I was first introduced to the world of standup comedy when I was in Edinburgh in 2003. I found a two-week course on standup comedy via Scottish Youth Theatre, with whom I had done Summer Festival the previous year. I had never really heard of it before I started so this was all new to me.

My two weeks were spent in the auditorium of an old Edinburgh theatre under the tutelage of two experienced comics. Along with a group of six others, our hours consisted of learning the background to standup comedy, watching DVDs of comedians at work and starting develop our own ideas for gags and jokes. It culminated in a showcase at Edinburgh Festival Theatre where we each did five minute sets. I did some material about being a demented spoilt brat (which I am) and struggling to get along with women. It was great for it's time but the jokes have dated a bit.

In 2005, I moved to London to be an actor and I got a job Jongleurs Comedy Club in Bow as a team member and was exposed to much more standup comedy. I learned so much from watching the comics at work, and indeed the comedy, especially when a great act was in, was easily the best part of the night. Ricky Grover and Jeff Innocent worked well with the audiences at Bow in the main because they came from the East End of London and had material centred around their background that worked brilliantly with Bow audiences, who could relate to them. Australian comedian Jim Jeffries was always good to have around, because nights were never boring with him around and the provocative nature of his act kept everyone on their toes. Jim would love riling the female members of his audience and they heckled him incessantly, but Jim was always ready to put them firmly in their place with some shocking but hilarious one-liners. There was never a repeat of the famous incident at Manchester Comedy Store where a punter attacked him onstage but there were times when it looked like that could really happen again in Bow.

Most comedians on Jongleurs were highly experienced and adept at dealing with difficult crowds. They knew, with just their presence and the aid of a microphone, how to work these situations to their advantage or as one comic told a hapless punter "The object of heckling is to make the person on-stage look stupid, with you it's the exact opposite." Hen parties and stag dos, especially on Saturday nights, were notoriously riotous. I remember John Moloney turning the crowd against a hen party and making right fools of them, drawing attention to the fact that no-one liked them. Indeed with a good comic, most of the audience were on the side of the performer and never the hecklers.

There were one or two occasions when comedians 'died' onstage - that is failed to generate a single laugh. In these circumstances, the comedian would politely and professionally acknowledge the situation and find a way to continue the gig or to end it just short of their allotted time. However, one comedian struggling to maintain crowd control dropped the microphone and stormed off-stage after a punter threw their underwear at him.

By the end of my four years at Jongleurs, I was getting fed up with both the job and the comedy and was needing to move on. I had become bored with the comics, even the good ones, and felt immune to being pricked to laughter. I had made one or two mild stabs at standup in London but nothing had come of it.

It was in this state of mind that I went to see "Kat's Got Your Tongue" at the Theatre Royal Stratford East on Saturday 31st July 2010. Kat Francois is a poet and host on the spoken word scene to whom I am reasonably close. Kat has always supported my poetry and I in turn have supported her activities onstage. Kat Francois is well-known as a poet and marathon runner, and hosts Word4Word, a monthly poetry event in the bar of Theatre Royal Stratford East. She is an amazing host, whose material and crowd control are fantastic to watch. It was inevitable that she would turn her hand to standup comedy, and "Kat's Got Your Tongue" in the studio space at the Theatre Royal was her first one-woman show. She played well, with some superb sight gags, a great new comic character "Grenadian Granny 999" and superb material relating the themes of race and youth which she conveyed well.

Despite my inertia with standup comedy, which has never really gone away, I still enjoyed the show. Kat has a great future as a comic if she can maintain material to this high standard and perhaps she will play at Jongleurs herself one of these days.

We'll wait and see...