My City....

My City - Sam Avery (Artistic Director of The Comedy Trust)

Featured in the Liverpool Echo –

The Liverpool Comedy Festival is a great way for us to promote household names, the city’s thriving comedy scene, new acts and stars of tomorrow. It’s also the perfect platform to showcase our year-round community programme.

As a Liverpool-based charity we work across Merseyside throughout the year, running outreach programmes with community groups, schools and local businesses. All our projects have comedy and wellbeing at the core and we’ve had a hugely successful year.

Our Feeling Funny project has been rolled out across Liverpool and Sefton – this uses comedy to help men tackle the taboo subject of mental health. Each group works with a professional comedian on how to construct a stand up routine over seven weeks and then they perform a gig in a real life comedy club. Sounds scary? It is. But it works.

One of our participants told us that it wasn’t just about learning how to write and perform comedy. “Something else I gained was getting up to a mike and talking about things that worry me (and others) about the future, things that I would never have the nerve to speak out on without being given the chance, so thank you.”

Ultimately the Feeling Funny programme isn’t even about comedy, it’s about communication. Comedy is just the vehicle we give our participants to vent, rant, tell stories and express themselves.

And the shows are hilarious. Most audiences come along expecting to force themselves to laugh but they leave having been genuinely enthralled and entertained by the show. Come and see it for yourself at this year’s Festival as we run our Feeling Funny Showcase on Sunday 2nd October.

For more information on Feeling Funny or to book a FREE ‘Happy Hour’ humour session for your workplace please contact us on 0151 709 5893 or info@thecomedytrust.com