(no subject)
Ok so yesterday Elsa and I woke up much earlier than we wanted to but unfortunately she had education to attend and I had a coach to catch so we hurriedly got ready and annoyingly said goodbye to each other for another weekend. I made it to the station with plenty of time to spare and got my usual seat at the back. Soon enough some chap came and interrupted my solitude only to sit and sleep next to me. He was also wearing my red jumper which I was not happy about. I sat for a long time reading and listening to music and at last we made it to a Victoria that was just as grey as Canterbury. I purchased some KFC and ate it on the floor of the station leant on a pillar. I felt like a cool tramp and considered spending the rest of my life in this way. However today was an important day for me so I decided to get up and go. There was a man in the little busking semi-circle playing Herbie Hancock's Chameleon on his saxophone to a rhythmic backing track and it made me feel funky for the rest of the journey. My mum picked me up from Burnt Oak station and in doing so held up lots of traffic and sent bus drivers' heads shaking. This house is uncomfortably warm and even after all the snow and the chilliness of my student house I felt stifled as soon as I walked through the door. I sat and thought about my impending gig. Hiding my head in my hands. Saying "WHY!?" and groaning. Sooner or later after a nice text from Elsa and my Mum urging me to start looking forward to it, I did and I started psyching myself up. Shouting and singing opera and doing knee tucks. Running around the kitchen blowing raspberries, hoisting myself up onto the kitchen counter. Talking myself up like a boxer. After a while of this I was fired up and almost ready. I left again from Burnt oak station, changed at Euston to the Victoria Line and Emerged from Green Park Station. For the first time since Christmas Eve I was in real London and it was quite odd. Looking at my google map I attempted to get my bearings, passing both the Ritz hotel and the grounds of Buckingham Palace (I think) in the process. After a few minutes of stumbling around I was on the right route. On Dover Street I saw a purple light behind the crowds and the nervous part of me hoped it was an alien invasion. I stared at it curiously for a moment. Two blokes outside what appeared to be a members club camouflaged as a pricey town house asked me if I was looking for somewhere. I realised that this expression coupled with the map in my hand made me look like something of a tourist. I registered the two guys. A young black guy in a waistcoat and shirt and a tall thin middle aged white man with his bow-tie undone smoking a cigarette. His accent was so anachronistically 40s aristocracy that I hesitated to answer for a moment for fear that I was being set up and the dangling corpse of Jeremy Beadle would point out a hidden camera to me after being fucked around by these two guys. I pointed out the purple light and even they looked perplexed for a moment. The young guy said it must be a spot light. The older guy told me if I couldn't get where I was going Kiera Knightly was in a hotel around the corner. I voiced my disapproval for skinny women and made them laugh which felt good. At last I had reached my destination: The Goat tavern, directly opposite The King's Head. The pub was absolutely packed with London people. I went upstairs at the Goat to sign in and get my place on the bill allocated. Behind a little table was a middle aged man in glasses and stood behind him a young dude with a septum piercing and a silly hat. I exchanged jokes with them and randomly picked the number two out of a tupper-wear box. Being 2nd on made me nervous. I was told to wait down stairs with the other comics so that they could organise the running order better. Graham and Hasmukh were running late so I got a pint and paced outside the pub like a nutter, trying to order my jokes, pick out words and seeing if they could go anywhere else. I was growing more and more anxious as the time for the upstairs doors to open grew closer and closer. I was getting annoyed by the London people. They were young business men and women making seedy jokes in long beige coats drinking out of little brandy glasses and I was annoyed that I had no one to talk to. With 5 minutes to spare Graham and Hasmukh arrived with Abigail. I thanked them all and we went upstairs. A row of women, rather than simply shuffling up a bit, stood and allowed Graham and I to take two seats pushed up against the wall. The lights went down and the compere came on. It was the bloke with the hat, his name was Dizzy High and he had no jokes. He relied on sounding stoned and after a few mumblings he ushered the first act on who had a funny, slightly spiteful sense of humour and you could tell in his nasty little smile after he dropped a punchline that he was enjoying himself. Already I could see that these acts were going to be far more confident and experienced than me. He was applauded off and for the third time in my life I heard a compere say my name and the dippy women next to me allowed me to pass. As I stood up I got some applause for my awkwardness. "Let's hope his jokes are funnier than his organisational skills" said Dizzy. I took to the mic thinking "that didn't really make any sense". Regardless I focused and did my best. I was worried about how my opener would go down amongst soppy London people. Any time the guy before me said anything the slightest bit un-p.c some dopey woman at the back practically screamed (as she did pretty much the entire way through whenever anybody finished a sentence). I was worried that I'd be testing the audience’s patience somewhat. I told them I was going to start off with an impression. I moved away from the microphone, put my hands over my face and made ghost noises while swaying slightly to absolute silence. I then walked back behind the mic and stared the audience down. Just as I had hoped; they looked at each other embarrassed, as though I had fucked up. "No?" I said. I looked more annoyed at them. "It's God." I said and one person let out a short stabbing laugh. And then silence. "Isn't he the one who moves in mysterious ways?" and like a building slowly collapsing or a tree creaking over people slowly chuckled and it built to laughter across the crowd and I was very happy. Each of my jokes got this reaction where people didn't quite understand what I was saying at first until it dawned on them and it finally paid off. My biggest laughs came out of improvisation which I was very happy with. The first from saying that my friend received free drugs from his dealer because he was his millionth customer. "What are the odds?" I added at the end to another long slow build of laughter while I pondered the obvious mathematics behind it. The other from likening myself to a man who had swallowed a bowling pin. I don't really see the appeal either but fair enough. I'm not detailing this stuff to big myself up by any means. The fact that I feel the need to stand up in front of people to make them laugh fills me we nothing but embarrassment and self loathing. However it is a compulsion to do this, something I dream about. Few things make me happier than making people laugh. It's among the only things I feel in control of and confident about. It