My 2012 in comedy videos
So I direct and write comedy, mostly for my own production company Turtle Canyon Comedy. Here are the films I am most proud of from last year…
I love Jurassic Park and the long grass scene from The Lost World has always amused me with its potential:
I wanted to write something that was shamelessly going after views off the back of a popular thing, mainly to see if I could and if it would help get views.
Matthew Highton explained the basic idea of this to me in a couple of texts and that’s all I needed to know it’d be awesome. We shot it in 2 hours out on Hampstead Heath and then gave it the look of an old, washed out samurai movie. Kind of.
This is something that I wrote years ago and have always wanted to make it but didn’t know who the right people were to cast in the leads. Until I saw Mark Stephenson and Harriet Kemsley on the same comedy night.
This next sketch is the biggest hit I’ve been a part of and was a little idea that Tom Toal chucked in at the end of an email to me. The Daily Star wrote about it and it became something of a phenomenon in Poland.
I regularly appear in, write and direct a web series about a British Batman in a small village. We’re onto a third series now and the magnitude has increased to such a scale that we’re finding it difficult to get the time to make them for our cult audience. This is the opening episode to the third series and I love it because the first scene is a shot-for-shot homage to Mission:Impossible 3 but still works perfectly with the Batman/Joker dynamic and sets up the rest of the series beautifully.
Also, my short film, Chubby Bunny, was screened at the Friars Club Film Festival and London Short Film Festival.
Boyd & Laws’ Natural Disasters
Stuart Laws absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead (1hr show).
Stuart Laws, in association with PBH’s Free Fringe
Venue 152 – Cabaret Voltaire Downstairs 1,
36 Blair Street, Edinburgh EH1 1QR
Dates – August 18th – 25th
Time -17.05
Free Entry (Donation at end)
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Following a great festival debut headlining 2011’s It’s Two O’clock Live at Two O’clock with a set described by critics as ‘impulsive’, ‘original’ and ‘one to watch’ – Stuart Laws returns to the fringe with his show:
‘Stuart Laws absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead (1hr show).’
28 year old Stuart is trying to embrace the fact that his attempts to blend in with the crowd have worked all too successfully and he is now a perpetual “omega male” or “little spoon”.
An energetic and compelling master of audience interaction, Stuart’s spontaneous performances see him creating a perversely endearing air of comedic chaos in a show about ornithology, Center Parcs, Terminator, milkshakes, The Bourne Supremacy, colour blindness and Hawaii Five-0. The show starts at 5:05pm. That’s coincidence.
“very funny” The New York Post
“laughs come thick and fast…definitely one to watch” Edinburgh 2011 Fest Mag review
“He engages with people masterfully and the whole thing feels impulsive and original” Edinburgh 2011 New Kid review
“the Energiser Bunny… warm and daft… perversely endearing” The Londonist
“charming and thoughtful” Spoonfed
Stuart started performing as a stand up in 2006 and is now an established regular on the London circuit. He can often be seen on the bill for James Acaster’s regular show at The Leicester Square Theatre, compering regularly for Comedy Knights & Laugh Out London and giving talks for PLEB. His online sketch work has found frequent success, with Graham Linehan describing his ‘Overactive Solutions’ as ‘hilarious’ and his webseries ‘Becoming Batman’ (wherein Stuart dons the famous suit to appear as Chalfont St. Peter’s answer to the caped crusader) currently exceeds 290,000 views. In May this year Stuart watched YouTube, livestreamed online and for charity, continuously for 24 hours with Matt Sandford, Stuart’s partner in their double act ‘Apocalypso’.
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For interviews please email: stu@turtlecanyonmedia.com or call 07725033729 http://stuchopslaws.wordpress.com http://www.turtlecanyoncomedy.com
The title of this blog is a neat summation of the first two series of the webseries I write and act in with Al Clayton and Nick Long. If you add in: attempt to kiss every female character except for my sister, am responsible for said sister’s untimely death, caused my friend to descend into petty crime and eventually become The Joker, anger a local council worker into becoming The Riddler, date and then lead a Selina Kyle to a dramatic fall from the roof of Axis Chemicals, rile an old schoolfriend called Thomas “Tom E” Elliot, fail to protect Chalfont St Peter, shun the cape, deal with an emotionally unstable agent attempting to get me to wear the Bat-mask again – in pursuit of YouTube views and get a butler; then you’ll be close to explaining season ONE and TWO of Becoming Batman.
