eviltechie.co.uk Life and times of a sit-down comedian

What’s the joke

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.