Our comedy night could be your life

When Joz Norris isn’t knocking on doors with his pims glass trying to drum up support for the Conservative party he bemoans the lack of alternative comedy outside London and questions whether the rest of the UK is ready for surrealism, anti-comedy, outsiders or any form of a nuanced act that isn’t based upon mother-in-laws and Bovril.

He clearly isn’t aware of the Durham launderette scene, a burgeoning hardcore, straight edge, DIY comedy scene that is currently taking place in launderettes throughout Durham.

The launderette scene is called Silly Billies and I am part of the experiment. We are not comedy for the man on the street but we’re here when you need us and you definitely need us. We’re righteous, we’re nonsense and we’ve lost our minds.

Jack Whitehall, the court Jester to the reptilian agenda, has never been in a launderette. Pity the poor man.

When you go to a £18,250 per term public school with Robert Patterson and Kate Middleton those sort of opportunities are just not available. He might get the chance to pay someone to visit a launderette and then write up their experience so he can be regurgitated on stage. But this just isn’t enough.

For people from Whitehall’s background opportunities like going absolutely mental in a Durham launderette are not available and that’s simply isn’t fair. The increasing lack of opportunities for young people is due to the widening gap between the rich and the poor in which many wealthy people are unable to pass the poor test and get into areas where non-rich people work.

There are other places where the likes of Whitehall simply would not have the opportunity to perform due to declining opportunities for the rich of his generation. Unless his father paid for a flat in Peterlee and he commuted to Durham to do a two year unpaid intership with Silly Billies I can’t see how he could break outside his class.

Such decline in social mobility can be accounted for that fact that a load of weird nights are just becoming closed doors to the likes of Whitehall. There’s This, Oblong and Burning Duck, all batshit mental nights in Middlesbrough, Sheffield and York respectively.

He will never see this new exciting art comedy collective arising. The spontaneous Silly Billy guerrilla gigs in the Durham launderettes are gaining a strong following, climaxing with sweaty topless teenage boys jumping on top of washing machines shouting: “the North, the North, where we do what we want to! The North! The North! Where we do what we like!”

As for you, what you waiting for? Five year of austerity and the destruction of society is going to kill us; in the meantime we might as well reclaim what we have left. The launderettes. Take back our launderettes and rejoice in nonsense.

We’ve found a temporary exit from the dystopian grind and it’s a surrealist ride, man. It’s called Silly Billies and you can join us today. You’ll find us in a Durham, watching the washing machines spinning round.

Silly Billies Launderette Tour! feat. Fernando, David Callaghan, Liberty Hodes, Joby Mageean and the Order of the Silly Billies, Saturday 11 July, Old Cinema Launderette, Durham, 7.30pm, £5.