The Road Comic's Playlist Part I

Songs that seem to be about the experience of being a road comic in the UK - even if they're not really.

This is merely Part I so is not intended to be in anyway definitive.  More will occur to me I'm sure.

Hopefully they'll occur to other comics too and they'll get in touch for inclusion in the inevitable Part II.

1. Steely Dan - Deacon Blues

As used over the end credits of the excellent documentary movie Comedian, this slice of fried gold pulls the great confidence trick true of all good stand-up.  It seems effortless, but only because of the attention to detail, craftsmanship, commitment and hard work that's gone into it.

Lyrically, "my back to the wall a victim of laughing chance, this is for me the essence of true romance" is a bit of a give away.  But also "and die behind the wheel", surely I can't be the only road comic to envisage a fatal accident on the way back from Lincoln on a Tuesday for £80?

2. Sixto Rodriguez - A Most Disgusting Song

Yeah, audiences, we're totally on to you.

Any song that starts "I've played every kind of gig there is to play now" is a shoo-in for this list, but his spot-on physical and psychological break down of the audience goes from poetic affection to utter digust.

A couple of the lines...


"every night it's the same old thing, Getting high, getting drunk, getting horny"

"They're all here....who mislay their dreams and later claim that they were robbed"


Is he singing about the crowd or the fools in the cap and bells upon the stage?

3. Half Man Half Biscuit - Bad Review

I can't thank Andy Robinson enough for introducing me to this revenge-fantasy-rant.


"Who the hell does Jeff Dreadnought think he is? Was he even there? (I ask myself) Does he even care? (don’t kid yourself)"

Change Jeff Dreadnought to Steve Bennett and you've got a phrase that's probably said in every green room at every gig on every night.

There've been many a night where I've driven back from a confused audience singing this at the top of my lungs.  Did I say many?  I mean - a rare few.  Obviously.

4. Simon & Garfunkel - Keep The Customer Satisfied

A well-respected, established and hilarious act once told me that he reckoned if he started being 'shit', he'd have six months grace from the circuit before he stopped getting work.  Personally, I can't see that happening as the act is really very good - but I do think of him every time S+G bellow

"I'm one step ahead of the shoe shine"

Yup, I'm six months away from teacher training.


If you have any suggestions.... comment away, but give reasons.  It'd be great to get a whole double album of these songs.

More Expensive Than Therapy

This is the story of how I tried out something new and different last night. I've broken it down into chunks so you can skip to the bits you want.

DEEP BACKGROUND

Early 2000, having gigged in a half-arsed way at and post University, and having had a depressing 3 month stint living in London not getting any gigs, I found myself living with my parents, temping at a utility firm and having no gigs in the diary.

Then in about February, a few things happened.  My girlfriend and I decided to start living together in 'fashionable' Moseley. I read Tony Hawks' up-lifting tale of travelling Round Ireland With A Fridge (spoiler alert: the moral is if you think positively, good things will happen to you. That's demonstrably not the case, but it will appear as if it works.).

And, crucially, my girlfriend and I went to see Man On The Moon. The biopic of Andy Kauffman, starring Jim Carrey.

So I decided that I had to try and focus, and see if I could become a Professional Comedian.

Three years later I had enough comedy work to jack-in my day job, and in the decade since I've alternated between being a Pro Road Comic and a commercial radio presenter (a job I got through doing stand-up).  I am now a comic again.

SHALLOW BACKGROUND

Things that have been knocking about my head in the past couple of months:

1. Stuart Goldsmith's excellent Comedian's Comedian Podcast, particularly the Terry Alderton interview Honest, insightful and revelatory.

2. US comic Andy Daley's character 'Jerry O'Hearn' - a stand up with no actual content. The video is of him performing at a comedian's convention, so as you'd expect he storms it.  I've shown this video to comics and non-comics and generally speaking, the comics like it - the non-comics look confused.

3. Andy Field, a newer act who I met once, but seems to post interesting things on Facebook so I'm yet to unfriend him, posted this video on his feed, of Andy Kaufman guesting on the David Letterman show.

4. El Purnell, Ecuador's Numero Uno comedian. He gigs all over the UK in Spanish, with a few English words/references.  I find it fascinating how little recognisable language he needs for an audience to 'get' it.

