HOWZAT

RICHARD MORRISON

COMEDY

These days you can consume comedy more readily than ever before – there are pratfalls on YouTube and Peep Show on your BlackBerry, while all three seasons of Father Ted are now available as a zingy spearmint mouthwash.

For me, though, there’s still something too bitty about grabbing gobbets of comedy on the go. I’m also, incidentally, a horror to tell jokes to outside a darkened room – watch me screw up my face in alarm as I try to make sure I’m following you – while the last time somebody played a practical joke on me a clifftop mansion in Cornwall almost burnt down as a consequence.

But if you actually want to do a bit of comedy, rather than just watch it, and if you want a helping hand, well, you have got options. There are well-regarded stand-up courses such as those run in London by the Comedy School (thecomedyschool.com) and by Logan Murray (www.loganmurray.com). Whether any of your fellow night-class students will be Grock-influenced class-warriors who perform in whiteface, as in Trevor Griffiths’s wonderful 1974 play The Comedians, we can only hope.

But if you’re interested in comedy improvisation, I can recommend courses run by the Spontaneity Shop (www.the-spontaneity-shop.com). The weekend-long beginners course that I went on a few years ago was not just about making professional improvisers of us – clearly that’s going to happen only for a tiny minority of people – but also introducing us to some important principles of comedy and storytelling: status; establishing an order and then interrupting it; never denying other people’s ideas. Anyone interested in how comedy works, how stories work, will get something unique out of this experience. And since impro can often be more fun for the performers than it is for the audience, at last you’re on the right side of the divide.

In February impro’s grand poobah, Keith Johnstone, comes over from Canada to lead a course. But you’ll need to be a practised improviser already to be allowed into The Presence. The beginners course I took was a mix of talents, of actors and course-aholics and day trippers like me. You won’t become Paul Merton overnight. But I found it a stimulating insight into the creative process – one which, definitive though Johnstone’s book Impro is, you can’t get just by sitting on the sidelines.

DOMINIC MAXWELL

THEATRE

I spend the first months of each new year trying to get physically smaller and mentally larger. And the fact that I invariably fail shouldn’t stop me sharing my hopes with you: not those involving Ryvita and dried seaweed but the culture-vulture bits, such as managing to – well, not finish Proust, but at least to start him.

Actually, my impending diet must be on my mind, because my first advice is to give up things: television, computer games, slick films such as The Bourne Ultimatum, which is all guns and chases. Silence and reflection are surely cultural pluses these days, but then so are many other things. Why not read a poem a day? And/or listen to Tennyson, Eliot, Heaney or A. N. Other reading their own verse on www.poetryarchive.org? Why not look at a daily painting, using the Web Gallery of Art (www.wga.hu/index1.htm), which has just left me marvelling again at Breughel’s Tower of Babel?

But drama is my subject, so what about visiting an unfamiliar producing theatre and perhaps even getting personally involved with, say, the Tobacco Factory in Bristol or Theatre503 in Battersea or the Gate in Notting Hill? And did you know that the Royal Court sells all Monday tickets for £10, the same price that the National charges in its Travelex seasons. That way, you could see David Hare’s new Vertical Hour and Simon Russell Beale in Shaw’s Major Barbara in 2008 and so afford to catch Kevin Spacey in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic or, next autumn, Kenneth Branagh in Chekhov’s Ivanov at Wyndham’s.