New - 13 April 2013 - Nuneaton

Gig Report Saturday 13th April 2013

Golf Club - Nuneaton

Tonight I am in yet another golf club. You would think I would avoid golf clubs by now but something keeps drawing me back. I have complained about gigs at golf clubs incessantly, having performed at golf clubs twice before - those two gigs remain respectively the worst and second worst gigs of my entire career. The second worst gig is recorded elsewhere in this blog. I haven’t yet had the nerve to write about the worst one. I may never do so. 

Before Gig

I listen to the Pixies album “Surfer Rosa” over and over in the car. I have always preferred this album to the Pixies album “Doolittle”. I always felt that Surfer Rosa had the edge. Tonight I decide this is lunacy, “Doolittle” is clearly better. This is a water shed moment. 

I arrive at the club. The previous golf gigs were male only. Tonight’s audience is both male and female (good). They atmosphere feels good (good). I help myself to a coffee from a coffee machine, it makes a hell of a racket while another act is on stage (bad). I don’t think he knows it was me (good). The coffee is free (good).  

During Gig

Stand up comedy is essentially fascist. An audience is a disparate group of individuals. If the comedian does his job properly, then he/she unites the audience into one, obliterating the audience members individual personalities. The comedian imposes his world view on the audience; there is no room for democracy in stand up comedy. Tonight  I am a semi-effective dictator, perhaps even a benevolent dictator. 

This gig is good but it never quite gels. It feels like I am playing to several different audiences all at once. This is invariably true. But in my fascist comedy utopia they would be as one. Instead the audience are clustered around several local audience warlords. There is the group at the front around a young man who announces he “is not Australian” - no one suggested he was. There is an older man and his posse. The older man is Australian but speaks with an English accent so it is difficult to tell. He also announces he is not Australian - he is lying. Then there is a middle aged women grouping, led by a woman who takes exception to my assertion that beer is not proper drinking. She is drinking wine and shows no inclination to drink beer all evening - she is well intentioned hypocrite. There is another woman who is a teacher, she seems to speak for herself, she corrects me on my diction, she is right to do so. Tonight it is particularly bad. I stumble over words for some reason. Perhaps I should have had two coffees? Then there is yet another woman who announces she is off to the toilet in a slightly too jubilant fashion. No toilet break can be that much fun. The Australian man goes off to the toilet at the same time, indicating perhaps, an alliance between the two. In fact all the audiences are in on the in-jokes demonstrating they know each other.  All this provides plenty of banter and ad-libing and I sense this is what they are really after. Tonight material will play second fiddle to interaction. 

This level of interaction and banter is tremendous fun but then it is sometimes difficult to pull all the loose ends together and bring the gig to a definite end. I am particularly aware of this problem tonight. I’ll be honest I am having difficulty ending the show. End number one, a routine about a kid offering me a sweet, works but with insufficient  punch to be a closer. Lets try again. End number two. A snooker routine brought back from retirement just for tonight. They go for this but I get into further banter with another woman who may or may not have worked for a chatline. I sense further comedy gold waiting to be mined but not at this late stage in the performance. The interaction spoils the rhythm of the routine. The end is an anti-climax. I cannot get off on this. They sense my frustration. I confess. “I was going to get off on that but that won’t do” Ending take three. A routine about my uncle. This routine has never closed a gig but tonight it will have to. Now more confusion over the word “segue”. It is the teacher who raises concerns. I think it is my accent. I spell it. She still hasn’t heard of it. She is a teacher. Whoops. I explain that segue means an uninterrupted transition from on thing to the next. Kind of ironic given the current interruptions. I do worry this latest interruption has ruined the rhythm of this third ending. We could be here all night. I cannot remember where I had got to in the rountine and whether to repeat key information. I go for it again. End. Punchline. Laugh. Yes. Get off. Goodbye. Love you. Keep supporting live comedy blah blah blah. Best audience ever blah blah blah.

After Gig

I had the feeling that much of the audience knew each other. It is always different when this is the case. There are in jokes and established hierarchies  within the audience. They want the show to be about them, they invariably prefer the banter to material, the comedian has to govern with the consent of the people. It is never a true dictatorship.  

I stumbled over a lot of words tonight. Why? Tiredness? Too much Pixies on the stereo? Would things have been worse/better/the same with no coffee?  

The best golf club gig ever! This felt like a very good corporate. The people were nice. You could tell they had never been to a comedy club before. You could tell they didn’t quite know how to be an audience. You could tell they wanted to get it right as an audience. There was no momentum to my set beyond each individual routine. Each bit lived or died by its own merits. So even after a good routine it was back to square one. They didn’t quite gel as an audience. But you could tell they wanted to. They are already the best golf audience ever.