5. A sketch troupe that I used to be in has, in part, reformed under the new name 'The Lovely Men', and we've been doing shows and gigs in clubs working towards a two-week run in Edinburgh.

6. There's a part of my regular club set where I do a mime using the mic stand as a prop. To being with, the mime wasn't even part of the bit, but then it developed and it's now at the point where I continue to do the mime (by it's nature, it's quite repetitive) for as long as I think the audience will allow it.  Some nights that can be a minute or more.  This culminated at a gig at Severn Arts in Leeds, when during the mime I improvised an extra bit, which involved me turning my back on the audience - but continued to do the mime. In my head, this went well and I was quite pleased with myself.

A couple of days later, I had an alert on my 'Facebook Fan Page' which I don't really update or look at or pursue in any way because I am lazy and afraid, to see a wall post from G***** M***** (name redacted), someone I had never met, that read 'Just not funny'.  On clicking through to his profile, I saw that he lived in Leeds and had been at the Severn Arts gig. His profile picture was of him windsurfing.

I replied to his post with 'well aren't you a fucking cunt'.

Then I deleted that.  And his original message.  I'm a right Stalinist, me.

Then I posted on Twitter 'G***** M***** (redacted here, but not in the original tweet) from Leeds is shit at windsurfing'

Then I deleted that tweet.

Then I calmed down.

7. This video of comic visionary Paul Foot being booed.

ROUGHWORKS

Roughworks is a monthly Sunday Night gig at The Glee Club, Birmingham.  It's for established acts to try new material and new acts to try their established material. Since I was last asked to appear late last year, the time allotted per act has gone from 10 minutes to 5-7 minutes.

If, like me, you tend to write 'on-stage' and want to explore around an idea, this restricts how effective that technique can be and the new time constraint is probably best suited to people trying short jokes or quick high-concept set-pieces.

The door charge is £3, so the audience is usually a combination of the local comedy anoraks (that is in no way an insult, I am one myself) and young people who can't afford to pay the £15+ to go to the Glee on a Friday or Saturday, or who see this as a way to go to their first comedy night.

THE IDEA

INT. CAR - LATE AFTERNOON

ME:                  What can I do in five minutes?  Count to a hundred?
OTHER ACT:  You should.
ME:                  Yeah, I should.

*lightbulb*

THE PREP

How could I count to 100 and still get laughs?  If I went on and just started counting - maybe after about 20 or so some people would laugh, but surely I'd lose them if I continued in a monotone, static way.  And where's the fun in that for me?

So, part 'inspired' by the Jerry O'Hearn video, I decided I would do all the actions and vocal intonations of a stand-up set, but only speak in sequential numbers.

At no point was I allowed to deviate from sequential numbers. No matter what happened. Even if EVERYONE stared at me for the whole duration, I had to maintain the character. You've got to commit to the bit, as I'm always telling anyone who'll listen.

If I got heckled, I'd have to respond in sequential numbers.

If everyone started booing, I'd start shouting sequential numbers over the top of them, a la Paul Foot.

A couple of set-pieces occurred to me that I thought would be funny. Because of the nature of Roughworks - many acts have notebooks or paper on-stage with them throughout the gig.  Half way through my routine, I would stumble to a halt. Put the microphone back in the stand, pull out a piece of paper and remind myself what the next sequential number would be.

At the end of the routine, I should try and sell a CD.  It is not uncommon for accomplished comedians to sell merchandise at the end of a good gig.  The joke here would be that the sales patter would entirely be in sequential numbers.

I also decided that as I approached 100, I'd try and get the audience to all shout it out, and then come straight back at them with 'hundred and one'.

I then began to realise that I'd have to have a 'set-list' in my head during the gig of the material the character thought he was doing.  It's almost as if the character thinks he's doing brilliant stand-up, and is completely unaware of the fact that he speaks in sequential numbers.

I based some of the actions and intonations in the routine upon things in my actual club-set, and some from generic stand-up routines.

The set list reads thus...

1. Hello
2. Comment on the room
3. Opening one-liner
4. Relationships (relate this bit to a couple in the audience)
5. Drug taking and being hungry
6. Alcohol, including vomiting and fingering someone
7. Forget what's next, check the script.
8. Build up to 100, and aftermath
9. My Jamaican mom beats me
10. Doing sex badly
11. Try to sell the CD
12. Thanks very much and good night.