Catch up on the gist of things with this handy trailer:
Or read this post that I wrote previously. Once you’ve done that you’re free to still watch Bat To The Future Episode ONE in a state of confusion:
And then once you’ve fully taken in that almost shot for shot reference to Mission Impossible 3 then you can watch Eagle-Eyed Cherry get referenced in episode TWO:
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In 1943 the Philadelphia Experiment was rumoured to have taken place in Pennsylvania. The USS Eldridge and a full crew was to be made invisible to radar by taking advantage of an aspect of Einstein’s ‘Unified Field Theory’. Large, complex devices were fitted to the warship and activated to create an electromagnetic field around the USS Eldridge. Reports differ as to what actually happened. From invisibility to radar to actual invisibility and, on their reappearance, the crew experiencing mental disorders. Some reports have it that the crew actually fused with the steel hulls.
Conspiracies are normally retro-fitted to events, facts are cherry-picked to fit a narrative that will provide a worldview that the theorist wishes was true. 9/11 could only be orchestrated by our government because the military industrial complex wanted to build new war machines to fight a new enemy. If it was really just a ragtag band of radical Islamists it would mean that the US government isn’t all-powerful. That might mean that all of the other bad things in our lives are not because of a powerful government conspiracy; it probably means that we have to accept responsibility for some of the more disappointing elements in our life.
If experience has taught us anything it is that humans are flawed, selfish and forgetful, after all, I was supposed to be writing about Montauk. The organisation and commitment required to plan, develop and enact a conspiracy would be so grand that it would either fall apart immediately or someone would leak details to the press. When the head of MI:6 can’t keep holiday photos secret it seems unlikely he’d be involved in subterfuge with aliens. Unless they got him a good deal on a fly-drive to Corsica. Despite that, some surveys have it that 20% of people believe that aliens live amongst us. Even the clear progression of abduction stories (now aliens but used to be angels, then vampires, then witches and further back with other mythical beasts) over time show that humans have sought to find grand reasons for someone disappearing, never to return, or, even more mysteriously, to reappear with amnesia. It could be another human doing murders, it could be a human getting wasted and not wanting to admit to it. It’s probably a succubus.
As humans we seem predisposed to seek order and desire explanations. Why did the woman who normally orders a medium latte order an espresso today? Why did my boyfriend cheat on me? Why are soldiers returning from war with changed personalities? Despite simple explanations being the most likely they also seem to be the least fulfilling. Complexity convinces. It’s been proven that humans will rate a prediction as more likely to be fulfilled the more complex it is. Occam’s Razor would suggest that the woman was in a rush, your boyfriend didn’t love you enough and that war fucks you up. Another complicating factor is the belief that the more significant the event the more significant the causes must be. It could even seem as if the human brain is a purpose-built structure designed specifically to believe that things are more complex than they are and therefore need extraordinary explanations. This, at least, explains the success of the film Lost In Translation.
Conspiracies do occasionally occur, that shouldn’t be ignored. Clinton had to apologise for STD trials conducted on a poor black population in 1920s America. The truth is that the conspiracies that do succeed in remaining secretive are normally small-scale and in small towns. But because of a complexity bias in our psychology we choose to believe that the bigger the conspiracy, the more likely it is true. Conspiracies that involve treachery at the highest level of government, suppression of alien contact, widespread drugs trials and experiments that break the accepted laws of the universe are believed by a staggering number of people. News last year announced that some neutrinos were recorded as breaking the speed of light. This could have had enormous consequences for science and technology and yet it was in the news before confirmation research was conducted. The truth is out there, mainly in press releases.
Religion seems to operate on the same human tendencies. It explains an often cruel and random existence by telling you that someone is in charge. A higher power that we can’t see or experience but who is working in mysterious ways. It is an attempt to deflect from the depressing likelihood that we are complex collections of carbon that continually cause conflict and create confusion. Which then raises the fear that we truly are free to do whatever our subconscious tells us to do, that no-one is actually in charge and that we can only really blame ourselves. Because inherent in all conspiracies, religions, superstitions and “secrets to unlocking the perfect life” are attempts to imbue greater significance on a world that doesn’t deserve it. Except Montauk, because that is a beautiful seaside town, with nothing sinister going on.
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British Airways Duty-free
Found this in their in-flight magazine
