Rich Milner tastes like this.

Read my Christmas address: tmblr.co/ZjhGTyZ-z8iA

I wrote a recipe for the Cooking with Comedians blog, you can read it here: http://is.gd/vRFABC

Last week the British Slime Minister was asked about the tax affairs of comedian Jimmy Carr, who The Times had revealed was participating in a tax avoidance scheme which allowed him to pay approximately 1% tax on his earnings which, given his considerable success, amount to millions. Cameron said doing so was “morally wrong” and Treasury Minister David Gauke has been repeatedly quoted in the press as saying Carr was “morally repugnant”. He was agreeing with the assessment of Chancellor George Osborne who used the words during his budget statement in March to describe aggressive tax avoidance schemes.

The phrase “morally repugnant”, though not uttered by any politician in direct reference to Carr, echoed throughout the media because it makes a good headline. It’s a very good word. Any word with ‘pug’ in it is pretty good, really. Pugnacious, for one. Pugwall, as in the late 80′s Australian children’s television programme about a boy and his friends starting a band. And ‘pug’, as in the dog bred to respiratory imperfection so lonely people have something to pity adoringly. And that’s about it really.

Repugant and pugnacious have the same root in the French ‘pugnare’, to fight (insert your own national stereotype jibe here you dick), so to be repugnant is to be in conflict with what is decent. Perhaps Carr’s pugilistic bobbing and weaving with the tax system makes the phrase particularly befitting. He has since apologised and said he will be more responsible in future. I assume he is speaking of social responsibility. Why else pay more tax than you’re legally required to, if not so that a proportion of your wealth can be added to the nation’s wealth in order to benefit the society in which you live and work? But he’s made none of the usual noises wealthy, tax-shy people often do, about giving to charity so they can exercise approval over how their money is spent.

I’m sure Jimmy Carr does give some of his money to charity. I’m not sure at all, it’s just a turn of phrase, but I’d like to think he does, though he must do so without drawing any attention to it. He’s certainly supported charities in a fashion. Earlier this year he appeared on Deal or No Deal, but took a quite a gamble with the money he was trying to raise for a hospice for children and young adults. With either £35,000 or £750 remaining, he turned down an offer of £14,000, and the charity missed out on £13,250. Perhaps that night he went home feeling a bit guilty and decided to make up the difference with a donation out of his very own, barely taxed pocket. Who knows, maybe he even thought ‘I know! I avoided paying at least a million in tax this year, they can have that!’ But if he did, he did so privately. Publicly he took to Twitter to ask that his fans donate their money to compensate the charity for his risky wager. They coughed up £6,000.

It’s hard not to think ill of someone who, given considerable wealth and a shirked tax burden, isn’t otherwise generously charitable. Whether or not you’re a fan of Carr you might hope that, despite his self-admitted irresponsibility, he still had the capacity to recognise his extraordinary fortuity in life and use it to help those less fortunate than himself. There’s no reason he should other than common decency. So let’s just assume for a moment that privately he’s a very charitable fellow who has raised and donated shed-loads for people in need. That wouldn’t morally offset his participation in aggressive tax avoidance. It would just be the bare minimum required to not want physical harm to come to him, preferably by my own hands. Or at the very least physical discomfort by my own scrotum. An Anglo-twist on the contemporary American Tea Party could be me and a few mates going around teabagging tax avoiders. Gary Barlow has got a face begging to be festooned with ballbags, and I almost wish Bono were British so he didn’t have to miss out on the fun.

Of course, there’s a bigger picture to all this. There’s the simply mind-boggling hypocrisy on the part of David Cameron and his party given the VAST amounts of corporate and private wealth that is siphoned, legally and illegally, out of the tax system and into an ever-decreasing number of hands, including Tory party coffers. Which raises the question of how stupid David Cameron was to respond to news of Jimmy Carr’s tax affairs in the way that he did. Setting aside value judgements (a prerequisite for any analysis of politicians’ motivations) it is stunning that Cameron, whose pre-politics career was being in charge of PR for a television company (admittedly a job he only got thanks to the string-pulling of his aristocratic mother-in-law), did not think: ‘hang on a minute, my party is renowned for being populated and funded by tax avoiders and my father made my inherited fortune with a pioneering tax avoidance scheme, I’d better watch what I say here and try not to highlight what a colossally immoral hypocrite I am.’ But he didn’t. He said Jimmy Carr’s behaviour was “morally wrong”, which is a bit like a kingpin slapping a pickpocket on the wrist.