In run-throughs I found I would get up to between 130 and 170. I decided that the routine would just finish at whatever number I ended up on, rather than trying to reach a specific number.

Because I'm now convinced that this routine is a 'character' piece, on the afternoon of the gig I decided that I wouldn't be using my real name.  I tried to think up a name that sounded like a generic comedian's name.  Rejected suggestions included Dave MacGuffin, Kevin Sherbert and Jon Ericson.  The latter because of the similarity to the word 'generic'.  In the end, I used that formula to come up with the character name 'Johnny Wreck'.

Then I recorded myself counting to one hundred - just straight through - and burned that audio file onto a CD.  I printed out a CD cover...

...took a case from an old, unwanted CD single and put the merchandise together.

Then I got dressed up in the most typical comedian outfit I could put together (all of the component parts being things I'd worn on stage at 'real' gigs).  Blue jeans, trainers, purple 'McIntyre' style shirt, black suit jacket.

Then I drove to The Glee....

THE GIG, PART I

The brilliant Steve Day is compering, and I prep him with an intro and outro.

Before I go on, he is to say

"I've not seen this next act, but I hear good things...."

and afterwards

"I didn't like it. Comedy by numbers."

Because he's a pro and a good sport - he does both of those things.

You can hear an audio recording of the gig here.  There were probably about 80-100 people in the audience.  I get to 149.

See if you can work out where on the set-list I am.  If I've done it properly, that should be easy.

AUDIENCE REACTION

Some people get it.  It takes until 34 for laughs to really kick in.  There are other big laughter points, but mostly you can hear individuals (mostly acts) laughing. After 115, the laughter thins out a bit.

I think a lot of people thought I'd stop counting eventually and do something else - they were wrong and possibly frustrated and annoyed with me.  There were a lot of confused faces in the crowd (as you'd expect) and the old cliche about only being able to see the people who don't like it was true - their faces were big and frowny in my field of vision.

AFTERMATH PART I

My initial emotional response was one of disappointment.

Some people laughed.  A lot of people didn't get it.  The acts thought it was interesting.  This was EXACTLY the response I thought I'd get.  So why disappointment?

I've been doing stand-up for a LONG time, and in that time, my psyche has trained itself to judge all gigs in a certain way.  Basically, did everyone find everything I said funny?  If the answer to that is 'no', I beat myself up about it for a bit and try and improve.  The answer to that question is ALWAYS no - how can you possibly expect everyone to like everything you do?  But that has become such an over-bearing, ingrained, thought process, that I couldn't help feeling like I'd failed.

But I hadn't.  I'd succeeded. I'd done exactly what I'd set out to do - count in sequential numbers while trying to get as many laugh as I could.

Then I realised that the gig wasn't over.

PERFORMANCE PIECE PART II

I also realised that it had ceased to be a gig, and it was now a performance piece. I am nothing if not a pretentious wanker.

Because of my placement on the bill, 8th out of 9.  There was only one act to go before the show ended and people would be leaving.  I positioned myself at the end of the bar, near the exit and readied myself.

I would get the one copy of the CD out of my pocket and try to get rid of/sell it.

I hadn't really thought it through, but as it developed, I realised I should try and say no more than'CD?' and try and make eye contact with everyone as they left.

What happened next was simultaneously hilarious, humiliating, fascinating and thrilling.

If I may, I'd like to break down the audience into three groups:

Group 1: Got what I was doing.

These people would look me in the eye, smile and say words to the affect of 'no thanks!'

Group 2: Didn't get what I was doing

WOULD NOT EVEN LOOK ME IN THE EYE.  They must have genuinely thought I was trying to sell a CD of my counting (which I kind of was, but in a different way to what they must have thought).

Interestingly, about half a dozen people muttered something about 'not having any money'.  I had never said the CD cost anything.  That assumption was on their part. I wonder how much they thought I would have charged for it?

Group 3: People I knew

Most of whom spoke to me, to begin with I replied as me, but then later I tried to keep in character.  A couple of them asked me how much the CD would cost, I jokingly said £100.  One guy offered me 27p. I said I'd hold out for more.

Eventually, I gave the CD to Jo Enright, who books Roughworks, as a thank you (or possibly a warning).  She was very complimentary about what I was trying to do.

AFTERMATH PART II

'So James, what are you going to do with this now?'

