Are you a stand-up comedian (new or not so new) looking to discover your authentic comedic voice? Well, that takes time... but you can speed things up with this two part Zoom session! Here’s what we cover: •  We identify you archetypes, likeability and status: ◦Identification of your Jungian archetypes (e.g., Innocent, Regular Person, Crusader, Caregiver, Explorer, Rebel, Sensualist, Creator, Jester, Sage, Magician, Ruler) that fit your persona. ◦ Likability: What makes your on-stage persona appealing to the audience? Rapid-Fire Persona Polarity Assessment: The group participate in a quick rating exercise to define the perceived extremes for each participant's persona across a 1-5 scale for traits such as: Friendly/Scary, Angry/Calm, Serious/Silly, Grown-up/Childish, Realist/Dreamer, Wise/Stupid. Persona Games: As a group, we also explore and select the persona games (e.g., giving bad advice, overthinking, impulsive, arrogant, shameless) that suit your comedy. Creative Writing Exercises: There are also creative exercises in class to explore your persona. • Plus guidance on how to interpret and utilise the feedback received (whether to cultivate an emerging trait or reign it in). Whether you've just started out or have plenty of gigs under your belt, understanding and embracing your on-stage persona focuses your writing and performance and enables the audience to immediately get you. Join me in these engaging and interactive online Zoom sessions to find your authentic stage voice. Be funnier, clearer, and more impactful.

@ Centre for Science & Art, STROUD (Gloucestershire) A Creative Community Comedy Workshop Note: Each time I do this day I refresh the content, bringing new creative exercises each time. So you can come back as many times as you like. In this stimulating and entertaining 3 hour session, you will learn stand-up tricks and techniques, have a laugh and emerge a more confident speaker too! In this supportive, enjoyable session, we strip away the fear of standing up in front of people at the microphone, and focus on the craft of comedy and finding your natural funniness and bringing it out. The big trick of stand-up is it’s all about preparation but making it all look casual and unprepared. (Which works for all kinds of other speaking too). Who is this for? Nervous absolute beginners very welcome (and more confident ones too)! You don’t need to be loud and charismatic to be good at stand-up; you just need to find your authentic voice and perspective. There are many ways of finding a playful comic voice. You can be quiet and dull, or dry and serious and that can be why you’re funny! Alternatively, you might already have done a course or be doing open-spots and you want to sharpen your skills and generate new ideas. Or you might simply be after an inspiring new way to explore public speaking. This is a safe, friendly and non-judgemental space —our goal is to have fun, build confidence, and demystify the art of getting on stage making people laugh. Plus you can bring a friend for a reduced fee for you both! What we will cover: Finding Your Voice: Explore your unique way of being playful and funny in front of an audience. Telling stories: Turn your experiences, everyday frustrations and observations into comic tales. Joke Writing 101: Discover how to write and deliver jokes in a relaxed self-deprecating way that leads to laughs. Stagecraft & Confidence: Techniques to grab the audience and keep their attention, whether you’re on stage doing comedy, or delivering a talk or presentation. By the end of the session... You will feel much more confident about getting up to speak to people, whether in comedy or a work or social event. And you’ll leave with new skills and ideas.

5 x 2 hour sessions on Zoom 7pm-9pm UK time/ 8pm-10pm European time 11am-1pm Pacific time (PDT) 2pm-4pm Eastern time (EDT) £135 (repeat fee £125) "Amazing. Just gotta say again. The class is fricken excellent. Definitely the best stand-up class I have been to." MS* * an act who has been going for 10 years "The highlight of my week! Trying out different techniques each week is really helpful and Chris’ feedback is very constructive." CR* * a newer act Learn more about your persona, develop your performance and get loads of new comedy tools and perspectives on my online stand-up course for gigging acts. You'll be part of a group with a great bunch of stand-ups working with me, UK comedy director and author of "A Director's Guide to the Art of Stand-up", talking comedy and getting inspiration. I've run it with comics from all over the world and IT WORKS. Everyone ends up with new stuff and loads of ideas. For stand-ups who are already gigging (or are returning to gigging after a break), this course will inspire you to write new material, give you comedy tools you will use again and again, as well as punch up your existing material. I’ve these run stand-up writing sessions with all sort of comics, including several who have many years of gigging under their belt, and of course the beauty is we don’t all have to be in the same room in the same town so I’ve had some truly international groups where UK comics are mixed with acts from Ireland, Germany, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, New Jersey and more. We analyse and discuss stand-up clips nominated by you - including clips of your own gigs. I give you writing techniques and inspiration and every week we take a close look at some new material that group members have written, discussing how to get more out of it.

10.45am-3.45pm @ Theatre Deli 107 Leadenhall St, London EC3A 4AF Transform your stand-up crowd work. This is a unique opportunity to learn from one of the best stand-ups at working an audience in the business and to receive direction and tips from one of the country’s top comedy coaches and live comedy directors. This live, intensive session is designed for new or established comedians who want to connect with their audience and elevate their crowd work, to enhance their gigs as well as creating clippable stand-up content for social media. This is a highly practical session. Playful and inspiring practical exercises will get you exploring aspects of audience interaction, meaning there will be lots of opportunities to get up onto the microphone in front of the group to practice your crowd work. • In the session you’ll receive feedback and a whole host of tips from Geoff Whiting, who will share experiences from his decades of doing crowd work with literally thousands of audiences. • And you’ll also receive tips and strategies from leading stand-up coach and director Chris Head. The session will sharpen your skills, build your confidence and equip you with new crowd work techniques and strategies. You'll learn about: • Reading the Room: Techniques for assessing who to pick to talk to. • Engaging the Audience: Creating spontaneous interactions, genuine connections and making every show unique. • Persona games: Identify comic approaches that you take with audience members that work with your persona. • Handling Hecklers: Strategies for handling heckling and defusing tense situations. • Building Confidence: Feel more comfortable and capable when interacting with audience members. About the session leaders Chris Head: A respected coach, director and author in the UK comedy scene, Chris has a wealth of knowledge and a proven ability in teaching comedians how to develop their material and performance. Geoff Whiting: Geoff has a host of practical and inspiring insight into how to engage and interact with audiences. A seasoned comedian with years of experience in stand-up and compering, Geoff is known for his mastery of crowd work and has performed in every major club and festival in the country and all over the world, honing his crowd work skills to perfection. Don't miss out on this chance to enhance your crowd work skills and become a more confident and engaging comedian.