Only as far as pickpockets go, Jimmy Carr felt he just had to pick a pocket or 30,000,000, that being roughly how many individual taxpayers there are in the UK. And while I’m very happy to make impotent tweets expressing how the extent to which I’m appalled at the current government greatly outweighs the extent to which I’m appalled at Jimmy Carr, I’m still really fucking appalled at Jimmy Carr. Assuming the figure I plucked out of the air earlier is vaguely correct, and he does indeed avoid paying tax in excess of £1,000,000, Jimmy has personally helped the government enact an ideological agenda to reduce the help given to the most needy and vulnerable in society based on the lie that we cannot afford it.

My perspective on this is anchored by the fact that I have worked in social care for the last 18 months, and have an approximate knowledge of the amount of money Sheffield has to spend on providing social care to people each year. It’s probably considerably less than the tax Carr didn’t pay last year. They’re certainly comparable numbers if estimations of Carr’s income are anything to go by. I’m aware of the budget because I’ve recently had to attend meetings notifying me and my colleagues that we’ll soon be finding ourselves in need of new employers. Sheffield, like other localities have or will do, quite suddenly decided to restructure its provision of social care as a direct result of the need to save money due to the cuts in public spending being made by this government. As part of this restructuring the charity that I work for is having to shut up shop in the city because they were unsuccessful in re-bidding for their contract. I can’t say with any certainty but I strongly suspect they were unsuccessful because another organisation undercut them by promising to squeeze even more pennies out of an already underfunded sector. I can only speculate as to how further savings could possibly be made, but it’s hard to imagine how they could be other than at the expense of workers and clients, the clients being children and adults with disabilities and their carers. I could pluck your heartstrings in detail, but to do that I’d have to divulge information about my some of clients’ personal lives and circumstances. As for myself, I couldn’t really afford to stay in the only job I’ve loved even before all this kicked off. The low pay and need to work unsociable hours to earn anything approaching a basic living wage mean that I’d have to give up any hope of pursuing the other thing I love, that being stand up comedy. It’s a fucking expensive and time-consuming hobby to make a career out of. In all likelihood I’ll probably have to find a job in an office, helping pricks sell shit to wankers.

So while there are lots of things that could be said and have already been pointed out by many regarding the iniquity of greater tax avoiders and evaders and the warped hypocrisy and staggering lack of self-awareness on part of David Cameron and his hateful party of relentless right-wing ideologues dressed up as accountants much like Carr’s, I felt the need to underline what a cunt Jimmy Carr is. He has since performed at his live shows and appeared on television, taking all the cheap shots his audience and peers could throw at him with the same feigned sincerity he has conveyed whilst appearing gallantly sheepish enough to prove that he’s far better at PR than the PR PM.  He said in his apologetic tweets: “I met with a financial advisor and he said to me ‘Do you want to pay less tax? It’s totally legal’. I said ‘Yes’.” It’s convenient that he made this statement on a platform that only allows concisely contrived contrition to be expressed in 140 characters, because I can’t help thinking that the conversation must have gone into a smidgen more depth.

