I haven't had such a long gap in blogging for a while. I have no idea how the past two months have gone by (chronologically, I would imagine), but here we are, December 15th, and as far as anyone knows, I could be dead.

But I am not! (Of course, I would say this). I have been simply been drowning in a sea of thesis writing, teaching, working, holidays, films, meals, sleep, watching live comedy, performing in live comedy (not dead) and swimming pools. All of which is pretty standard fare, particular for those of us who write theses, teach, work, holiday, watch film, eat, sleep, watch live comedy, perform live comedy (not dead), recycle jokes and swim. So here's a brief snippet of each.

1. My thesis nears completion. It looks and sounds very much like a thesis - earthy and well researched.

2. My teaching has been fun. I hope one day to be good at it.

3. My work has proceeded. I have research papers and journal submissions and I think I'm due a minion.

4. I went to Egypt! I walked like an Egyptian - that is to say, near some pyramids and sand. This was a very good time.

5. I have watched many films. I'm unlikely to reach 100, as I've lulled for much of the year, but I've got through a lot in the past month. Donnie Brasco is absolutely my new favourite film. I like Johnny Depp playing lunatics and the weird, but Johnny Depp playing hardman undercover agent is far better, and Al Pacino's performance? Forgedduhboutit.

6. I have ate and slept. Not dead, you see.

7. I saw Mark Watson - here's a comedian who you should go and see if you want five hours of comedy delivered in under two hours. I failed to see Josie Long.

8. I have done the Imps, and that. There were new Imps who are a delight to be around and old Imps who get better and better, and a director-assistant director team who are doing a lovely job. A student of mine saw a show, which I imagine was strange for her. But that's me, shattering preconceptions about lecturers and their non-participation in improvised comedy shows. In some ways, this carries over into tutorials (no preparation, polite applause, rock music between each section).

9. I continue to Twitter. Follow me on Twitter. This is where you get everything you might expect from this blog - mystery, intrigue, preconception shatterings (bring you own!), jokes about the News and what we should do about it - but shorter (less than 140 characters) and more regular (more than 0 characters in two months).

10. I have continued with swimming. I am svelte. I am doing an exercise class on Saturday mornings. My abs glean in the midday sun. I am getting faster in the pool. My biceps bulge. I take my hands and place them on your hips, pulling you close.

A story about last Monday that I want to remember.

There is a legend in the Imps, known by few. It's name is Lost in Alien. It is my all-time favourite improvised scene - loosely based on the films Lost In Translation and Alien, it remains the funniest thing I ever did on stage with Andy, featured the line "' I Will Survive' was your song?" and a thousand other bits of stupidity, and culminated in our first on-stage kiss. It was one of those moment where everything we said got a laugh and I felt like we were in complete control of the audience yet giddy with delight at the same time.

Last Monday was the last Wheatsheaf show I will do with Joe Morpurgo and Lucy Hamilton, two of the best improvisers I've ever had the privilege to perform with and (to the extent that anyone cares about it) two of the best human beings on the planet. I have had numerous great scenes with Lucy (including the only Imps scene I can remember that was done completely without words), she is so easy to be with on stage and I will miss her.

And now to Joe. To finish the the set off, we did a scene which could be entitled: Batman - by William Shakespeare. Everything started off normal enough - Batman (Joe) and Robin (Jim) talked in Elizabethan English to set the scene. At one point, Joe fires webs from his wrists - it later emerges that Batman has defeated everyone in Gotham City, and he had also eaten Spiderman. My cue to come in as the disembodied voice of Spiderman, from inside of Batman. The scene basically broke away from any semblance of a Shakespearean plot from then on, as the dysfunctional relationship between an increasingly irate Batman and an increasingly aggravating Spiderman played out.

Spiderman says "follow my lead", and Joe exits the stage, stomach first. Then: "What can you see, Batman?" "Nothing, it's dark". "Me too. We must be in the same place". Then: "Spiderman, I need your senses". "OK, I will use my sense of touch. It feels squishy. Are you somewhere squishy?" (Joe grabs his stomach in pain) "Use you sense of hearing. What can you hear?" "Digestion".

In the next scene Simon, as narrator came on, only for Joe and I to completely tear the Shakespearean structure to pieces and say goodbye to any plot for good, first correcting his failure to use sufficient plurals from offstage ("Can our hero..." "HEROES".), then making snide comments when he tries to please too hard ("Is it the Flies". "No, it's just the Fly. Keep up"), before finally breaking into a proper fourth-wall crushing argument between Batman and Spiderman ("Whose name is on this play?" "It should have been mine, until you ate me". "Well, did your film win any Oscars?"), until Joe tires of the whole thing and commits hari-kari to end it all - only to be met with "You missed me".

It was beautiful. Everything we said got a laugh. I felt in control yet giddy with delight, spurred on by occasionally glancing at all the other Imps on stage falling about with laughter. Joe was magnificent, spending most of the show on stage alone, talking to his stomach and slowly building up an impotent rage (all the while, I could corpse at will from off-stage).

