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5 straight-up gay ways to… do karaoke

Author: Mark Bittlestone 

Mark Bittlestone is a stand-up comedian. He is also very gay man. Just a very gay man, doing a lot of straight-up gay stuff.

 
 
Right so, yeah, I know there’s “a thousand ways to be gay” but tbh and imo… if you don’t love karaoke then you legitimately are not gay.
 
Everything about it: the showmanship, the self-obsession, the power ballads, the cheesiness, the WHOLE thing is gay gay gay. So here’s how to do it properly, gay-style.

 

1) Keep a list of good karaoke tunes whenever you hear them.
 
Write those songs down!
 
Trust me, there’s genuinely nothing worse (genuinely, nothing) than being asked “what song do you wanna sing” and getting absolute stage fright and not having something on the tip of your tongue (because you’ve already got a bloke’s anus on the tip of your tongue, amirite 🤪.)
For this reason, I keep a phone note (always in the cloud just in case obv) called “good karaoke tunes”. Some recent additions – I Think We’re Alone Now, The Boys of Summer and You’re Brilliant at Karaoke. Actually that last one was just something I wrote down about myself when incredibly drunk, but is still a recent addition.
 
 
2) Get your song choices in early.
 
Get to know the remote!
 
Seriously the first few minutes in a karaoke booth or doing public karaoke thing is EVERYTHING. It’ll be a feeding frenzy. You HAVE TO get in there with your choices. When I’m in a booth, I insist on being in charge and I whack out my phone note (a euphemism for my dick)* and program the first 20 songs. It helps that at my local Korean karaoke joint (Jihwaja in Kennington, South London, England – highly recommend) I’m the only one who knows how to operate the remote (it’s in Korean characters) so it’s a bit of a fait accompli.

 

3) Get boozed.

Essential tbh

Not to try turn y’all into alcoholics but this is really a must, to be totally honest. There’s many things that are hard without alcohol, such as talking to family, first dates, or my cock; but karaoke is essentially impossible. You need to be inhibition-free to belt out Maria McKee’s ‘Show me Heaven’ in front of your boss of three months.

 

4) Less is more.

Sing it like you mean it x

For a booth I think 6 people is the optimal amount. Any fewer and it is slightly tragic (though once you’ve got past singing in a private karaoke booth I suppose you’re so far deep in tragedy – incidentally Tragedy by the Bee Gees is a cracking, though v difficult, karaoke choice – that I guess a little bit more is negligible) but any more and you’re gonna be waiting for HOURS for your song to come round and then you’ll get frustrated like me and steal people’s turns and then everyone will get mad at you and storm out leaving you in the booth on your own where you’ll sing out the allotted 100 minutes of hired time by yourself as you get drunker and drunker on sambuca…never happened to me though…*

 

5) Book an extra hour.

We need more time!

You’ll want it. Seriously. It’ll take y’all a while to warm-up but once the tunes and the booze is flowing like oat milk in a Gen Z apartment you will be LIVID that whichever anus booked it only booked 90 minutes like PUR-LEASE we need 3 hours!!

 

*not

For more from Mark follow him on Instagram here and check out some of his videos below! 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
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A post shared by Mark Bittlestone (@poofsrus)

 

 
 
 
 
 
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A post shared by Mark Bittlestone (@poofsrus)

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