Racist gigs
Aug0
I’ve been thinking about writing this gig up for a while, but I’ve been putting it off because I didn’t know how to write it without making the person involved sound like an absolute arsehole. But I think I’ll just tell it and not mention their name.
teh date: christ knows it was ages ago
teh place: Get Happy Comedy, the crown
Bit of a last minute thing, David messaged me on facebook asking if I could do a 5 spot on the day, and for once I said yes.
Gig started out nicely enough, about 10-15 audience, the compere was telling a story about he’d been accidentally racist at a gig by substituting the line ’still, that’s black people for you’ rather than the intended ’still, that’s fat people for you’ - which was quite funny because the butt of the joke was the compere himself, and the unfortunate situation he had got himself into.
And then the first act came on and opened with the line
“I thought about inventing a disease that kills black people. And then I remembered about AIDS”
Which caused a sort of stunned, shocked silence, as you might imagine. It was a bit like the Bateman cartoons in punch, where everyone reacts with shock and horror to a minor faux pas - e.g. The Man Who Offered a 5 Pound Note In Woolworths - except this time this was a real, genuine shock moment.
And then I started laughing.
Not at the joke itself, or at least I don’t think it was - I don’t think I’m that racist (just to explain my theory about racism: we still live in a racist society and it would be strange if I wasn’t slightly racist - the best I can do is to accept my racism and try and deal with it rather than pretend it doesn’t exist).
More at the staggering, monstrous inappropriateness of the joke. The notion that someone could get up on stage and say that - and the discrepancy between what I knew of the comic and the joke.
This wasn’t like the exhibit (my previous experience with racist jokes) where the compere was very much in the old-skool working mans club so his racist joke (whilst he was talking, a black guy walked in, and quick as a flash, the compere says - can’t see you at the back, smile) fitted more with the persona.
I suppose what I found funny about it was the release of tension. Except there was no payoff line here - there was no line that resolved the tension in a way that my brain would interpret as funny.
So why did I laugh? Who was I laughing at?
I suppose in this instance the butt of the joke was the comedian still - the humour came partially out of pure shock and partially out of the discrepancy between what I knew (or thought I knew) about the man and the joke.
I remember logan’s line about if it happened in real life it’d be a tragedy, but as it’s on stage it’s funny.
Increasingly I’m coming to believe that material is only part of comedy - more of it is the performance - if another act who fitted the profile of a racist comedian, by which I mean if they were older & sounded less posh had told the joke, I don’t think I would have laughed - or at least I hope I wouldn’t.
Or maybe I am actually just more racist than I realised.
Anyway, I went on after that guy and opened with my special needs bit. Christ knows what the audience made out of any of it. I had fun though - to the extent that I was laughing all the way through my set.
What’s the joke
Aug0
Cavendish again last night. Was a weird gig. The writing hasn’t been going very well, I’ve been trying various tricks such as +ve/-ve, mind-mapping, writing stuff for a week and then leaving it.
It wasn’t working.
But then the other night I was in the mood for writing, and when I say that what I mean is that I was drunk - and I’d read a piece on the new offensiveness in stand-up comedy and Richard Herring’s response to it so I thought I’d explore the concept a bit - particularly as my new opening can be construed as offensive, potentially. Additionally, I was briefly mentioned in Giacinto’s post on chortle, mentioning how disability is the last taboo.
It consisted of me doing my infamous 1 minute plus speech-impediment voice (with actual joke!) - then analysing the joke for the next 4 minutes - frequently coming up with intelligent justifications before making more horrible cripple gags. I’m still not sure if I’m happy with it, and as once again I failed to record it I have no accurate idea what the audience response was. From my memory, there was a lot of laughter when I started the voice, no laughs at all the line about black & asian comics playing with the audience’s expectations, and I can’t really remember how it went after that.
It wasn’t terrible, but looking back at it, I did go for some easy targets (<REDACTED> & <REDACTED> - together at last!) and mocked <REDACTED>, albeit whilst exploring whether it was okay for one disabled comedian to mock another, and if so does the degree of disability matter.
I think the real problem is that I don’t actually know what I’m trying to say here - probably because I’m not totally sure how I actually feel about my disability - I accept it as part of who I am, I try not to let it define me etc. etc.