Monday was one of the best shows I can remember in a long time. As a final act of the uniqueness that Joe brings, he got forty audience members on stage to join in the final song of musical, whilst reflecting out loud on three years of Oxford and love and life and everything. This is also the show that he ended Story Story Die with a rant on the Cherwell's predicable reviewing policy for any form of untraditional theatre. But above all of this, I am so glad that I'll remember my last Imps show with Joe for this: our Lost in Alien.

Home from Edinburgh, having had a great week in Edinburgh.

Aside from performing in a few Imps shows whilst there (more on that later) we got to see around fifteen shows. Some were exceptional. Tim Key (this years main award winner) thoroughly deserved his accolades with his show, The Slutcracker, and his friend Tom Basden's show, Now That's What I Call Music-Based Comedy, was also great. They both have a similar style, delivering what could be described (simplistically) as intentionally bad poetry (Key) or songs (Basden) ("it's not intentional", says Key, "when I sit down to write a poem, I think 'Let's make this a good one'"). Basden is an excellent guitarist, I should also note. Their material is coupled with extensive use of multimedia and some props, making the show seem so much more than just stand-up. Key ends his show attempting to cross the room, aided by the audience, without touching the floor, paying off an earlier bit. Basden litters his shows with slides on his inventions (new boys names, girls names, maths) cartoons, and other ideas (a wordsearch comprising 100 letter Y's and the word 'Patio') set to music. I liked Key's show more, because of the quality of his performance, his delivery, his interactions with Fletch the techie, but Basden has perhaps been underated this year.

I also really like Laura Solon's first show in Edinburgh since winning the Perrier in 2005. She tells a story through a number of charachter (both male and female) which she voices. The story is both good in of itself and serves to allow a number of excellent standalone sketches (the French radio interview where the presenter and the French author debate whose culture is better, England or France is a highlight, as is her Welsh call-centre lady). The performance was energetic, her delivery impeccable and she seemed just, for want of a better word, lovely.

Rounding off my picks (bearing in mind I'm waiting to see Daniel Kitson and Stewart Lee on their post Fringe tours) was Simon Munnery's 2009 AGM. For our ticket, we got an hour and a quarter in the venue, and a further hour in the pub after as he finished going through all the submitted motions, improvising responses leading into more established routines. It's incredible how much matertial he has to draw on, and style-wise, there's no-one like him ("I went swimming in the river: widths, mainly").

I saw a lot of sketch shows - the Bristol Revunions and Delete the BanJaX were really fun, especially the latter. They seemed liked good friends whose palable delight at performing together was infectious, and where bits fell apart due to exhaustion and lost voices at the end of the run, their good natured mocking of each other was pitched exactly right. One of the guys, Dan, was particularly difficult to stop watching, and his enormous personality was obvious in all his characters (both human and horse). I want to do shows with them.

The Durham Revue were disappointing - I've often enjoyed them more than their Oxford or Cambridge counterparts. Cath and I left feeling quite bored by the end, as the show ran out of ideas about halfway through. I enjoyed the Penny Dreadfuls and Pappy's Fun Club, although given the disputes over the latter between Imps, I've had quite enough of discussing its merits and shortcomings. Rich Hall was quite a letdown - it was a bit meandering, and while he's great at dealing with the unplanned bits with the audience, little of his material was as stellar as I've seen in the past.

There's more, but instead, let's talk about the Imps. I did three shows, and to be brutally honest, I didn't enjoy myself a huge amount. Part of this was being a little out-of-practice, and the problems with joining a group of people who have their own momentum. I also didn't particularly like the set lists - I find improvised musicals tedious and I don't have much more love for Shakespeare scenes either. I find them restrictive with their conventions and often too long and convoluted. I'm also not convinced the audience don't share my assessment, for all our own bluster. Quite frankly, I like short form with all its silliness and energy and gimmicks and short scenes which allow quick ideas and short bursts of insanity, and I like long form for the ability to develop ideas and characters slowly and build up layers of humour and bring back themes. Where the group currently is sits between these two, but without the positives of either.

So here's quite a thing. Let us talk about it for a few minutes, shall we?

Apparently, the Oxford Imps have not impressed Sian Cox-Brooker, as well as the nameless many who would doubt our reputation as the most talented bunch of frustrated thesps. That is, of course, fine - the sold out show we performed last week (and all other weeks) leads me to believe someone is enjoying what we do. However, I can only assume that while I saw them laugh frequently, they failed to laugh largely, thus allowing the laughs to be smaller than our swollen egos.

But I do need to be clear about something. Do people doubt we are frustrated thesps, or do people doubt we actually have any talent? Because I do doubt the former myself - most of the group aren't interested in performing drama outside of our comedy show (which has always left me feeling the exact opposite of frustrated) while the few that do are incredibly successful within the Oxford scene.

