So what did he do with the collection of brilliant little jokes he had dreamed up for this weird anti-comic comedy?
Stand-up comics, comedy drama and film, talks and workshops.
Writer and broadcaster Sarfraz Manzoor, himself a practising Muslim, talks to Muslim comics, comedy writers and scholars about what makes their fellow-believers laugh.
There's one about the Nightclub comics, comedy records, all these different things.
The former Perrier award winner, who has been nominated for a record seventh consecutive year, is in the running for best male television comic, best comedy entertainment personality and best comedy entertainment programme.
Chris was selected as a feature comic at comedy festivals in Asheville, Charleston, Baltimore, Ventura, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and the Women In Comedy Festival.
"To a large extent," says comic Mark Thomas, "comedy is about instantly recognisable short-hand signals and images.
Might it have been the US comic's comedy routine about a pet caterpillar driven to suicidal fury by the endless wait to pupate?
While it might seem somewhat strange to label an entire medium on the basis of its association with one genre (humour strips), it should be borne in mind what an appropriate label it is, particularly given that the words comic and comedy are etymologically related to the Greek komos, a word associated with the Revels, a time of humorous and subversive transgression.
1. Leonard Maltin, The Great Movie Comedians (New York: Bell Publishing, 1982), 47. 2. Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 149 50.
