Comedy musings

I've sort of turned my comedy into some kind of dark therapy these days.

I just can't seem to make idle observations about life and then spin-them ever so slightly to the left or right in order to make people laugh at the light stuff. I can't do it...Correction, I can do it, but I don't enjoy doing it. Surely comedy is also about the performer themselves having fun within their own carefully defined parameters?

I was discussing Youtube vids in front of a crowd of 15-20 people in a pub in North London, and in particular one clip of a pop video...You know, them pop videos you have today, on the internets and the wifis and the Android markets...it seemed to feature a lot of zooming in and out, I made the throwaway comment 'I thought..."this amount of zooming in and out is specifically reserved only for porn videos." Which, triggered the biggest laugh of my night. A casual remark, sold with enough nonchalance, seems to bring bigger laughs than a carefully thought out twisty turny routine built on callbacks, layers, and idiots answers.

There was another time when my routine about the death of the English language was going down like a maths test last thing on a Friday...So I began to berate the audience's lack of engagement and they loved it. They loved the fact that I lost my rag with them and began to mock them from a position of superiority. However, what sold that one was I began to put on my Yorkshire accent (half my family hail from Yorkshire so I can nail it) and say things like "Is this what you want? A northern man talking about things from the north in the 1980s? Like Dandelion and Burdock? and Swizzels-Matlow from New Mills Derbyshire...Ooo remember Sherbet Dib-dabs, I do. The stick was yellow wasn't it. It tasted like burning lemons. What is Burdock? It sounds like a chip-shop. Chips in newspaper. Burdocks fish n chips on a Friday, thanks mum. 5p a bus ticket. BFH that's your bus-fare home!" Basically I unleashed a mocking tirade of northern observational clang syndrome on them and it seemed to go down well. The barman said he'd not seen anybody get laughs like that in a while and that my 'act' was brilliant.

It was an act, but with 90% of it inspired by control freakery. John Richardson does this brilliantly, he gets angry over the little annoyances in life and weaves it into stories that people can relate to. I have a million and one similar stories that I'd like to turn into routines, but it seems that commercial success in comedy lies with simple observation of a halcyon northern childhood.

So the dark therapy is, simply playing up to this...Getting angry at the crowd for not liking my self indulgent ramblings, and so turning my thoughts into a mockery of the wants and needs of the crowd, that simultaneously refreshes them.

Follow any of this? I didn't.

My stand-up

Ah look.

I have been filmed now. Next time, I'll slow the pace down a little bit lol.

Comedy requires time to let people laugh, rather than steamroller them with the next gag before they've had a chance to process the info. Thing is, my mind was running at my normal air-traffic speed and thus, I outpace you peasants.

First time stand-up.

Seems yesterdays post got quite a bit of following, bless twitter...

So have another tale, probably less cringe-worthy than being near lynched for mocking an illness that claimed a young life.

I am a public speaker, I have been an educator, and I deliver briefings and instructions daily, in clipped enunciated tones. So naturally, I thought I'd find comedy easy since I like to show off and I like my opinion to be heard...But my first time clutching the mic' was a nightmare. I shall share with you more of my first gig and how I felt.

Firstly, I over-wrote everything in order to ensure I didn't run out of things to say. All my jokes and stories were heavily rehearsed and verbose...I wanted to ensure that I had enough to last me the full 5 minutes. Before the open mic slots began, I was sat in the audience reading my notes and trying to act out my whole performance prior to delivery, in doing so I failed to gain an impression of the room and what was working and/or not working for the professionals.

Called to the stage, I did a clumsy double take and clambered into the spotlight, I failed to realise that the double take had already made people laugh, so didn't run with it...I was simply mortified and feeling very out of place and somehow I felt 'not good enough' to be on-stage.

All my planning and preparation didn't matter a monkeys fuck because the second I stood in front of that crowd, I completely forget everything I was supposed to be saying. Mumbling through the wreckage of the carefully planned routine you had envisaged didn't seem to bring me many laughs. Instead it brought a beetroot face, a large slice of humble pie, and a rapidly pounding heart rate that drowned out my thought processes. I thanked the crowd, said it was my first time and acknowledged that I had just committed the comedy equivalent of ejaculating after 3 thrusts, then left the stage and room in about 20 seconds. The compère was kind, and got me a bigger round of applause than what I believed I deserved.

I tried to remember what had just happened...I thought I had managed a few sympathy chuckles from my bit about using a hair-dryer to dry your balls if you're late for work and fresh out of the shower. But I wasn't really capable of cutting loose and leaping around like that part of the routine needed. Too insecure, too out of place, not in control of my thoughts.

I now know that I had simply overloaded my brain, in an attempt to pander to the great god 'control freak' who lives inside of me. I was trying to remember whole lines of dialogue, about 15 pages worth...To recall 15 pages is an impossibility for most normal people and I am no exception.

But...Afterwards, I was told I had done rather well, I mean who the hell was I to judge how my routine went? I learned an important lesson from the professional comics and that was, listen to the audience and react accordingly. You see, my brain told me I had done really badly, but nobody else saw it that way. Yes I wasn't as slick as the professionals, but by all accounts it really was rather competent and my embarrassed mumblings had been perceived as part of a character act by the crowd.