‘How much less tax, exactly?’ You’ll basically be paying fuck all. ‘Really? How is that legal?’ Well, first of all you have to quit your job. ‘That’s easy, I’m self employed.’ Then you have to sign a new contract with a pretend company in Jersey. ‘A pretend company?’ Yes, a bit like A4e, basically a front for fraud subsidised at the expense of the taxpayer. ‘Great. We could call it All4me!’ Very clever Mr Carr. ‘I know. Then what?’ The pretend company rehires you in the UK, but takes your earnings and only pays you a small salary. ‘That sounds like a terrible way to pay less tax. Are you actually any good at your job?’ Don’t worry, we then pay you the majority of your earnings in loans. ‘Oh yeah, what’s the interest on that then?’ Fuck all per cent. ‘Gosh, that’s a good rate.’ That’s because they can be written down as tax liabilities. ‘That sounds great. And you say this is totally legal? Only I’m sure any reasonable person, which of course I am not, would consider that to be a very clandestine and convoluted way to do something totally legal.’ It should be illegal really. It’s probably a very irresponsible thing to do, but no one will ever know. ‘Great! Where do I sign?’ Sign? I’m sorry Mr Carr, I’m afraid I’ll need more than a signature. I’ll need a soul. ‘But I don’t have one, clearly. Case in point, I’ve just agreed to join your tax avoidance scheme!’ That’s where our soul exemption scheme comes in handy. ‘Soul exemption scheme?’ Yes, in order to avoid paying with your soul, which of course in your case is impossible anyway, you can pay with the souls of all the suffering children in the land. ‘How do you expect me to do that?’ Go on Twitter and ask them to donate all their tiny little souls. ‘That sounds like it requires no sacrifice or compassion on my part whatsoever.’ Yes, one might even say that it’s morally repugnant. Are you still sure you want to pay less tax? ‘Hell yes.’

There’s an advert for some wine that is rubbish and a gaping example of the awfulness of the endless aspirational advertising the TV vomits at us. A review: http://tumblr.com/ZjhGTyDlPL6t

You would think, having not written anything on this for many months, and it appearing as if it has become an annually updated blog, like the minutes of the AGM of everything I’ve not been doing, that I would have loads to say. People say that don’t they? When they bump into an old friend and they say ‘OH MY GOD I’VE GOT SO MUCH TO TELL YOU WHERE DO I START?!’ This blog entry is the opposite of that, both in that I have nothing to tell you and I’m not even talking to anyone. I’m essentially just telling myself I have nothing to say. So, please, continue reading.

This blog is called ‘Talking at strangers; typing at you’. The strangers I most talk to at the moment are largely familiar faces, people who keep coming back to my little gig above the Red Deer in Sheffield every month. I know their names and everything (I don’t really care what their names are, it’s just an MCing trick I’ve picked up to give that impression). I have not been gigging much these last months, or even this last year, because of reasons. It’s not that I couldn’t have if I’d really tried hard, but if I gig I want to do so with some real regularity (like this blog and pooing), so I’ve been learning to drive to make that hopefully slightly easier. In the course of learning to drive I’ve nearly run over a fox and a husky. Not at the same time, that would have been like hit-and-running through a distinctly average Disney animation.

I also switched my driving lessons from 9am to mid-afternoon. I am not a morning person. I hope they don’t get rid of human rights legislation because I’m sure I could find a lawyer to argue that it’s a violation of my human rights to not allow me to ‘come round a bit’ in a morning. If I were to drive to work then I could be putting myself and others at risk. You might say ‘get up earlier, give yourself time to come round’ but you’d be underestimating the highly principled nature of my body clock, which campaigns daily for the sort of working hours legislation I sincerely hope we prove ourselves evolved enough to introduce this century by being the change it wants to see in the world: aggressively sleepy until 10am. If you want 9am me on the road, fine, but bushy-tailed canines will pay the price for society’s systemic victimisation of evening chronotypes.

How many foskies (or comedy audiences, for that matter) have to die before I can dance to my own circadian rhythm? Morning people are the oppressors of a post-racial/patriarchal/classist/heterosexist/cisgenderist/ableist/whatever-means-by-which-I’m-oppressing-people-I’m-hitherto-insensitive-to future. Obviously we will never overthrow our worm-catching overlords because snooze button. They’ll just get to the rally before us and tidy all our placards up. Speaking of which, any movement for radical political change that makes its number one priority cleaning up after itself is surely doomed to failure?

