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. 

Archive - Golf Club - 23rd Nov 2012

Here by popular demand. Me dying on my arse at a golf club.

Show Report Friday 23^rd November 2012

A Golf Club somewhere in Essex.

There is something about golf clubs and me that don’t get along.  I’ve tried gigging in them before and it never works out. Maybe it’s the male only audiences? Maybe it’s the neat little world of etiquettes and hierarchy? Maybe it’s the over manicured fairways? Something doesn’t click with me, I don’t frequent golf clubs socially and my only professional experiences of them have been debacles.

Then again there is something about Essex and me that has traditionally got on. Perhaps surprisingly I have always found Essex audience amenable to my sense of humour. So tonight - a gig in a Golf club in Essex, what will triumph? Will the Essex good vibes overcome the malevolent force of the golf club? Or will my nemesis the golf club triumph supreme?

Before Gig

I decide to get a train and walk from the station. It doesn’t seem so far to walk on the map. The road is about a mile, but it turns out it is also unlit and the pavement runs out about half way along. I have to walk on the road dressed in black with only an iPhone flashlight app for company. I become unsure that I am heading in the right direction. I phone the venue. “When it looks like you are heading in the wrong direction keep on going”.  It looks like I am indeed heading in the wrong direction so I keep on going. I arrive at the venue. I meet one of the other acts. He assures me it is going to be horrendous but I don’t believe him. The audience (all men) seem friendly enough. Although I should add that they do seem to be on a parallel social wavelength that I will never understand.  But they look sedate enough. It will be OK.

During Gig

The members are eating crackers and cheese as I take to the stage. I have already watched their response to the compere. I know they are going to be a tough audience. I will need to go as broad as possible. What do I have that is broad and accessible? Stuff about alcohol. Alcohol will be fine, everybody loves alcohol don’t they? Everybody gets jokes about alcohol. I make some opening remarks which are well received, and then I launch into some of my drinking material.  I mention heroin and at the mention of the world famous opiate I can feel a hundred arses clenching tight. I have made a terrible faux pas. Heroin isn’t an acceptable subject of conversation at this golf club. Some social protocol has been transgressed. I thought heroin was mainstream now? I thought it was ok to talk about in front of anybody?  And I know at this early moment that I have lost them for good. Whatever I do now I will never get them back. The rest of the routine goes down to silence. And awkward shuffles of feet from the crowd. I think I am imaging the shuffling of feet but its the kind of thing they would do in a film to represent it. This drinking stuff is going nowhere. What else does everybody like? Christmas? Hitler? I move onto some stuff about Christmas and Hitler- nothing. Come on the British love the second world war what is wrong with them? One of my best punchlines is delivered to silence. “That is one of my bankers” I explain to them. I am unsure whether the audience are up on the technical jargon of stand up or not – banker – but that seems irrelevant as we clearly are on different hymn sheets at the moment.

One guy heckles “I haven’t laughed once yet.”  

Then a young stupid guy put his hand up to heckle. I ridicule the young stupid guy  for his politeness. Some banter ensues. This provides the only real traction of the night for me. I suggest I don’t know whether it is OK to take the piss out of the young stupid guy because I don’t know whether he is just stupid or borderline retarded. This generates amusement but looking back upon it I genuinely feel he may be intellectually subnormal and therefore it was not Ok to do this.

I exhaust the potential in the yoiung stupid guy and I try to switch back to material As I turn to face the front row I see that several have of them have left.

Much of my current set has material that builds on the back of the previous stuff. I am forced to abandon all this and rummage through my metal archives for old stand-alone routines that they may like.

By now the set ups are getting laughs of the wrong kind. As I introduce a new topic there is laughter at the anticipation of how shit it is going to be. Every new topic draws knowing laughter of “I can’t believe he would think there is anything comedic in this.”

I hear a knocking behind me. The young stupid guy  is now on the other side of a glass door behind me that forms the backdrop to the stage area. He has obviously left the venue by another door and is now standing outside knocking on the door to be let in. I make a snap decision to let him in. It is a risk. He may be about to do something stupid but on the other hand he is in full view of the audience –what with glass being transparent and everything. If he remains there he can make gestures behind me and undermine my now non-existent authority. If I let him in it may generate something. After all things can’t get any worse. Things can always get worse. I let him in. He tries to grab the microphone off me and I refuse to release my grip and we wrestle for some moments. “You’re shit” He attempts to blurt into the microphone. If this is all he wanted to convey, he could have done it from the audience. We continue to wrestle. I suggest to the audience I have pulled and that he is a groupie. I manage to man handle him to my left-hand side with my arm around him as though he was a contestant on a game show and he’s just won a washing machine. I smile at the audience as though everything has gone to plan. I want them to believe this is what I do. If nothing else I want them to be confused. I bid the audience farewell. It is a long walk to the edge of the stage.

After Gig

That was perhaps the second worst gig of all time and the worst gig of all time also occurred at a golf club. The only thing that separates this one from the previous debacle one was that tonight I had other comedians on the bill for moral support.

When people learn I am a comedian they often ask me “but do you get heckled?” as though heckling were the worst fate that could befall you. What they really should ask is “are you ever bludgeoned to death by indifference?” I think people imagine that the tough gigs are rowdy bear pits but that isn’t true you can always do something with that energy. The really tough gigs are ones with indifference.

In the immediate aftermath of bad gigs it all seems a bit of blur. Something bad’s happened but details are sketchy.  However I am always blessed with flashbacks to bad gigs. The next day I get sudden vivid reminders of something I said or a joke falling flat on its face in glorious technicolour. 

As I go to leave I say goodbye to a man from the committee. He waves at me from a distance but doesn’t come close to shake hands. He may fear catching something contagious. I leave the gig on foot and walk back to the station. The walk seems longer than on the way there. Only now does it strike me how dangerous it is to walk on an unlit country road on a dark November night dressed from head to foot in dark colours. I plan to dive into the trees if a car comes but there are bends and dips that conceal approaching

cars. I may be mowed down by a vehicle. I don’t want that. I don’t want to go out on this gig; I want to go out on a high.

PS I am now of the view  that I should have used physical violence upon the young stupid guy when he attempted to grab the microphone out of my hand. There are times you should take a stand.