Comedy double act will delight the children in Brighton

Childhood friends Rachel WD and Ruby Clyde are delighted to be offering their latest children’s show as part of the Brighton Dome Comedy Festival

SHELF: The Kids Show 2, suitable for ages six and up, will be taking place in the Studio Theatre on Saturday, October 24 at 2pm (doors 1.15pm).

Rachel said: “Ruby and I have been best friends since we were 10 years old. We grew up across the street from each other in south London and we became friends. After university we started doing comedy. We saw comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe and we just thought that we could do that.”

Their first show was 2015, as Ruby says. As for the name: “We picked the name by sitting in our room and naming objects until we hit on a word that we found beautiful to say. We just liked saying it. It was as simple as that. It's a little bit odd and I think it's memorable. And at the time lots of acts had single-word names.”

Rachel said: “We started off very much doing comedy for adults. Both of us wanted to write, and getting into writing was really difficult. So is comedy but at least you could start doing open mic nights. We started writing sketches together and performing and it just continued from there.”

Ruby added: “We were doing alternative comedy. It was pretty silly stuff but I liked to think that it was cutting edge, but a friend of ours who runs Comedy Club 4 Kids saw us perform and said ‘Have you ever thought about doing this material for children?’”

And so they did.

Rachel said: “We struggled at the start. If you have an adult audience, you can have a couple of dud jokes and they will be fine with that and will try to laugh. But if you have a couple of dud jokes with a children's audience, they won't laugh and they will just tell you that it’s not funny. Early doors there were kids shouting out ‘Oh, get on with it!’ And that's what you have to do.

“But we were lucky that a lot of what we were doing worked immediately for the children. And the thing with children is that you can do a much more pure version of comedy. With adults you have to find the right audience. With kids there is a real purity to it, and you tend to find that once you have got material that works, then it tends to work with all kids within that particular age range.”

As for how they divide the task, Ruby said: “When we were performing to adults it was much clearer. Rachel would be the more outrageous one and I would be a little bit more stern but now there's just really a lot of silliness – though maybe Rachel is still the more mischievous figure and I'm just running around trying to thwart her!”