So it must be that we aren't all that talented, a flaw we apparently blame on our audiences. I have been an Imp for four years now. We have blamed audiences for giving unimaginative suggestions. We have blamed audiences for encouraging cheap and easy sex gags. We have never blamed an audience for a bad show. We blame ourselves for not being funny. We blame ourselves for being funny but not being good. We even blame ourselves when we are both good and funny, but not as much of either as we hope to be. Anyone who has ever sat through our post-show analysis will quickly realise we are our own harshest critics. Suggesting otherwise is as inaccurate as it is mean-spirited.

Thankfully, of course, the Revue are close by to show us how to do things, in the sense that while they are the same idea as the Imps, they perform an entirely different form of comedy. They write a scripted show once every four months. We make up two hours of comedy every week. So you can see how might lack ambition. If only we could make less comedy with more of a safety net. Of course, they are infinitely times funnier, so that's measurable at least.

Do not mistake this for an attack on the Revue, who I happen to respect and have defended from charges of mediocrity a number of times today alone. I just want to point out where this article may have drifted slightly astray from the small matters of truth and reality. I can't help that the writer may not like the show, and would listen and agree with anyone who wanted to point out which specific bits of comedy failed. But I do expect a little more research and specificity if we are going to be so strongly criticised. She could, for instance, have emailed hannah@oxfordimps.com - if only to check who is now in charge of auditions.

Tonight was the final Wheatsheaf show of a large number of the Imps: Andy, Bex, Paul, Schuller, Rachel, Joe, Robin, Sophie. I am quite saddened by it. Many have been in the Imps for the majority of my three-plus year stint with the group; several I consider to be amongst my best friends. They represent some of my best memories from Oxford, and I can't begin to estimate how much of a hole they will leave in my life next year.

Guys, I truly, deeply, honestly love you all. Some day we will do it all over again.

I think I can say, without fear of exaggeration, that yesterday's 12-hour Imps show is one of the best things I've ever done. I am so pleased with how it all turned out - the quality of the shows was high, the execution was smooth, and the audience were large enough. Sure, I may have had a tendency to micro-manage every last minute detail, but it really was worth it.

Main results: We took £600 (after costs were paid for), which will be going to the Oxford Night Shelter within the week. I did ten of the shows (as, I should mention, did Bex), because of hardcoreness.

Additional results: I only said one truly wrong thing (stillborn tree). I came out of the shows with several sketch ideas. I am deeply in love with all my Brothers and Sisters Imp. I put Oldham in a wardrobe. I got to be Martin Sheen (pretending to be a woman all these years). A member of my family saw me do improv.

It has cost me quite a lot of sleep however, and mentally, I was quite tired come 10pm last night. I have developed a twitch in the muscle attached to my left elbow, which I would imagine is due to a sleep shortage. Or possibly to lupus.

(It's never lupus).

Last night was the first Wheatsheaf Imps show of the term, and my first proper bit of improv since June. And you know what? We rocked it. Not perfectly, by all means, but I thought everything came together wonderfully. In the second set I did not one but two scenes that I personally think were a couple of my all-time favourite, so thank you Becca and Andy.

I don't know if its noticeable from the audience, but the show seems to me to have a different feel to it. I think this was inevitable, given the people who have left the group, but I certainly noticed the change. Yesterday felt like a show about everyone on stage. I like it.

Come to the Ministry tonight. It'll be excellent, and then you will be as well.

Last night was probably my final Imps show of the year, as exams loom. In fact, if the exams get more loomy while the big pile of reading does not get any less loomy, Monday could have been my final Imps show as a student in Oxford. We shall not entertain this thought. Instead, we shall tell it dull stories of childhood activities during in the post-war years.

I am to do standup at the Magdalen punts party this Saturday, then a set for Stand Up for Darfur next Friday, at the Keble O'Reilly theatre. Get tickets from me. It is important to support such worthy causes - without such events, people would never go on punts.

The classic misdirection joke. I have perfected the technique: have a look at the first word of this paragraph, and while you are doing that, I shall finish the post and leave.

I've been on a bit of a high all week after the Imps on Monday, which was by far the best show I've done or been involved in this academic year. I have not been as active in the group as in previous years, as I have more pressures on my time and am looking to take on other things (see Sideshow, Sunday; Mirth, Ministry of; thesis, writing of a). As a result, I have often found myself disappointed in my performances, probably due to a shortage of practice.

This week just clicked however. I felt very responsive to everything on stage, whereas recently I have felt sluggish, mentally. I had three scenes with Becca, Lucy and Simon, and felt each was a success. While the scene I had with Simon was the most enjoyable, I was most pleased with the film and theatre styles scene with Lucy, and I think we really kept a strong story going without getting lost in the gimmick of the game.

I MCed the second set, and was trying out a character idea I had over the weekend, when I was thinking a bit about the movie Man on the Moon. It was very fun to do, and I think people responded to it which was the main thing. I'll definitely be using it again, and am toying with the idea of using it to compere a Ministry night, though I'm not sure it fits as well for a standup night as much as it did with the joyously enthusiastic, nerd-cool of an Imps show.