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.
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.