Is comedian Lewis Schaffer’s comedy life-changing? For two people, yes it is.

Lewis Schaffer being intimate at the Source Below last night

This week, after his return to London from the Edinburgh Fringe, American comic Lewis Schaffer re-started his twice-a-week Free Until Famous shows at the Source Below in Soho.

About halfway through last night’s show, I started to realise I no longer have any idea what is funny or not for ordinary people watching his show. I really dread to think how many times I have seen Lewis Schaffer perform and all the shows tend to blend into one.

He probably has about 15 hours of material and every show is mostly drawn from the same well but each is totally different, totally shaped round each audience and full of good off-the-cuff gags which, in the past, he used to forget. Now one of his entourage writes them down and there is a chance he will remember them and add them to future shows.

“I don’t have an entourage,” Lewis Schaffer told me last night. “It’s a crew. I think it sounds better. Do you think it sounds better?”

“It sounds suitably street talk and American,” I said.

“I don’t want to be part of a crew,” Rose, one of his entourage, told me later.

I was laughing out loud throughout Lewis Schaffer’s show at the Source Below last night. So was Rose. So were comedians Matt Roper and Prince Abdi and comedian Pippa Evans’ dad, who were in the audience. People who had seen a lot of comedy were certainly enjoying the show. And I think the audience was mostly enjoying it. But I realised I had lost the ability to know. I watched two couples in the audience. In each couple, one was laughing throughout and the other was straight-faced. I have no idea if the straight-faced ones were enjoying the show or not. I think they were. Who knows? I don’t.

Rikki Fulton: comic with footsteps

Lewis had decided to zero-in on two Scots girls in the front row whose faces I could not see but one of whom should consider a career following in Rikki Fulton’s footsteps. And, in lieu of a ‘real’ black man in the audience, Lewis Schaffer decided that Somalian-born Prince Abdi would stand-in as “the black man in the audience”.

Lewis Schaffer’s comedy shows can be difficult to describe.

This one ended on time and he made a faster-than-normal exit, as he had to get to the Bloomsbury Theatre for a fundraising show in aid of Resonance FM Radio which comedian Stewart Lee had organised.

Each week, Lewis Schaffer performs two Free Until Famous shows at the Source Below, one American in London show at the Leicester Square Theatre and his Nunhead American Radio show on Resonance FM. You have to admire the fact he has avoided becoming famous.

So Lewis Schaffer and two of his entourage/crew and I got a taxi to the Bloomsbury Theatre.

He had been scheduled to be top of the bill at the gig solely because he could only arrive  just before the end of the show.

The watching Bloomsbury Theatre technician was laughing

I think he went down well. The audience certainly laughed in all the right places. As did Stewart Lee and the sound technician in the wings – usually a very good sign. If the sound technician laughs, it’s good.

Stewart Lee called him back on stage for an encore.

Yesterday was the 12th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center. Lewis Schaffer has a very good story about it.

“Tell the story,” Rose and I said to him as he went back on stage. The perfect story to round-off the show that night.

Of course, he did not. He told a story about a blind man. It seemed to go down well with the audience.

After the show, in the foyer, I saw two people having their photo taken with Lewis Schaffer.

This is a big advance, I thought. People must be starting to think Lewis Schaffer is actually famous.

“Listen to this,” Lewis Schaffer told me. “This is Alex and Alicia. They went to see my show at the Source Below three-and-a-half years ago.”

Matchmaking Lewis Schaffer (centre) with Alicia and Alex

“We had our very first date by going to see Lewis’ show,” Alex explained to me. “We’d read about this interesting comedy gig, but we didn’t know what to expect.

“When we arrived, we thought This is a very small place to have a comedy gig and we quickly realised we were two of five people in the entire audience. We sat at the back, but Lewis asked us to move to the front to fill out the crowd and, when he discovered that Alicia was half-Welsh and half-Indian, that became the focus of the next hour’s set.

“So this first date became a kind of trial by fire for Alicia to defend her heritage as an Indian and a Welsh person and, three-and-a-half years later, we’ve stayed together and we’re now engaged.”

“When are you getting married?” I asked.

“In a couple of year’s time,” said a broadly-smiling Alicia who then added the Lewis Schaffer like proviso. “Enough time for me to back out.”

Lewis Schaffer was beaming.

He had had an impact on two people’s lives.

(There is now a YouTube clip of the first section of Lewis Schaffer’s appearance at the Bloomsbury Theatre HERE)

The most unexpected performers come out of Radnorshire

I tend to have a bit of a problem with character comedy, but any generalisation has its exceptions. Last night was one.

I went to an event called The Literary Cabaret: How to be a Bohemian, held as part of the Bloomsbury Festival at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel – that’s the new one inside the gloriously renovated OTT station building.

One of the performers was Ian Marchant, billed as “author of Something of the Night (to be published in January 2012) and six other books, and writer/presenter of several Radio 4 and TV series”.

This rang no bells.

He appeared as a rather shaky elderly gent called Lionel Spume, with a walking stick, and regaled us with autobiographical tales of his life, occasionally interrupted by forgetfulness. It was suitably highly sophisticated, very funny and, I suspected, required a not-yer-average comedy-club-going audience of a certain age, with its references to Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Set, Robert Graves, Burgess & Maclean and John Betjeman – whose wonderful statue in St Pancras station made Lionel Spume blubber with tears.

Lionel Spume’s performance also included some musique concrète he had allegedly written in the 1950s and he ended with a rap song which I think is called Elderly Rhymer. This would have brought the house down except that St Pancras station is so well-built. The soaring eccentricity of St Pancras perfectly matched Ian Merchant’s performance.

I wondered why I had never heard of him and, when I got home and Googled him, realised I actually had seen him a few months ago at Vivienne & Martin Soan’s monthly comedy event Pull The Other One, where he had performed in his other incarnation as half of comedy duo Your Dad – they have also performed at least seven times at the Glastonbury Festival, so that terminally scuppers any street cred I might aspire to.

I had actually talked to him at Pull The Other One and had been surprised he lived in Presteigne, Radnorshire.

Well, who would not be taken aback by that?

The moral to this blog is three-fold.

– Pull The Other One books some of the most interesting acts on the circuit

– there are astonishing hidden gems of comedy out there working mostly un-fêted by the media (except occasionally by Radio 4)

– interesting people can occasionally come out of Radnorshire

A version of Elderly Rhymer by Your Dad is on YouTube here: