Hello, yeah.
Let's applaud lunch, (applauding)
if anything, I guess.
Applaud lunch.
I hope you had a good one.
I'm Chris.
I'm gonna just you know,
give you some weird stuff for the next 15 minutes,
and then we can get back to the real reason we're here.
I want to talk about
the first hip hop album I ever heard,
which was the Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem.
Some of you guys might know him by his Roman name,
Thousand and thousand.
(laughing)
Well done, quickest person in the room down there.
Everyone else, that's fine.
Not a lot of comedians do gangster Roman numeral jokes.
I is one.
(laughing)
Now, back when I was 12 years old listening to that album,
back when I was 12 years old and thought that Dr. Dre
was pronounced Doctor-Doctor-E,
(laughing) I wanted to be a rapper
more than anything else in the world, okay.
And this was at the same age that I thought
all rap was made up entirely on the spot.
And that's what I do now.
I make up raps on the spot.
It's weird that I'm standing on a spot,
that feels weird. (laughing)
I make up raps, it's called freestyling.
The easiest way to do it is to show you right now.
So, from this half of the auditorium,
can be top or bottom,
can I get an activity?
Like filing a tax return or making a smoothie.
- Fencing. - Fencing?
Was that, who said that? (laughing)
Fencing.
Good on you sir, I was expecting to look down
and see you wearing like the full get up here,
just like, "This is my moment, I'm gonna seize it."
But fencing.
Okay, and a word from over here,
maybe a, I don't know, an occupation?
- Kissing. - Kissing?
I love it!
I was thinking like, vocation or jobs,
but you were like,
"No, the thing I spend most of my time doing."
(laughing)
"The thing I am occupied with, 'cause Lord knows,
"I'm a kisser."
Okay.
Kissing and fencing are the two suggestions.
This is gonna be a really short one
before I get into the meat
of what I'm gonna do for you today.
This is a segway from head mic to hand mic,
and this is a freestyle rap made up entirely on the spot
based on the suggestions fencing and kissing,
and don't worry it's not anywhere near as atrociously bad
as you are expecting it to be.
Some of you seem unconvinced but don't worry.
If we can drop that beat, good sir, let's do this.
♫ Yeah, I wanna get it today
♫ I talk about lemme toil with the foil and épée
♫ Different kinds of sabers that I use when I fight
♫ Standing on the side of a thin blue line
♫ The lights come down people in the crowd cheer
♫ They wanna see the fencing match
♫ That's why they gathered here
♫ Olympic sport also commonwealth
♫ But forget your mask and it is bad for your health
♫ You might injure yourself
♫ If you don't wear the beekeeper
♫ Little face thing that they feature
♫ Lookin' like they're walkin' 'round
♫ Like the superhero villain Venom
♫ Yeah you see the Spider-Man show
♫ Full face mask comin' at you with a saber
♫ It's like "Whoa buddy do me a favor"
♫ I'm only first grade I am just an amateur
♫ But you take the blade and you just hack it more
♫ I step back when it makes the contact
♫ All the natural metal things react
♫ And send a little buzzer round and the crowd goes crazy
♫ They're like hittin' that guy was just gravy
♫ Easy to do, yeah they all missin'
♫ I try and stab there 'cause I'm obsessed with kissin'
♫ I'll be sat there see it in front of my eyes
♫ All the sexy maids weightless I'm occupied
♫ I'm like, oh, I love it, I love the lèvres
♫ I wanna make sure my lips go together, yo
Wait, one sec, are you speeding it up
like a massive douche?
Just like, "Hey if we make it go faster,
that'll really mess him up."
Don't worry, hey, let's acapella it,
that'll be even funnier.
I will go fast, but acapella,
'cause genuinely, that is too fast
for people who don't have English as a mother tongue
to really parse in their heads.
(laughing) I'm very sorry,
all the confused Norwegians going,
"Well I thought my English was very good,
but apparently not." (laughing)
We're gonna do kissing.
We're gonna do kissing, okay, okay.
♫ Kissing when you do it yeah your leg just pop
♫ It's a cool rap about kissing in hip hop
♫ Such a sensual task that I do with my lady
♫ Every day yeah I mean really daily
♫ She's at the back there so she might deny
♫ She might be like no, just one time at night
♫ When I lean over I'm never knees go weak
♫ 'Cause the only kiss you get Chris is on the cheek
♫ But I'm like, no I kiss 'til I cannot speak
♫ 'Til I got glandular fever inserted inside my body
♫ I go to my GP
♫ I'm like, get the mononucleosis outta me
♫ But they cannot do it, it's the kissin' disease
♫ Yeah you make the beat, go the rap becomes less easier
♫ Had to go, there we go, we did it no missin'
♫ Fencing and then a much faster version of kissing
There you go. (applauding and cheering)
Thank you.
That's why I do this.
Not the noise then, the silence at the start,
where I come on and you go, "This is gonna be awful."
But what I wanna do here now in the next 10 minutes
is teach you how to do that.
Okay?
Some of you are excited,
the rest of you are like, "That's never happening."
(laughing)
But it will.
Now what I want to do to start out is
tell you a brief anecdote.
It's from the Freakonomics podcast,
a great podcast if you listen to it.
In 2001, competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi
went to the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest,
and ate 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes.
Now to give you a reference point for that,
oh, I can drop this now, this is great.
Now I can mime eating hot dogs.
Nom nom nom.
He broke the world record, right?
The world record before this was 25.
He doubled it to 50.
And people were like, "How did you do this?"
And he said, "I didn't acknowledge that that was a record,
I didn't acknowledge that that was the limit."
And he talks about how we set
artificial limits for ourselves.
And these artificial limits
are something that was removed from me
when I started listening to hip hop,
thinking it was all made up entirely on the spot.
Because if you listen to Eminem
or André 3000 or Kendrick Lamar,
and they have these beautiful lyrics
that are kind of filled with linguistically dense
and thematically rich imagery,
and you think that is made up,
that becomes your bench mark,
and you've removed the limit of how good a freestyle can be.
So this is what I want to teach you.
The first thing to kind of
get into your heads is that...
It's important because it makes you present in the moment.
Okay?
And there's an improv teacher called Will Hines,
UCB in L.A.,
and he says that by being present and forgetting the future,
the present becomes richer and slower and bigger
and more evident.
And why is this important?
It's because we can't change the past,
and if we focus too much on the future,
then we forget about now,
and we stop making the changes that we could in the present.
Being present is forgetting your conscious mind
and just going with it, right?
Rap is about not being self conscious
and literally being, forgetting your conscious self.
So if you drive, you'll be familiar with this.
Highway blindness.
That's where you reach your destination,
but you don't remember the actual drive to get there, okay.
Some of you are nodding and that means
that's happened to you, or you drink way too much.
(laughing)
If that happens, that's because your brain is zoned out,
'cause it's just a normal activity that you're used to.
This is how you can freestyle, okay.
If you've got something you're familiar with.
I wash up the dishes a lot, we don't have a dishwasher.
I mow the lawn a lot.
I rap when I do that, because it occupies my kind of,
mechanical stuff and I can just let my brain flit around
from object to object and be in that moment.
You know all the words that I just said in that rap, okay.
You know all the words I rhymed
with those words in that rap.
And you know the rhyme schemes that I used in that rap.
Rhyme schemes for example like AA BB would be
"If you change your mind, I'm the first in line
Honey I'm still free, take a chance on me," okay?
AB BA, wrote that song.
(laughing)
Apologies, Norwegians, for not using lyrics from A-ha,
but, the joke doesn't work if I do that.
Although Morten Harket is a hottie.
(laughing)
It's just my Norwegian friends.
Rhyming is a pattern,
and our brain seeks out patterns and fills them in.
So, that's why, I don't know if you're up to date with
the kind of what's happening in the UK
with the Conservative Party,
this couplet will make sense in your brain
even though I'm trying to throw you off, okay?
Theresa May want us to bring back the hunt,
but chasing down foxes that makes you a nasty person.
That works (laughing)
because you're brain expects something
that I'm not giving you.
