Located in the centre of Cardiff Bay, the Glee Comedy Club is one of five Glee Clubs distributed across the UK that was founded in 2001.
The Club is a venue for various live comedy shows and music events and is also the home of Cardiff stand-up comedy. People who come here can enjoy a laugh out loud night by watching the live comedy with delicious food and nice drinks. It’s a wonderful place that you can’t miss in Cardiff.
Aside from arranging each show by contacting performers, James also has to keep the atmosphere in the club happy and relaxing, all the services from the bar to the kitchen should be worked well during the performance.
James said people prefer to enjoy a high quality performance rather than just having a beer these days and the glee club tends to satisfy the customers from both aspects.
As a witness to the growth of stand-up comedy, James said: “20 years ago, the comedians were almost entirely male and people may have had very fixed views, and nowadays people may slash the old-fashioned mentality. It’s good to see that there are more and more female comedians performing and people are better represented. We are still in the process of changing and are not perfect yet but we will get there.”
Kim thinks that as the news in the world gets more and more miserable, people want something to laugh about and comedy is an important part in building a happy society.
As an avid fun of stand-up comedy, Kim believes that “the good comedy should always punch up and never punch down, you should make fun of the government and the people in power, and you should never make fun of the vulnerable people.”
“Generally, we are seeing a change, that people are realizing that comedy could be clever, that doesn’t have to be offensive and it is getting better hopefully.”
Tom began his first stand-up comedy at 18 and he enjoys the buzz when making people laugh. Since he was studying in music, the idea of combining his skills came out at that time to make his performance stand out.
As a comedian, it is not easy to give the audience both an excellent performance and fancy jokes all the time. Tom said that the comedian Paul Sinnerman has an idea that all acts have either excellent performance and adequate writing or the other way around. “I would say I work hard to bring the performance up to the writing,” and “It’s happy to see a couple of jokes work better on the audience when I put more energy into my performance.”
Meanwhile, new jokes always need time to polish, “Sometimes you know it is a good idea but you don’t know what the journey is to the punchline and the funny idea needs to be restructured for many times to be funnier.”