I think there’s definitely some fertile ground - as I say, what’s the joke here - when I walk on stage and put on the voice of a person with learning difficulties or Cerebal Palsy (see, I do know the PC words, I just choose not to use them much of them time) - what are the audience laughing at? Does it matter?
I think I started opening my set like this because it’s a question of how far can I push it - I started out not wanting to mention the face etc. at all - moved on to a few one-liners (straight face etc), and then it became how can I make this worse… I remember when doing the course I done a bit one week that I thought was quite offensive but everyone was fine with, so the next week I had to do <REDACTED> jokes just to get a response.
<REDACTED> said it was just shock, and maybe it was.
I don’t think I want to be a shock comedian - although I think if I can work out what I’m arguing here there might be an Edinburgh show in here.
Surprisingly, most of the audience loved it and I won the tiny little plastic trophy - I was quite ridiculously proud of that.
Next gig: Party Piece on tuesday.
Days without cigs: 5. Chewing the gum until bestival and then will quit completely. Terrifies me.
But I’m back again said norah with a monumental crash
Jul0
So it’s been a while…
What’s happened - meh - I’ve been feeling crap once again, done a few gigs and shit - did my first ever compering gig - brief link here
(have to turn it up a bit)
Back in the game once again with dale’s night.
No idea how it went because I didn’t record it - I got a bit confused because when I turned up there was about 3 audience, and as I’m not “in the moment” enough I decided that I was just going to try out new stuff tonight, because it’s only other acts and they can go fuck themselves. They’re not important, like audience.
So I made that decision, and also made another decision that I’d have a few bevvies because it wasn’t a real night.
However, in between the time I made that decision and when I was on, the night massively filled up with real people - and I ended up delivering this confused mess to a real audience, including a slightly curvy american woman who had only come in the pub for the wifi - I’m sure I could force my CAT5 into her uplink port. Except I couldn’t obviously, because as I’d already said, she wanted wireless. I don’t know what that means in my extended metaphor.
But I’m back in the game! woohoo!
Back to Earth
Jun1
And now he’s grounded.
I did Dale’s night at the queens head - I hadn’t brought anyone so I was entered into the slam - all the acts get 3 minutes and then the winner of the laugh off gets to finish. My new even more offensive than usual opening went down really well - especially as there was an asian comic who’d done the stereotypical accent earlier so I could play on that. For some reason I massively miscalculated the length of my material so I ended up partway through a routine.
Anyway, I and another comic were joint winners so I got to go back up to finish my set. Now, after I’d done my bit I realised that the timing of my set was wrong & I was stressing about what I was going to do if I won. So when they were having the vote I was voting for the other guy. Anyway, I went back on, tried to resurrect the routine I was in the middle of and that didn’t work at all. Switched to something else that didn’t worth either and then I just freaked and walked off without finishing - which I think is the first time I’ve done that.
Dale was very nice after the gig and said he should have realised that I didn’t want to go back on. But darlings, the show must go on.
No but seriously, it was a useful experience and I’ve had enough good gigs to realise that that was a one-off and that I am funny although I still have a long way to go.
Desperately Seeking Salvation
Jun0
teh date: 24.06 (that’s 3 gigs in a row - madness surely)
teh place: Desperately seeking stagetime
New night, run by Anthony and Phil from the course. Was a really excellent night - wonderful cool room opposite Bond Street tube (so piece of piss for me to get home from).
Took me a while to find the place for some unknown reason, so by the time I was there I’d missed out on the guaranteed slots and had to stick my name in for a random draw.
The cream of the london new act circuit were there, all of the more established acts I’ve grovelingly made friends with in the hope that they might aid my career, and the newbie scum who I look down upon and despise.
I ended up breaking my no-drinking before I’ve been on rule again, but I was feeling quite tired and I thought I needed a pint in a sort of kill or cure type scenario. It worked.
Didn’t want to do my standard 5 as most (but not all) of the audience were fellow acts, and at least 50% of them had seen my act before. So I ended up doing probably the most offensive set I’ve even seen - exactly the sort of thing that I said I wasn’t going to do when I started this comedy lark. It involved a spacker voice (I can say that, you can’t - diplomatic immunity once again) and a reworking of a very old ice cream joke that my dad used to tell me. The payoff line was about how black and asian comics often play with the audience’s expectations by putting on a stereotypical voice (I was thinking of Omid Djalili when I wrote it).