Obviously the word I was meant to say was
countryside alliance supporter.
(laughing)
Another example of why your brain
will fit in words that aren't actually there,
if I say a sentence.
So try and make this sentence make sense, but not rhyme.
On stage Chris has a bottle of water,
boom-puh-ch-boom-boom-ch,
he doesn't have a son and he doesn't have a,
- [Audience] Daughter.
- Exactly.
Even though you're not meant to make that sentence rhyme,
your brain is screaming, it's daughter,
it's daughter, right?
It's easier to rhyme than not to rhyme.
So, the two rules of freestyling
that will help you be present,
be functioning on the edge
of what your brain thinks is possible,
which kind of shuts down self-monitoring
and self-censorship and is where innovation exists,
the two rules are number one, make sure it rhymes,
all the time, okay?
When you're starting out,
it doesn't even have to make sense.
It's called rhyme over reason,
focus on just keeping that flow going.
The second part is the hard bit,
the second part is being present,
it's being in the moment and not thinking about this.
So to do that, this is what I want you guys to do.
For the next maybe a week,
maybe make a commitment for the next five or seven days,
to do this.
I know you all sing in the shower, okay?
And I've not been like, listening,
I'm not the NSA, that would be weird.
(laughing)
You sing in the shower.
Stop singing in the shower.
Start rapping instead.
It's super easy, okay.
If you've got a glass partition,
draw a little letter in the condensation
and rap words that begin with that letter.
If you've got objects in the windowsill,
rap about those words.
And just keep it going.
You can repeat words,
you just can't stop.
You can rhyme the word shampoo eight times in a row
as long as the words before it are changing.
And you'll start to pick it up,
it's just five minutes a day.
Day after, keep it going.
At worst, you are keeping really clean.
(laughing)
At best, there's literally no limit
to what you can do, right?
Limits are like Tinker Bell.
They only exist if we believe in them.
What I wanna do now, having given you that,
is a freestyle before we kick off
the second half of the day,
which Thor thought would be a wonderful idea.
He said, "Chris I know this evening you're going to be
performing a comedy performance with a kind of
raps and jokes at the dinner.
What I'd like you to do is do a rap about topics
that are being discussed today."
So, that's what we're gonna do.
I was in the first half so I've been here.
We're gonna take five suggestions
of things that we heard about today,
or things that you kind of associate with OFF
or anything you kind of noticed about Norway,
if you're a tourist here.
We'll take those suggestions
and we will turn those into a freestyle.
I mean me.
It's not like I'm gonna,
"now put those skills to the test guys."
(laughing)
So let's get five suggestions.
We'll divide the room into quarters then take a wildcard.
Let's come to the top quarter circle over there.
- Cartoon! - Cartoon, cartoon, lovely,
because we had a wonderful talk from an amazing cartoonist,
cartoons, cartoons, brilliant, okay.
- Transparency! - Transparency, I like it.
Transparency, cartoons.
What was that?
- Football! - Football?
I don't know where that came from?
What specifically about football sir?
(laughing)
"I just shouted a word and retreated into the darkness,"
(laughing)
I like it.
Okay, I mean, can I just take the act of just kind of like,
just shouting football out of the dark,
I think that's fun.
So transparency, cartoons,
shouting football out of the dark.
Someone down here was repeatedly saying something.
- Playing! - Plane?
- Playing. - Playing?
- Yeah. - Playing, okay, cool.
Playing, I like it.
Playing, any, playing what?
- It's up to you, sir. - It's up to me?
No, it's up to you, that's how this works!
(laughing)
- Playing football then. - No, you can't do that!
(laughing)
You're working in cahoots,
it's like Statler and Waldorf split up
onto different levels.
Something different.
A different thing.
Playing something, playing what?
- Playing dumb. - Playing?
- [Audience] Playing dumb.
- Playing dumb, playing dumb I like it.
Playing dumb.
This seems like you're heckling each other now.
Playing dumb, shouting football out of the dark,
transparency and cartoons.
One final one.
Let's come to this side.
- Feminism. - Feminism.