I got that question a lot from the other acts.  The honest answer was 'I don't know', but I enjoyed saying 'the potential is literally infinite'.

A couple of acts had really good pointers on how to improve the act (just to clarify, the advice wasn't 'stop counting and do some fucking jokes!')

And I even toyed with the idea of trying to get on at Roughworks again next month, and start with 'hundred and fifty'.

I'm really quite proud of what I did last night. I normally hate self-promotion to the point that it's severely damaged my career. But this I liked. Hence this blog.

Thanks for reading.

The initial tension part one

Much of 'how stand-up works' is based on the theory that the comedian creates tension, and then punctures it to cause the audience to laugh. It's how most jokes work, and subsequently how most (but not all) comedy 'bits' work.

The more seemingly unfunny the 'set up', the bigger the tension - and, in theory at least, the bigger the release when the tension is destroyed. This goes hand in hand with the idea that stand-ups 'say the unsayable' - but audiences, bless 'em, don't always know that they're supposed to abide by a formula.

For example, sometimes an audience will be so taken by an 'unfunny' thing in the set-up, that they're too hung up to laugh when the punchline comes around, because they're still thinking about the unfunny thing. A lot of times it's certain hot-button words or topics like rape, child abuse or cancer.  All things being equal, and as long as your joke doesn't contravene your own moral code, then you should be able to joke about anything.  But the comedian has to be aware that if it's a contentious topic - the joke better be really good, and that you may have to argue with an audience member afterwards.

Anyway - assuming that an act is not necessarily going to bring out something shocking in their set, the biggest tension they'll face is the one created when their name is introduced. The audience won't have heard of them and so the underlying tension in the room is the audience subconsciously thinking 'I hope they're not awful'.  The act has then got a window of opportunity to destroy that tension - how long exactly is open to debate but, generally speaking, it's probably between about 30 seconds and a minute before the audience starts to worry that they were right, and that the act is no good.

Sometimes this leads comics to try and get to the mic as quick as possible and get the first joke out at double-quick speed, but this is self-defeating, it makes you look nervous and no-one wants to watch a nervous performer, and generally speaking, nervous performers make audiences nervous. It's very hard to genuinely laugh when you're nervous. Hence 'nervous laughter' being a totally separate entity (and one of my most hated noises).

If you are calm, and look like you know what you're doing, the audience will already start to relax - an act with one of the most reassuring on-stage presences in the world gave me this piece of advice;

"You're already doing something that they would never do, they already kind of respect you."

COMING SOON: There's going to be another part to this post where I ming on about opening lines.

Some mid week links...

Here's a couple of things that you may already have seen....

First of all Liam Mullone's glossary of terms for the Edinburgh Fringe.  A lot of comics have just had to leave the bubble and some will find the come down harder than others.  I may have to write a longer piece about the ridiculousness of the 'star review' system.

Second - after the Essex lion 'furore', here's Louis CK talking about lions (clip starts half way through a joke - sorry about that, but he does get to lions eventually.)

Third, and probably the one you'll take away with you, Patton Oswalt giving a 'keynote' speech at Just For Laughs about the state of, for want of a better term, 'the industry'.

Where nobody knows your name...

One of the simultaneously great and terrible things about being a non-famous comedian is that, by definition, audiences don't know who you are.

The up-sides are that you won't be judged on anything you've ever done previously getting to start each set with a blank slate, and that if things don't go as planned - they won't remember you anyway.

The downsides? You have to start from scratch at every gig, and if you do really, really well - they won't remember you anyway.

Until the level just below telly, it doesn't matter how respected you are on the circuit, how many times you've stormed it or how many positive comments you've got on your Chortle thread - audiences probably won't be able to remember what your name is even while you are standing on stage in front of them.

The excellent character act Loretta Maine has a bit where she points to a guy in the front row and asks 'what's my name?' - the laugh comes from the fact that he doesn't know, and the audience don't know and they're just relieved they didn't get asked.  Interestingly the second time she asks (towards the end of her act) the audience do know.

On countless occasions I've asked people who've been to The Glee the previous night 'who was on?' only to be met with a faraway look, a tongue protruding from the corner of the mouth and then the eventual 'er... there was a man in a suit, I think a Canadian or could have been Australian....' and those will be some of the best acts on the circuit.