The worst thing about it - well I say the worst thing, it was all pretty horrible - but a particularly bad thing about it was that when I was doing the spacker voice, people who knew me were laughing along but people who’d never seen me before were looking at them giving them daggers for mocking the poor disabled lad who had the courage to get on stage.
I am going to hell for that one.
But at least I got a laugh.
Sunny Stoke Newington
Jun2
teh date: 23.06 (that’s a day after the last one - I’m getting serious about this shit, fo’real)
teh place: Party Piece
Really starting to get worried now about how consistently well this is going. I know I’m due for a fall and I think the better this keeps on going the worse the damage to my ego will be. However, in the meantime it’s nice to knock them dead every night.
Once again at PP I had a weird feeling about the gig. The first bit had some really big names (relatively speaking) but some of them seemed to treat it as less of a gig and more of just a chat. It was bizarre.
Nice to see David, Nelson and Sarah again. Sarah’s completely changed her stuff since the last time I saw her, which is a shame in some ways because I liked her self-harm material. But the new stuff is very good, although as I pointed out, exceptionally lazy in that it just consists of extracts from this ridiculous psychic Hello-type magazine.
I’m just jealous I didn’t think of the idea, and wasted my time writing cocking Eurovision jokes that didn’t age well.
Tom was very happy with me because I’d brought audience once again. He promised me a drink which I failed to collect in the end. Went on and killed them all, switched my set back to an earlier style - brought back the IT jokes which went down surprisingly well, although I thought the peer-to-peer once should have got a better laugh. Stupid audience not familiar with network topologies.
Got the tube back with Mark Restuccia (proper comic - he features on chortle and everything) who was extremely complimentary about my set. Yay me!
Stockwell once again
Jun0
(apologies - I’ve not been updating these regularly so now I’m going to write a bunch of reviews at once)
Teh date: 22nd June
Teh place: Cavendish Arms, Stockwell (again)
Another fine gig at stockwell - I know I keep going on about it but I really do love the Cavendish.
It was a bit of a reunion for the people I did the course with - about 3 of us were on - Stevie G opened again and once again failed to get into the clap-off. But, he’s so good he doesn’t need the likes of the petty Cavendish Arms’ audience to approve of him.
And, in fact, the fact that I did get into the clap-off should be taken as a condemnation of my work.
By which standards, I have a very long long way to go.
Could potentially have won the clap-off but (joking apart) - I don’t really like that kind of competitiveness in the new act scene. And I’m most definitely not saying that because I failed at the Laughing Horse New Act competition at the first round. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Apparently my stabbing motion looks more like a wanking one. I should probably clear it up with David that I’m implying he’s a murderer rather than a wanker.
Wimbledon Park
Jun0
Good gig.
Jesus it’s hard thinking up new stuff to write about this. I suppose it’s testing my abilities as a writer to think up new angles (ha ha) on old, tired stuff.
So yes, (psych myself up, ready for showtime), gig last night’s was good. Once again unexpected friends turned up, not the biggest crowd in the world but they were very friendly.
I think I’m growing in confidence in every gig I do. I still think I don’t react enough to what’s going on around me, I’m still predicting how certain gags will go.
Party Piece
Jun0
And he storms on from strength to strength.
Last night was Party Piece in Stoke Newington. I’d heard mixed things about the night, and the area itself has always had the reputation of a shithole, quite frankly. However, when I got there, it was great. Stokie (as I believe no-one calls it) was a nice area, maybe it’s because the sun was shining and anywhere (even Balham) would have been nice but I really liked it. Arrived with ages to spare (the evil Hils Jago’s advice about turning up early to gigs was actually sound), wandered around and ate the remains of the previous nights dinner (roast pork & potatoes - fact fans) in a park.
Actually that’s one of the nice things about doing comedy - getting to see areas of London that I never would have considered visiting.
Mark & Pru turned up unexpectedly - well not completely unexpectedly - I did text them - but I didn’t expect them to show so it was nice to see them.
