Christina Martin
In her first year of performing stand-up comedy Christina placed third in both the Reading Comedy Festival Open Mic Competition 2005 and the Funny Women Awards 2006, and was offered paid work by Off the Kerb and Christian Knowles.
Christina has performed at venues such as the Bloomsbury Theatre, the Hyena in Newcastle, the Free Beer Show, Josie Long's Sunday Night Adventure Club, Robin Ince’s School For Gifted Children, The Red Rose, Too 2 Much, The Underbelly, The Assembly Rooms, the Tattershall Castle and the London Comedy Store, where she performed in the Funny Women Awards final and successfully beat the gong at the King Gong show.
She performed a set on the BBC7 radio show 'Festival Atmosphere: Brighton 2006', appeared on Radio 4's '28 Acts in 28 Minutes' and has been been a guest on The Richard Bacon Show on Radio Five Live, The Sunday Programme on Radio Four, Richard Herring's Objective and One Life Left on Resonance FM. She has also been invited on BBC1's The Big Questions several times but can't be bothered to get up early on a Sunday morning.
She was due to perform a set for 'The World Stands Up' on the Paramount Comedy channel, but after running her jokes past its lawyers, the show's producers felt that she might offend Christians. She likes this better than actually getting on the show.
It ended up being a blessing in disguise. She was approached by New Humanist magazine to write an article about this experience and has been writing for them ever since (http://newhumanist.org.uk/1413). When one of her most successful New Humanist features, God Trumps, went online it received over 56,000 hits in a day – the average daily visitor count for the New Humanist site is about 4,000. It is the most read online article in the magazine’s history and has been now been made into a collectible game.
Her work with New Humanist led to her performing at the British Humanist Association dinner 2008, the Rationalist Association AGM 2009, and the National Secular Society Secularist of the Year Awards 2007, where in previous years the comedy was provided by Stewart Lee and Nick Doody.
She also performed a set at the NSS Bye Bye Blasphemy Party in 2008 alongside Robin Ince and Sir Ian McKellen. After the show Robin Ince offered her a gig at the Bloomsbury Theatre in December 2008 alongside, amongst others, Mark Thomas, Ricky Gervais, Richard Dawkins and Stewart Lee. The DVD of this is now available to buy.
Robin invited her back to perform at another Bloomsbury Theatre show in June 2009.
She has also hosted the Worst Lobbying Awards 2007 in Brussels.
Further to her participation in the Comedy Idol competition 2005, where she made it down to the final 20 contestants, Jimmy Carr said the following about Christina: "Good comedy mind...intelligent delivery...really charming...give up the day job"
Other quotes:
4Laughs: “…they don't get much better than this. The delivery's cool but the material's hot. The persona's tough but the approach is feel good. The passion's piercing, the preparation profound”
Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society: "Christina kindly provided entertainment at the Secularist of the Year event...Given that the winner was an Iranian woman who had suffered greatly...it might have been a bit downbeat. Christina's very funny and very appropriate set raised the mood considerably and turned it into a real party...one laugh after another as she laid into religion in her inimitable way. She's a comic with a big future."
Claire Pollard, organiser of Ladyfest 2008: “It's always so nice to see a comic who has no special quirks, no affected or generic comedy mannerisms and really intelligent, funny material. I would book her again in a shot (in fact I’m thinking of running a regular night just so I CAN book her again)”
BBC Tyne: "Petite, cute and deeply offensive! How can such profanity, blasphemy and downright badness come from of such a lovely lass? She makes Christina Aguilera look like Angelina Ballerina. As part of her intelligent, bold and funny act, Christina takes a wry swipe at organised religion. Duck for cover - this lady has teeth"
www.chortle.co.uk: "Christina Martin has unashamedly borrowed Stewart Lee's entire persona, from the long, deliberate pauses mid-sentence to the delicately judged sarcasm and obsession with the idiotic doctrines of organised religion. So heavy is the debt of inspiration, that you can almost hear her best Pope-deriding material coming from the sneery mouth of Lee himself. And I mean that as a compliment - there are a lot worse people to try to emulate, and she does so with conviction and intelligence."
www.insidecomedy.co.uk: "Christina is already a familiar face on the stand-up circuit and the quality of the material she performed at the semi-final is confirmation of why comedy clubs routinely book her to appear at their venues...Christina's set was intelligent, bold and funny. She dealt with the subject of organised religion with originality. She is an exciting act and one to watch."
Aside from the stand-up Christina also writes comedy.
She was commissioned to write for the BBC Radio 4 sketch show 'Recorded for Training Purposes' and her sketches were broadcast in January 2009. She was also invited to write for Radio 4’s ‘The Now Show’.
Her spoof Christian character Noel Hurley and his amazon.com reviews won her a small following in the USA. And her own spoof amazon.co.uk reviews won her the title ‘Weblebrity of the Week’ on Steve Wright’s Radio 2 show blog round up in May 2009.
She was a regular feature writer for Viz Comic between 2006 and 2009 and was the first female writer in the comic's history. She was interviewed on BBC Radio Tyne's breakfast show about this. Her articles are included in the Viz annuals 'Last Turkey in the Shop', 'The Council Gritter', 'The Five Knuckle Shuffle' and 'The Cleveland Steamer'. She also has articles in their thirty year retrospective book 'Anus Horribilis'.
In 2006 she was a guest speaker at Pecha Kucha in Newcastle on behalf of the comic's editors. Pecha Kucha is an international event described as "a fast paced evening of fun, drinks and a collection of inspirational images and stories by some of the most influential people in the creative industries"
She has provided a contribution on the experience of being a female comic for a book called 'Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued' by Susan O'Doherty and for an article by Sarah-Louise Young for the women's magazine 'Scarlet'.
She has contributed a piece on disablism in stand-up comedy for the magazine of disability charity MENCAP, and has provided a chapter for the book ‘An Atheist’s Guide to Christmas’ edited by Ariane Sherine.
She also writes for The Guardian's Comment is Free column.