10.45am-3.45pm, Saturday 28th February 2026 @ Theatre Deli, Leadenhall Street, London EC3A 4AF This is the workshop for you if you're a stand-up comedian wanting to sharpen your storytelling skills. A story can be anything from 1 minute, to 5 minutes to, on occasion, an entire show! You can either: * come along with a story of a few minutes in length that you have been doing in stand-up that you'd like to get more laughs and engagement from. * or come along with a story that you have not yet performed and discover how to make it a funny and compelling story. Alternatively, if you're not yet sure what would make a good story for stand-up, the session will enable you to identify and develop one. Here's what we'll cover: 1. Embracing Creative License We will look at exaggerating and inventing elements and how to make a story funnier by upping the ante. 2. Use of present tense We’ll explore how telling a story in the present tense is a key technique. 3. Use of direct speech (in act-outs) We’ll work with act-outs from back-and-forth dialogue to potentially full act-outs can involving acting out a situation. 4. Using Misdirection Misdirection creates a moment of surprise (which is great for laughter and engagement). Comedians utilise it constantly in one-liners, yet it's often overlooked in stories. We’ll look at working with it in stories. 5. Integrating Regular Laughs We’ll also look at peppering your narrative with jokes throughout. We will explore identifying "afterthought" moments within the story. 6. Structuring Your Story with SHEP To make sure it's in the right structure, we’ll shape your story using my storytelling structure SHEP (Set-up, Hook, Escalation, Payoff).

24th February - 31st March (5 x Tuesday nights - no session 17th March) 7pm-9pm UK time, 8pm-10pm European time, 11am-1pm Pacific time (PDT), 2pm-4pm Eastern time (EDT) Across 5 weeks, be taken through the process of writing an artfully structured and plotted comedy script. A writer said of the course: "This course structures me and my script". Great slogan! "Structure yourself and your script". WEEK 1 of the course: SET-UP (ACT 1) ACT 1 will be setting everything up for that episode. It will open with the SET-UP that establishes the world and the characters. Homework: Write the set-up WEEK 2 of the course: TURNING POINT (ACT 1) At the end of Act 1 you reach a TURNING POINT for your protagonist. So something changes for your main character, it's the moment that sends your characters down a new path or raises the stakes on the challenge that has been introduced. Homework: Write to the turning point at the end of act 1 Week 3 of the course: MIDPOINT (ACT 2) Act 2 picks up the story, then around half-way through the script, you hit the MIDPOINT. It's not just the middle of the script, it has a specific job to do. It can be the moment of no return, or at least when things suddenly get more challenging and options close down for your protagonist. It can also be a revelation where the audience find out something significant. Homework: Write to the midpoint of act 2 Week 4 of the course: CRUNCH POINT (ACT 2) At the END ACT 2 you hit a CRUNCH POINT for your protagonist. This is the worst point. You can look at the script making things worse for your protagonist across the three beats of turning point, mid point and crunch point. Homework: Write to the crunch point of act 2 Week 5 of the course: TWIST (ACT 3) As you go into act 3 an element of the narrative reaches a conclusion but you're likely to keep a storyline open to take us into the series. The TWIST at the end of the episode gives a surprise finish, which is either simply a comic beat to end on, or potentially sets up the narrative to come. Homework: Write to the end of the script, the twist of act 3 (This final homework will be reviewed online a week after the final session) In the sessions we look at shows as varied as Ghosts, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Catastrophe, Black Books, Friends, Alma's Not Normal, Fawlty Towers and Hacks to provide examples of these story beat moments and script structure.

7pm-9pm UK time 8pm-10pm European time 11am-1pm Pacific time (PST) 2pm-4pm Eastern time (EST) This Essential Tools Zoom course will equip you with the essential tools for writing sitcom and comedy drama. You might have: - an idea in mind already that you want to develop and write, - a draft of a script that you want to rewrite and enhance - or even no specific idea at this point. (If this is the case, the course will definitely give you ideas!). As well as providing you with a complete set of essential tools, on the course you will write a lot of funny scenes with your characters without worrying initially about where they’ll slot into a story. You'll simply be working with that week's tools. This freedom will allow you to make discoveries of scenes and situation that will be highly useful to your script and will take your characters places you’d never considered. If however you have a much clearer idea of where your script is going from the outset, you can use the tools in the places that are most relevant for your developing story. "Really liked the combination of very well chosen comedy clips, practical exercises and discussion. The sessions flew by, and having weekly homework kept me focused, gave me structure and kept me writing." JH "This course was so useful for guiding me through the process of developing a comedy script for television. Each week we were set different homeworks that got me into the rhythm of writing much more regularly. Chris has a great manner and clearly many years of invaluable experience in the industry. The fact that it was online made it much more accessible, as we were able to all be in different cities, countries even and share our ideas. I highly recommend this for anyone serious about developing a treatment and script for TV. " JM