A warning to all of you out there who want to try your hand at story-telling comedy: please have a story. I feel as though this advice went clearly amiss on Marie, whose vague ramblings failed to amount to anything at all.
Marie got to know each member of her audience. This was nice at first but towards the end it felt as though she thought she knew us a little too well, making annoying assumptions that couldn’t be pulled off comically. She would also almost always refer to us by name, but would either get it wrong or be unsure about it - very irritating.
The name of the show related to a phrase she would shout whenever something bad would happen. She then made half the audience shout ‘aye!’ and the other half ‘paloma!’. It didn’t work. We didn’t know what it meant and we didn’t care. Most of what she said was about skiing and France, which was simply uninteresting if you knew nothing about skiing. Or if you did for that matter. There was no narrative arc to her story, it was told as you might tell a friend you wanted to bore. She even began one story with ‘this isn’t funny but….’. She also made a few unfunny, irrelevant sexual references and innuendos, which I deemed totally inappropriate for a small audience that was mainly aged 60 plus. The show was pointless, not funny and a real effort to listen to. One to definitely miss.
