EDINBURGH FRINGE - 16TH AUGUST 2015

SHOW 9 

16TH AUGUST 2015

AUDIENCE: 50

WALKOUTS: 0

RUNNING TIME 55 MINS

BEFORE 

A busy Sunday night and a bustling audience full of energy.  There are four older Glaswegian men who are on a piss up from Glasgow. I can tell they will be trouble. 

My venue has now been fitted with massive air fans which i decide to turn off as they are noisy. 

DURING

A great atmosphere at the start of the show. It could not be better, the audience warm and energetic and I feel very relaxed and already in the zone. 

But as I establish where the audience are from, already the Glaswegians are out of their box. They are very excited to be from Glasgow, very excited to be from a place and they already have that internal dynamic of their own internal comedy, special to them, tedious to everyone else. 

One of them pipes up and I decide I have to come in hard. I am not prepared to have them as part of the show. Last year one of my fringe shows was constantly interrupted by a group of pissed up woman who worked for social services. It was funny and I enjoyed the banter and I weaved it through the show and in many ways broke the ice but I do not wish to go down this path again. It is a fringe festival and I want to perform the show I have written. I do not want to do crowd control for sixty minutes. Other people have come to see me do a show not fence with twats. It annoys me that they think the show should be about them and not me. I try to keep the heckle putdown funny but I want it to have edge and carry an implicit threat that I will chuck them out if necessary. I want them to know it is not OK to keep piping up. 

For the time being they are quiet but they are also drunk and an hour is a long time in the mind of the piss head. I am careful to eyeball them frequently to keep them in line. I want them to know I am not intimidated by them. 

The start of the show is a dream. Every punchline lands. The audience get everything, they are big laughers, there is good rolling laughs. This show is shaping up to the best so far and possibly the best of the run. If the show continues like this it will not be bettered in this run. I am enjoying this show immensely but I cannot entirely relax. 10% of my brain is constantly maintaining the Glaswegian situation. 

Even the switch to the God material, which does require the audience to stretch up and is a bit more cerebral than the start to the show, goes smoothly. Perhaps the Glaswegians have taken the hint. I cant quite see their faces, I cannot tell if they are enjoying it. They are certainly not laughing as much as the rest of the audience but I am not feeling any bad atmosphere form them.

Even through “Homophobia” material all quiet on the Glaswegian front. At this moment I am worried by something else. There is one black man on the front row and I have a routine about having a black girlfriend. I am worried, the audience will tense and not want to laugh in front of one black man. I am disproportionately concerned about this. I never worried about this issue in London or Berlin when I was previewing the show. But it the white dominated Scottish audiences, I have already become unaccustomed to the dynamics of a multi ethnic audience. It is all fine but I think I take my eye off the Glaswegian ball and they sense it in some way.  Up until now this has been the best show. 

The Glaswegian levee breaks around the start of the “Jacket” routine. They have been quiet for around 20 minutes so this is already a minor miracle. 

“I was trying to help mate” In a show that has been going swimmingly without them. 

I really slam them, bluntly telling them they are the only problem. I go in too hard and it all jars and the moment just hangs. There is a tense silence. But i am glad it is not funny here. I don’t want them even to think I am remotely joking. I want to do my show. I do not want to usher these pricks through the show. This is not about them, this is about me. This is about the other audience members who have come to see a show. I want them to come back. But there is no point humouring the Glaswegians. Pissed up pricks never come back. 

They start becoming a problem during the AIDS routine. I have to shut them up and start bits again. But bizarrely this routine works though not as well as it could have. This routine, so temperamental in previews, is becoming bomb proof in the show. No matter what happens, it always seems to work although it is never the same twice. It can teeter but it never crashes. It takes considerable skill to keep the AIDS material on track tonight through all the interruptions.  

I think I expend a lot of credit with the audience steering the AIDS routine through because the driver material falls flat. But I may be performing it badly today? And also it is getting hot. Maybe it is the temperature? 

The last two sections,  “Jesus” and “Love and Hate” work well but in comparison with the start of the show they fall flat. The Glaswegians are now getting up and going to the toilet in an almost constant relay. I am distracted by them, it sometimes knocks out my timing and not every punchline lands. It is also hot and the energy is sapping. A great audience is now an average audience. I close the show. It receives a strong round of applause, The Glaswegians nip out to avoid putting money in the bucket. I should have thrown them out.

AFTER 

In some ways the best show of the run but nevertheless I end feeling disappointed as it could have been better and was marred by the pissed-up Glaswegians. With hindsight I should have told them to leave or really read them the riot act but on the other hand I wasn’t sure that I could do it without poisoning the atmosphere in the room. It also pissed me off that they stayed till the entire end and then nip out before the bucket. I feel disrespected by that. My feeling of them hardens from boisterous drunks to cunts. 

Also I should have kept the fans on I think it heated up too much in the room as the show went on and the audience tired.