Guest blog from Kathryn Hanke of The Dog-Eared Collective; a quartet of funny mongers championing a wildly anarchic and mischievously surreal brand of comedy.

It has always been well-known that as writer-performers you have to jump through hoops to gain any kind of Arts funding. And this is not a bad thing – if arts funding bodies gave out money willy-nilly, hoop makers would go out of business.

However, what naturally happens when the demand far outweighs supply, is that the system of selection becomes more ruthless. It’s like Darwin but with creative folk instead of finches – to (financially) survive we must develop traits which help us to get fed. And as a general rule, this means that comedy as pure entertainment is becoming considered a more commercial venture than artistic, and so within arts funding realms, it is like a flaccid beak for a finch. Not useful.

This could be a fair point – as a sketch comedy writer-performer with a troupe, what I do is not intended to blow people’s creative minds to smithereens – or push the boundaries of common understanding to a point where the frontier of a performance style is challenged.

However, neither is it to conform to an entirely mainstream and commercial brand of humour, to sit comfortably in the status quo and allow our audience to switch off. As a group we are wildly theatrical with our staging, we mix stand-up techniques (live improvisation and working off the crowd) with pre-scripted material and we regularly fuel our shows on the anarchy of live performance. An audience member once said to us that seeing our show was like ‘having sex witha dinosaur. I have no point of reference for it’. So we are doing something different and (possibly) original. But this also means that we are not a safe bet commercially – and gives us yet another bendy beak.

So where does this leave us? I guess very much in the middle (with Malcolm and Stealers Wheel) as not ground breaking enough for arts funding, but not commercial enough for mass comedy industry backing.

I can’t say that I’m complaining, I enjoy seeing a lot of funded new work, each of which seems deserving of its support and I think it’s crucial (as an artist) that there are always creative people who are given the forum to put on innovative fringe work – whoever they are and whatever their chosen style. Maybe it’s just that we need to make sure that in struggling for survival of the fittest, things do not become too polarised between what is artistic and what is entertainment.

There may not be plenty of money in the middle, but there’s lots of room and we seem to have a laugh, so why not come and join us? You may even find out what it’s like to have sex with a dinosaur.

The Dog-Eared Collective are performing their latest sketch show ‘You’re Amazing. Now Look At Me’ at The Carriageworks Theatre next Saturday 3th March at 7.45pm. Tickets: £7 / £6, Box Office: 0113 224 3801.

If you’re interested in writing about comedy for The Culture Vulture, tweet Kay at @KayLinaBrown