I was then given a list of simple rules to deliver entertaining stand-up...They work for some professionals, they might for you.

• Gags must be natural and relaxed, delivered in a welcoming tone like matey pub chatter. 
• Reading a script in a fluid and ever changing environment is doomed to failure. You're not really acting...Unless you're character acting and acting out.
• It's comedy, remember the key points and riff off of them like you would with a pub story.
• Involve the crowd. Ask them questions, get them to do stupid things, I had a room putting their hands up and down like kids in response to increasingly disturbing scenarios. I was left with one guy who swore he had made love to a swan.
• If something goes wrong, roll with it. The mic stand fell over once when I forgot the mic cable was trailing round it, and dragged it over...Cue 2 minutes of improv' about the place being haunted by camp poltergeists who objected to my button down collar. I've since done this deliberately if I feel the need to inject some physical comedy into the room.
• Hecklers are funny as fuck. They're usually pissed, and they're usually a lot slower than you. Repeat what they say in a mocking or surprised tone to give yourself time to construct a retort and then unleash it. I was stumped by one once, so I launched into a Who Wants to be a Millionaire scenario where I asked the audience which one of my comebacks I should run with. My 5 minutes was soon up, everyone was satisfied and I was show-boating.

Lynched at an open mic night

I had a couple of simple throwaway gags to use that linked together my more in depth raconteuring. One of them went something like this:
...They were interviewing some guy at the side of the road, he's knackered, he's running a marathon FFS yet the person with the mic expects them to answer a series of dull questions in between gasps and snorting snot into the drain. Anyway, they ask him what he was running for...He answered that he was running for Leukaemia. Funny, I run to get fit myself.

There's usually a brief chuckle, allows the slow ones to laugh before I launch into a story like the one about about buying the largest dildo in Anne Summers with a shy ex, and then walking back through the shopping centre with this...thing...writhing away in an Anne Summers bag. It's a good story that one.

This night nothing was going to right...People were eating, and I was the only open mic' guy they had in what was blatantly a pub eatery.

So I'm rattling through my Leukaemia throwaway as usual when suddenly there is this audible groan from a table towards the back of the room, shortly afterwards  what I imagine is some meaty women with a thick accent yells "No...No...You cunt! It isn't funny!"

I retort something like "Maybe, maybe not, but you don't get to decide what is or isn't funny for the room...We operate something called a democracy in this country. That's d..e..m..o etc. And people don't tend to vote for ugly women."

Another disembodied harsh female voice chipped in "Just Shut up you wanker, cancer, it's nothing funny!"

Being in the zone and thinking I was in charge of the room, shit this was my second gig and my first had gone well (or so I was told) I tore right back with, "look If you don't want to deal with cancer then I suggest you change your diet and start doing some exercise....And given that you sound like Ertha Kitt, giving up smoking helps too."

The original heckler screeched "That's her mum you cunt!" Perturbed by the venom I leaned forward to peer at the crowd through over exaggerated raised eyebrows, and saw a table full of sweaty larger sized women all wearing pink t-shirts...smiling angelically from the front of the T-shirts was the face of a young girl, no more than 14, surrounded with glittery words like "princess, darling, daughter, niece, never forget!" For those slow on the uptake, this is the universal symbol of being out on a night to the comedy club to raise money (and forget the pain of loss) for cancer research.

Fuck...Where to go from here? To retreat means the certain death of your act, to attack means a guaranteed lynching at the hands of mob justice. So I did what any human being would do, dropped my manic stage personae and said. "Right, I get it now...I apologise, I cannot see you all from up here...Since I've fucked my act, and probably the rest of the evening, I'll just say thank you for your time and I hope you can enjoy the rest of the night...I'll leave it to the professional comics back stage, who are now tearing up their cancer material, and wish you well. See you later." I didn't say my name.

What I wanted to say was something like "Can I have one of those t-shirts please, I need to inject some fresh capital into the wank bank." or "What a tragic a waste, she had such a pretty mouth!" or "How did something so beautiful, come out of something so butch?" or "Her dad must be good looking, because frankly...It's not your genes that are dominant!"

Such is the evil that lurks within a comical brain. You have to switch off your inner filter to generate humour...Sometimes it goes too far...But there is part of me that wishes I went down in a hail of fists, if only to win the comedy battle at the expense of my life.

So I left the stage...Did I feel bad? Nope. My skin has been tempered by many days of being abused as a teacher...I am Edmund Blackadder in a classroom, fuck you kiddies! I blamed the venues, as the landlord had clearly failed to grasp that a well lit corner of a room next to people eating meals is not the ideal performance space for somebody acting out a mental breakdown for laughs.

What made me feel damn good afterwards is a number of the professional comics praised my attitude and composure, some even suggested that that particular group was a form of cancer in itself, that it had sucked the life out of the room and killed the audience...And that perhaps they shouldn't have brought their overt statement into an environment that encourages mockery of life. Discuss.

P.S. Did I mention that this whole shower happened in a pub, when I was the only mic guy who turned up? So I was orating when everybody was eating a fucking hog-roast and expecting the laughs to start about an hour later when they'd had a bit to drink?