Do you want to pick a specific aspect of feminism,
or a cause that feminism is working towards?
- [Audience Member] Equality.
- Equality, okay, of course, lovely.
So feminism and the strive for equality,
transparency, playing dumb,
shouting football out of the dark and cartoons.
This then, if we can drop that beat.
It has a little intro which gets us in the mood.
Is a freestyle about all those things.
Let's see what we can do
and let's hope this beat doesn't
randomly speed up in the middle
and try and make me trip over myself,
but I think we can do it.
It's gonna be good, I like it.
Yo, you got your phone out for this.
♫ Yeah, sitting down there the phone now displaying
♫ What I say when you record
♫ When you're just shouting playing
♫ But just leave an ellipses dots at the end
♫ You're like it's up to you
♫ I intend my friend for you to pick and choose
♫ Yeah, you're silent, you keep mum
♫ No words coming out like you're playing dumb
♫ Playing dumb like we're ignorant and ignore
♫ All the things though people implore us
♫ To assure ourselves that we will keep ourselves aware
♫ Not sit back and just put fingers through our hair
♫ Ignoring the things, yo, we open and see
♫ We need to keep wide, be open, transparency
♫ Like a window, let the light come through
♫ Even the UVA rays and UVB rays coming down
♫ See when I look
♫ Transparency we need it like an open book
♫ Democratic stuff that is what I need
♫ I need words written out so I can see
♫ Transparency comes
It's doing it again, this is ridiculous.
Loop it back to the start and we'll do it again
'cause otherwise it's gonna break the flow.
This may very well be my fault
for partially corrupting my USB key
because I didn't click safely remove.
But that is a lesson I should learn and you will heed.
If you play that again and we'll do it
until it gets going again.
Is that okay?
Yes, we're gonna get back into it.
Is that okay?
We're getting back into the mood.
Good stuff, okay.
We've done those first two,
we'll move on to the final three
and we've got about a minute and a half
if I accurately counted that in my head,
which I did.
♫ Yeah, sometimes when I'm young I play in the park
♫ I always worry after 8 PM, the trees get dark
♫ And people come up to me
♫ I hear behind the foot fall
♫ Coming out the dark just to shout football
♫ They're running away
♫ I'm like, I must report
♫ I can't have a comeback, have a witty retort
♫ To the sport that they cried out of their lungs
♫ They ran away like the clouds
♫ Peeling back after the thunder
♫ Why do you hide inside the dark woods
♫ Why do you shout then you think I've done good
♫ I'll run away now, no need to stick around
♫ It's basically a deposit left a sound
♫ The last property donated from ye
♫ You're just shouting out words and runaway from me
♫ I'm like standup to me, I want some equality
♫ Now move on to feminism with the segway
♫ Everybody should be equal y'all
♫ I think we're all on the same page within this hall
♫ Yeah, the prime minister was speaking the words
♫ Bring it back down
♫ Yo, it's not for the buzz
♫ We gonna keep going and I rap double time now
♫ Let me go, last thing and I must crowd
♫ source, 'cause I forgot the word
♫ Because the beat keep messing and it's so absurd
♫ What was the last thing that we needed to do
♫ We gotta get it going yeah shout it from you
♫ Okay, yes I abhor it
♫ When I forget words and I just try and draw upon
♫ The knowledge doing the wordplay
♫ Drawing cartoons at school back in the day
♫ I would have my paper
♫ I would have my crayon
♫ I give it to the teacher and he gives me a slaying
♫ He be like Chris, you did a caricature of me
♫ It's horrible, yeah, you should of adorned me
♫ But I had drawn my teacher in boring clothes
♫ Looking muddy when I hit him and he had a big nose
♫ He was like Chris, in this classroom
♫ We don't have time for these cartoons
♫ But I'm like hey, I must say I'm right on the money
♫ You got a big nose and I made it look funny
There you go. (applauding)
Thank you very much.
It's been an absolute pleasure
and I'll see you guys tonight for more proper stuff.
It's gonna be great.
Thank you and goodbye.
(applauding and cheering)