just so happens that people devote evenings to this kind of thing and it really appeals to me. If only it wasn't so closely associated with arrogance and ego. None the less I left the stage rather chuffed and once again the silly women allowed me through to sit. And I bowed before them in thanks. A guy a little younger than me came on and said some stuff. Nothing at all memorable. The next comic was boring. A sassy middle aged American obsessed with herself and her sex life. The crowd liked her. The next guy was great, very strange and imaginative; sledding squirrels and the cultured lives of free range chickens. I was very impressed with and jealous of his material. By now it was half time and everyone could get a drink. I managed to force my way out of my seat and Abigail very sweetly told me that stand-up comedy is really good actually. No sooner than I had replied with the deliberately awful joke "yeah it's a good laugh" did the nice bespectacled owner of the pub start screaming in my elated ear. Apparently my choice of seating had made the place look unprofessional. Shocked, I immediately apologised but he continued shouting at me and saying that it should be common sense. Now in retrospect maybe this is common sense, but I am an extremely inexperienced comic and prior to my performance I was sickeningly nervous and as a result I didn't exactly have the best interests of the punters in mind. Despite my endless apologies and my suggestion that he disqualify me from the competition he continued to barrage me. I told him that he made a fair point but asked if he would rather talk about it somewhere else as, to be honest, it was very embarrassing. He said that it was I who had embarrassed him in the first place. In reality he could have saved a lot of face by not losing it in front of a room full of people who were politely and awkwardly looking away and continuing their conversations. He said that I should not have made paying customers stand up. He also argued that my having the punters stand up flustered the compere which was the reason he completely fucked up his introduction of the comic that I liked. I resisted saying that it was probably the meth that had made him fuck up. I also wanted to ask if he got the job because he was the bespectacled knob-head's nephew. In fact I resisted saying a lot of things and instead humbly apologised and stated that I hadn't considered that I my actions may have misrepresented him and his company. And after all this what has he achieved? He still made the same amount of money and I still made the same amount of people laugh, if not more by creating an anxiety. All it's done is made me rethink the world of comedy. I came home and watched the channel 4 list show "The 100 greatest stand-ups ever" and all I saw was a load of money grabbing cunts. This man made me disgusted that someone could see me as a way of making profit and corralling in customers to spend money on tickets and drinks. This is most certainly not my motivation in telling jokes. I would like to make people laugh because it feeds my ego which makes me feel good. The biggest reason, however, is that it is the way that I find easiest to express myself. I can't express the way I feel in words, but when someone hears me say something funny it is the closest they will get to hearing what I am really like. That funny me is me. That funny me (a.k.a me) is not a means to make some prick in Piccadilly an extra 20 quid. And fuck him because he approached the situation with such a lack of humour and professionalism. My admittedly amateurish entrance only heightened the farcical nature of the evening, which even despite my slip-up, was absolute horse-shit. The acts that performed in the second half looked like a load of tramps coming in out of the cold. One bloke genuinely insulted me (not directly, otherwise it really would have been a total shitter). To think that this 42 year old man who has lived on this planet for twice the length that I have could think it artistically appropriate to enter a competition whose purpose was to find the best new comedian in the country (who I definitely don't consider myself to be) and simply detail his disgusting sex life with his revolting wife with not a whiff of wit or humour was an egg in the face of the valuable and potentially beautiful art form of stand up comedy. And like him, so many comics in the 2nd half (and even in the clearly superior first half) just detailed their sex-lives to a room full of adults. It was disgraceful. I'm certainly not a prude and I don't disapprove of discussing such subjects but if your whole act consists of detailing it you're no different from Jim Davidson expecting to get laughs out of his ridiculous views. You're not a performer. And when it came down to it, none of the funniest people of the evening got through to the next round and it made me wonder what kind of competition I had entered where the funniest people in it were not recognised. What kind of ridiculous industry is this? Has it really reached the stage where observational comics or shock comics relate their template/sordid lives to a room full of wankers who find comprehension and agreement funny? The comics finished and I didn't progress which I was genuinely cool with. The people who got through were more confident and experienced. They sounded like real comics. We left abruptly. We had been joined by Matt Jones during the interval who had mistakenly spent twp pints in King's Head. I passed the owner on the way out and said "thank you very much" as any opportunity to perform is one to be grateful for. I resisted calling him a money grabbing fucknut; a: because it was needless and childish, and b: because it's not a very good insult. We all left and talked the evening over which was fun. We walked through posh London; past all the high class tailors and Matt Jones pointed out a particularly stunning smoking jacket. Abigail requested that we go to a restaurant because she was hungry. We ended up in a Soho Pizzeria where we occupied a round table next to the window. We ordered cokes, a couple of pizzas and Graham got me a beer which was lovely of him. This order didn't seem to satisfy the waitress. I then got the impression that we were still children pissing off a world of adults. The extremely grown-up situation we were in begged to differ. We chatted and Matt Jones was very funny. A male pianist and a female singer took to the stage next to us and played some brilliant slinky jazz. They were fantastic and I applauded after every song. It made me realise that I was in London and that things like this must be happening a thousand times over. It made my 5 minutes of stand up seem meaningless. We left and said goodbye to Abigail who went her own way home and I sincerely thanked her for coming along and seeing me (as I did everybody else who accompanied me). Matt and Hasmukh talked about a bloke who had advertised a job for is own personal nemesis. I realised that they had become very close friends while I had been in Canterbury. Me and Graham spoke about comedy on the way home. When I got in my mum wanted to hear about my evening despite her tiredness. She smiled and listened and I left her to sleep and I went to my bed and mumbled the things I wished I had said to that prick in the glasses had I the courage.