So if you're a newbie worrying about your first gig at a new act night where you're on with a dozen other acts, bear in mind that you'll only be in the audiences consciousness for the time you are actually standing in front of them.  Unless of course you're at the extremes of awful or brilliant - but even then, they'll remember what you did rather than what your name is.

It's not the subject, it's the context.

Tanya Gold's piece on misogyny and rape jokes

Harry Hill once said that it was easy to shock an audience, all you need is a kitten and a chainsaw.

Generally speaking, jokes work because of surprise. The set-up leads you one way raising tension, then the punchline wrong foots you, puts an unexpected idea in your head, releases the tension and makes you laugh.

There is a fine line between the kind of delightful surprise that leads to laughter, and just plain shock that leads to disapproving shakes of the head.  All audiences are different, and what gets laughs from one might get disapproval from another and vice-versa.

As comedians develop, they get a better sense on how to dance along that line for maximum effect.  Some choose, and become known, for stepping over the line.

A lot of newer comedians, as they try and work out this grey area, position themselves on the 'shock' side because to a new act, gasps (or groans, boos...) are at least a response, and often easier to get than genuine laughter. A lot of new comedians are playing to the other comedians in the room, sometimes because they're the only other people there, but mostly to try and impress them.  Other comedians tend to enjoy it when the comic on stage is dying a hideous death or taking risks that they themselves wouldn't have the nerve to. They are not necessarily a nurturing audience. This movie sums it up pretty well.

And so what you get is lots of terrible rape jokes. Rape has become stand-up shorthand for 'I AM EDGY AND YOU CAN'T HANDLE ME YOU SQUARES'.  Which is a shame because some rape jokes are funny. Here's George Carlin and here's Louis CK and here's Sarah Silverman (Tanya Gold quotes a bit of this routine - I would argue - out of context).

Now before you decide to comment that I'm a rape-apologist, I'm really not. I don't even condone most rape jokes, but I will defend a comedian's right to make jokes about anything they like. Audiences can then decide.

But, confession time, I have a joke in my current act that contains the word 'rape', but I say it's not a rape joke.

It's part of a longer bit about Mo-vember (the charity event where men are sponsored to grow moustaches in November). I speculate on rejected similar fundraising activities, namely Cock-tober and Rape-ril.

It's not the cleverest joke I've ever written, but it has a near 100% hit rate with audiences, so it's staying in the set.  Sometimes it gets applause - which I follow by saying 'It's always disturbing when the mention of rape gets applause'. Which in itself gets a laugh, (but I kind of mean it).

Does my 'rape-ril' joke mean I condone rapists? Does it mean I hate women? And who the fuck are you to make such judgements based on, what is essentially, a childish pun?

Of the jokes mentioned by Gold, I reckon the only decent ones are Sarah Silverman's and Paul Revill's. The others aren't particularly good jokes. Interestingly, the Russell Brand joke is given no context or content at all and is just used as an excuse to repeat a showbiz rumour.

"All this normalises and diminishes violence towards women: if it is easy to laugh about, it is hard to take seriously. There is an obvious connection between misogynist discourse and violence because, as Maureen Younger of Laughing Cows says, "Women are always the butt of these jokes. It's never the perpetrator". In these gaudy rooms, the indifference amazes."


Rape jokes no more normalises or diminishes violence towards women than jokes about Hitler normalise or diminish anti-semitism. If there is an 'obvious connection between misogynist discourse and violence' then let her quote the studies that prove it, not just a quote from one person - particularly when the clips linked to above disprove her theory about perpetrators not being the 'butt' of the joke.

" if it is easy to laugh about, it is hard to take seriously"

I don't necessarily think that it's true. Sorry to invoke Hitler again, but because I enjoy, and laugh at, The Producers - does this mean that I don't take the Holocaust seriously?

I think it's much more dangerous to have the attitude where you just hear certain key words or phrases and immediately dismiss whatever's being said as immoral or unfunny, without paying any regard to the context in which the words or phrases were used.

Not doing jokes about rape will not stop rape from happening and no rapist has cited Jimmy Carr's jokes as a reason for his actions.

Comedians exist on the edges of taste and have to be given the freedom to experiment with taboo.

Hopefully, bad rape jokes will begin to be viewed as the hack and lazy comedic tropes that they have become and most good comics will steer clear.