Bromley 16th January 2014

16^th January 2014

 

Bromley

 

Before Gig.

This room is like a giant banqueting hall. It is designed to hold around 400 people but tonight there are nearer 60 people in attendance. They have sat themselves around the edges - - an entire periphery with no centre. Except, the two sides of the audience do not connect across the front.  The way they've assembled themselves resembles male pattern baldness. There is no compere per se rather the bar manager has a clip-board and he confesses to me before he goes on stage that he has never before introduced a show. I am guessing this is going to be hard work. 

 

During Gig

I guess correctly. This gig is an uphill struggle from the off. The applause dissipates before I get to the microphone. I find it difficult to generate any momentum.

There are only two tables that I can actually see from the stage. They are stage right and stage left with an empty table between them – the bite out the donught. I cannot see any other tables. This is partly a result of the stage lights and partly a result of the curvature of the earth that is clearly visible in this giant banqueting hall. This will come in handy later on when I will be unable to see their ambivalence and merely sense it intuitively.

This is fairly up market audience but they seem to turn their noses up at the thought of heroin making me think they are not proper posh just noveau riche.

“Beer isn’t alcohol” I state later.

“Yes it is!” corrects a lady (table right). 

Sigh.

She is of course factually accurate but, alas, her search for the truth is misplaced in a comedy show. Her literalism will be her undoing as an audience member. If there is state of mind half way between pedantry and confusion then this woman resides there and will stay there for the remainder of the gig.

Nevertheless the ill judged intervention affords me the opportunity to do this routine as more of a conversation piece as though I am persuading a sceptical friend. Initially, I like the turn this routine has taken tonight. For a moment, I am hopeful, but I am never destined to get to the end of it as a bigger heckler is on the horizon. Just as I am about to recommend drunk driving to the audience (that would probably have invited another outburst from my obtuse friend at the front) I am heckled by a woman mid way up the audience (and thus invisible) “Looking at porn on the internet?”  This feels more of an 'in' with the audience and I take it. I am desperate to build a rapport. There is banter back and forth along the lines that I may get together with this woman after the show. She is clearly well into middle age (and possibly beyond) so the joke should be that I am hitting on one of the less eligible women in the audience and, I don’t how I know this - - but I can tell that she's overweight. Indeed this is confirmed shortly afterwards when a man at the back heckles her regarding her size. From then on I feel hamstrung. I keep thinking to myself “don’t say she’s fat”. I now feel I am fencing with one hand tied behind my back.

I feel I have exhausted the banter with this woman and I return to material but I am still finding it hard to get moving on the routines. As the gig goes on this hall is getting bigger. The walls are moving outward. The gap between the front table expanding. This woman will heckle again but it will never reach the giddy height of me claiming to fancy her. There will be more banter. Occasionally her table will break out in a sort of separate gig but they will always return to the polite ambivalence of  audience. There will even be a point later on where I accidentally say she is fat and she won't mind and the audience won't mind but neither will they like it either and I will feel a bit dirty.

 

There comes a point where I realize things aren’t going to get better and I totally relax and the gigs just bumps along. There is not a scintilla of malevolence from the audience but there now seems to be a mutual understanding from both performer and audience that this is as good as it gets. The room stops getting bigger.

 

I am keen to encourage any audience participation. There is a man right at the back who previously was heckling the woman heckler who has decided to start heckling proper and aim it at me. However he is so far away that it is a bit like trying to hold a conversation with an elderly relative in a wind tunnel. Since I cannot hear what he is saying, his heckles have to be passed on by a relay system, intermediate tables have to hand the message on. It feels a bit old fashioned, maybe like the way heckles may have been done in Victorian times. Actually, I wish I’d made that observation about it.

Liverpool 9th November 2013

Liverpool 9 November 2013

Before Gig.

This gig is in a room above a pub. This gig is how gigs used to be. This pub is how pubs used to be. The pub has a wonderful dingy quality to it.  The pub still sports a threadbare carpet. The pub has a wonderful heavy atmosphere. The pub is pre-smoking ban, I find it hard to believe that no one is smoking in here.  I feel like I am back in the mid-nineties. It reminds me of pubs in Scotland where I first cut my teeth as a drinker. It reminds me of the comedy venues I used to visit as a punter when I first moved to London.  I feel a certain excitement that I haven’t felt for a while. A certain raw energy, a certain feeling there is going to be an event. Many gigs now seemed to have a sanitised quality, I didn't notice it until now, but something seems to have been lost. 

Last year I gigged in Liverpool and came a little unstuck with the audience doing a joke about gay marriage. That particular gig is recorded elsewhere in this blog. This event is at the back of my mind now. I wonder whether I should do a shorter truncated version of that routine tonight or whether to do it at all? I am of two minds. On the one hand I want to learn from my mistakes and on the other hand I don’t - - or rather, I don’t want to learn the wrong lesson from my mistakes. Ideally I would like to come back to this city and make that routine work.  This is after all a different audience but then on the previous occasion my experience was repeated over two nights. I also have a niggling worry over my routine about chatting to a kid and the paranoia we now feel as a society regarding kids. I am also aware that this is the city where Jamie Bulger was murdered. My routine doesn’t go anywhere near that area but I am wary. A previous acts strays into this unwittingly. He does a joke about kidnapping kids (the act is from Germany, the oversight is understandable), but I must be somewhat vigilant. 

I feel a conflict between the risk-taking part of my brain and the safety-conscious part. My instinct is to take the risk, after all doing stand up is inherently risky, it is putting oneself out there, shouldn’t you be bold? On the other hand the logical part of my mind thinks I need to be tactical too, calculating, sometimes dare I say it, risk averse.  

During Gig

I am the forth act on tonight and the audience feel that they are drunk and tired when I take to the stage. The applause doesn’t last long enough for me to get to the microphone and it is a short walk from the curtain. The opening is strong and well received by the audience but even at this early stage I can tell they do not have much attention span. There is chatting in the audience and people shouting things, not quite a heckle but more than a stage whisper. I can feel the audience lose focus between part of a routine and another. I also feel I have to win them with every routine, they may forget they like me a second ago. 

My instinct is to go up in energy and increase the level of aggression in the delivery. Logic tells me to lower the aggression, quieten the delivery, make them listen, draw them in. I go with instinct. 

An arms race develops, louder from me, louder from them, so I up the volume more and so on. For the time being, they are noisy and I battle on with my bombastic delivery. I notice a time delay in the reaction of the audience, a time delay characteristic of very drunk audiences. I say a punchline it gets nothing, I cannot quite believe it, I pause, the laughter comes, slowly at first and then it builds and hits like a wave. Playing giant arenas is like this, apparently: that is the word on the street in any case. This particular rhythm of time delay is very familiar to me. I remember it from a late night gig in Glasgow about three or four years ago, when on that occasion I experienced an almost identical reaction. That audience too were very drunk but In Glasgow it was also later in the evening. Tonight Liverpool appear to reached the same level of inebriation in a shorter space of time.