New - 22nd March 2013 - Just The Tonic Leicester

Gig Report Friday 22nd March 2013

Just the Tonic - Leicester

Prelude

I don’t do drugs before I go on stage. It’s a rule of mine. I don’t do any of them: aspirin, paracetamol, codeine, night nurse, day nurse.  I find that these remedies knock my sense of nuance. I’d rather plough on with a flu than lose the fine tuning of the performance. With medication I no longer know how loud or quiet I am, how fast or slow I am going and whether I am being too harsh or lenient on that heckler. The subtleties are all lost. I have to sledgehammer in a performance and hope for the best. Some audiences don’t mind being sledgehammered but others are more sensitive souls who actually require a good performance. Never mind the injunction “Not to be taken while operating heavy machinery”, what about: “Warning! Do not operate a sense of humour while using this medicine.” 

There is a guy called “Dr Gig”. Dr Gig is supposed to come and help you when you are ill and have a show to perform. Dr Gig, through the sheer force of adrenalin, makes you oblivious to your illness. Dr Gig has been about for a while. He used to masquerade under the slogan “The Show Must Go On”. A lot of people believe in the show must go on, mainly people who’ve never had to go on with the show in their lives. In my experience Dr Gig is a charlatan, a quack, a peddler of unscientific, new age buffoonery. He should have been struck off years ago for malpractice. 

So basically I am ill tonight. I don’t want to get into the whole cold vs flu debate. Let’s just say it’s been coming on all week but is now reaching a crescendo as I launch into my weekend gigs - timing! Last night I watched Louis CK at the Hammersmith Apollo and got through three packs of handkerchiefs in an hour and a half. There is still a small pile of paper tissues there dedicated to my memory. 

Tonight I am in Leicester, and while I may not be fit to perform on stage, I am at least fit to drive a car through busy rush hour traffic. So far I have driven with the handbrake on, sat stationary at a green traffic light and changed lanes without making any conscious decision to do so. But in my fevered state, I am blissfully unaware of the anger to other drivers.  

Before Gig

An hour before the show and my nose is running like a tap. This isn’t good. It looks unseemly and the constant wiping of nose will upset the timing of my jokes. And how can I ridicule anybody on stage with my nose taking a permanent leak? I am going to take some medication. I take some medication. 

Caimh McDonnell is doing an excellent job of compering. I am watching him banter and riff effortlessly with the audience. Whereas I usually watch the compere and follow their every twist and turn, their every question, retort, repartee, imaginative leap, ad lib, segue into material and back again to banter, and I can follow every link in the chain thinking, “I can see what he’s doing there”, tonight my brain is too slow. It is all foggy. I cannot keep up with his mental leaps. Both he and the audience are moving at a speed that is beyond my addled brain. What would ordinarily appear merely as seamless compering is tonight black magic.  I worry that I can't keep up. Apparently a car crash happens in slow motion. Well this is an anti-car crash, it is happening in double quick time. Is it the illness that is making me slow or the medication? I knew I shouldn’t have taken the medication. 

The audience seem emboldened since the first half (drunker). There are outbursts of cockiness now, nothing too serious but remember I have half a brain. Some disparate hecklers seem to have teamed up into loose federations. One of the hecklers is sitting near the front. 

During Gig

I don’t know what I do right as I walk on stage but I do something right. I can already feel the good will in the room before I talk. They believe in me. My brain is at half speed and they believe in me. Maybe they will believe in me so much, that they will laugh sufficiently long between gags to give me extra thinking time. This is my plan. I notice the second row heckler is on side with his beaming smile. Things are going well and the resultant high I am feeling from that, tricks me into thinking I am perfectly OK. There are ad libs. These work. I am OK. I add new bits into the dentist routine and these go down well. See I am perfectly fine. Dr Gig is here. I can do mental gymnastics. I am OK. My judgement is not impaired. Dr Gig is the real deal.

It turns out Dr Gig is a dick. I have this bit of material about gay marriage and its reception varies around the country. But I have noticed that it is significantly less well received at some weekend clubs. But that’s not really a problem because there is an escape pod. There is a punchline early on in the routine where, if the audience are not going for it sufficiently, I can hit the abort button, end the routine on that punchline and go on to something else. The later bit of the routine is more niche, so even if they go for the start bit, they may not go for the end bit. Therefore I have to judge whether they are going for the first bit sufficiently well to justify continuing. I have to judge the quanta of risk. I’m not a comedian at all. I am an insurance salesmen calculating actuaries. “Based on my data this routine has a 63% risk of death.” So I have a getaway primed if I need it. Trouble is I am not really risk averse in these situations. If I was, I don’t think I’d really be on stage in the first place. Who would choose a career in live performance if they were so risk averse?  

So I launch into the start of the routine and the energy dips. Mmm, I think I should get out early. That is what my instinct is telling me. Follow your instinct. Your instinct is good. Your instinct is experience talking. That is the cumulative memory of every gig you have ever done. You know those cops you have a gut feeling and it is always right. You are that cop trust that instinct. Instinct is good. Hang on doesn’t instinct lead people to hate foreigners, steal and commit murder? Instinct is bad. I continue the routine I do not abort. But should I have done this? Is my judgement clouded?  I shouldn’t have done it. As I now head into the more niche section I can feel the doubts of the audience about this bit, but I am committed now. There is no escape pod, and tonight I lack the mental dexterity to ad lib my way out of a car crash. So I march towards the end of this routine, the routine which has now become the routine of diminishing returns. With every step now the ice cracks under my feet a little bit more. But still I head out to the middle of the lake.  Finally I reached the inevitable end of the routine and suddenly they are back on board with it, they love it. It’s like they never doubted me in the first place. The end goes very well, better than the beginning. Already it seems there was no risk in going on. It all seems so safe now, a fuss about nothing. All the warning signs were wrong. I was right to go on. I was right to ignore my instincts. Never trust your instincts. Instincts are definitely bad I decide, instincts lead to famine and war and panic buying at supermarkets. 

The only thing that really throws me is an act of kindness. The German buys me a non alcoholic beer (there are reasons for this, can’t say today, another blog another time). He brings it to the stage. It is apt and funny and generous. I make a joke of it and move on. On other nights I think I could have made something bigger out of this but I am not quite sure how to maximise it tonight. Now for the first time on stage my mind feels the cloudiness it did before I stepped on stage. Something very obvious about how to ad lib about this is staring me in the face but I cannot see it. Where is Dr Gig now with his wise counsel? The show did go on. But where is Dr Gig where you really need him?