voice), and is immediately heckled by an audience member who shouts “gay.” He completely falls apart and lasts just 26 seconds from when he first speaks, though technically 15 seconds from the start of his actual material.
Scott, Patrick, and the team dissect what went wrong with surgical precision. The opening gag was terrible, the delivery was sloppy, and Fraser’s real voice is apparently the affected one he was using. When heckled with a factually correct observation about his sexuality, he crumbles entirely. Patrick notes that comedians have to recover from heckles, especially truthful ones – but Fraser simply can’t.
Despite the disaster, Fraser has apparently booked another gig that evening at the Banana Cabaret in Balham. The team jokingly suggests he should perform in drag to make the act visually funny, since the material clearly isn’t working. The episode closes with them sarcastically promising to pass on Patrick’s “encouraging” comments to Fraser before attending tonight’s show to watch him potentially crash and burn again.
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