Got chatting to the promoter (Tom Webb), who’d I’d met once before, albeit very drunk (I was very drunk, not him), and the highly amusing John Atkins (who I’d met at Stockwell). John was asking about Logan’s course, but I advised him not to bother as it’s aimed at absolute beginners and I think if you’re gigging and on the circuit (I can’t believe I actually used that phrase in a “non-ironic” sense) it’s probably a waste.
Broke my rule about not drinking before the gig and had a pint. Gah. On the plus side, unlike other gigs where I’ve had a few (i.e. many) beers beforehand it didn’t seem to make much difference. Still, maybe I would have been even funnier if I hadn’t. Who knows.
John did an absolutely brilliant 5 minutes that consisted purely of him doing a 5 minute 90’s rap medley, starting out with Ice Ice Baby, before veering into the Fresh Prince and ending on Turtle Power. It wasn’t traditional comedy, but it was very funny.
But yeah, after all that, my 5 minutes went very well. Said all my stuff, wasn’t too nervous on stage, got some good laughs. Once again the punchline to the eurovision bit went down like a lead balloon, but I got much more laughs by pointing out that it had taken 3 minutes to get to that point. Why do people laugh when you point out that a joke has gone badly? I dunno.
In other news, I’m going to see what happens if I do a 5 minutes w/o mentioning the face thing. Just to see what happens. I’ve probably got a load of stuff I can resurrect from the course that I never did again.
Although it does give me a very good entrance and gives me about a minute of quick fire gags - which builds up a level of trust from the audience that I then subvert by doing another 4 minutes of tedious, offensive stuff about Wikipedia and Lewis Caroll.
Ah, the trials of being a performer.
Random street scenes
Jun0
Well I’ve failed to keep to my promise of writing every day, what a surprise.
Trying to think what’s happened the last few days - all I have is a series of emails written to myself that consist of one or two phrases that I’m now trying to assemble into a coherent whole.
Yesterday as I wandered out of the house in order to get some breakfast, there was the sort of street theatre that Shepherds Bush is famous for.
For starters, a stranger was trimming my front hedge. That’s not a euphemism (BUT IT WOULD HAVE etc etc.) - he was a friend of my grans who happened to have a trimmer in his van (?) - as I was standing there watching a man trim my hedge, some mediterrean looking people turned up looking for the dodgy woman from next door.
This is a woman (the woman next door) who has been known to borrow cash off my gran, always with some elaborate story about how her husband needs to get to the airport or some other such bollocks. She tried to borrow cash from me once (at 1AM, no less) - but I told her to piss off or I’d have her arrested.
Anyway, so some people (who I suspect had been stupid enough to lend her money) turned up, looking for her and their money. I explained that she wasn’t in, or if she was she wasn’t answering her door - they asked me if I had a key. I replied that I didn’t, and even if I did I wouldn’t let them in (on account of how I don’t know them from a bar of soap).
Thought very little more about it, wandered down to do some shopping (Waitrose@Westfield - love it). On the way home with the fruits (and vegetables) of my labours I spotted the pair again, this time carrying a Morrison’s bag of shopping. They seemed to be having some sort of altercation:
“I never should have married a Muslim!” shouted the woman
“I’ll f**king punch you on the nose!” replied the man (actually to be honest I can’t remember which one shouted it - men/women, they all look the same to me - genderist I know)
“You touch me, that european (i.e. me) will stop you!” came the retort.
Now, I should point out, when I wrote (i.e. me) I was in fact breaking from the main text to point out that the woman was referring to me, she didn’t actually say i.e. me (in brackets).
Additionally, I was tempted to reply that quite frankly I didn’t really give a flying f**k whether they beat the shite out of each other on the street. I hate being involved in altercations at the best of times, and I had no problem watching those two idiots beat each other blue. So long as they didn’t bleed on my doorstep. Blood is such a bugger to get out, I should know.
Oh yeah, nearly forgot, as I walked down the street I overheard another conversation:
“So how does it work then” replied a person of indeterminate gender and race
“By the grace of Jesus Christ” replied his/her friend, seemingly in all seriousness.
Maybe I could do a sort of Overheard In New York website. Scenes from Shepherds Bush? Hammersmith Happenings? A**eholes on the A40?