‘WHAT DO WE WANT? A COMPLETE DEPARTURE FROM THE ECONOMIC AND PSEUDO-DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURES THAT GOVERN GLOBAL SOCIETY? WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!’
‘Can you just clean up a bit first?’
‘YES, RIGHT AWAY!’

It’s like the power elite got a global revolutionary movement to tidy its room. That’s probably potential material but I’ll leave it here anyway until I check no one else thought of it and reconcile it with my bleeding leftist heart and because no one reads this. And I know this to be true because I have site stats, obviously.

I have a gig list on this site that I keep for my own reference and though it’s not displayed it does come up in search results. So I get a few visitors a day from people googling gigs I died at once a year ago. I did well at gigs too and it’s not that I’m trying to self-deprecate to appear charming but just because I’d feel like an utter cock otherwise. But having a gig list on a website is a bad idea for that reason. Every time you check your stats to find someone has googled a gig or venue where you died or did well, you recall the death and think ‘I did rubbish that night’ but you take no pride nor derive any residual joy from doing well; you just think ‘I did a gig there’. And I suppose that’s why a lot of comics keep doing it. The death lives on but feeling truly alive is lost to that moment.

And if you think that’s profound then you should read more and I should think up more shitty jokes to give me something to live for. This blog post is going to end now because it was only written in the hope that more blog posts will follow in greater frequency and quality, and I guess there’s currently no way of knowing if it’s been successful. I’ll just have to cross my fingers and keep clicking refresh.

I was unemployed for a quite a while. I could provide the backstory to all that, but it would be a several thousand word tangent on top of the several hundred word tangent that is to follow. Upon eventually getting a low paid but quite rewarding job, doing the training I needed to before I could start, and waiting a couple of months for my first pay day, I treated myself to a ticket to see Doug Stanhope in Manchester. I also got tickets for two people I knew wanted to see him, my gigging companions Sarah and Fern.

I’m not certain, but I think I am one of those people who first came across Stanhope on Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe. Even if I did know of him before that, it wasn’t until then that I really got into his work. I watched every Stanhope video I could find on YouTube and eventually finished listening to all his recordings a year or so ago. I’ve repeatedly listened to them since.

I remember listening to the ACID Bootleg whilst pushing Green Party leaflets through letterboxes before the election. Though the aim was to get a couple of local councillors elected, which we did, it’s quite disheartening doing something so ostensibly futile and frequently derided. Something you know the inbred bourgeois, stucunt inhabitants of the area were looking upon with dismissive disdain while smugly putting Lib Dem stickers in their windows. The front doors in the area were all at the top of steep flights of stone steps, allowing tenants to look down on anyone who climbed up from the street below. One door was ajar and down the hallway a group of them sat around the kitchen table. I habitually slipped the leaflet under the stiffly sprung letterbox, trying to avoid trapping my fingertips, and they looked down at me and shouted to ask what it was. I said it was a Green Party leaflet, possibly the most inoffensive, if unappealing, material you could have posted through your door. Their voices cranked up a notch and yelled at me in self-assured, southern, middle class tones. ‘No! Not interested!’ I left it hanging there anyway, the Stanhope in my ears encouraging a minuscule act of ‘fuck you’. The self-satisfied certitude required to not even expose yourself to alternative views betrays the unthinking of a narrow, miserly mind. I wonder if they agree with Nick now. Twats. After posting another green slip of paper and stepping away from another door, someone even threw something at me from an upstairs window. I didn’t see what it was but it was small and heavy, a coin maybe, and it hit me on the head. I was pissed off but couldn’t stop myself from laughing at Stanhope’s ‘I fucked a midget once’ bit. Perhaps it was actually my indiscreet laughter that prompted the pelt. Or maybe a magpie dropped it.

The point is that I am fan of Stanhope’s comedy. All of it in all its mucky glory. I was really looking forward to seeing him live for the first time. Sarah needs little provocation to mention that she once went to see Bill Hicks and got to meet him. Stanhope is too easily compared to him, but they share a brilliance for calling bullshit. I like all kinds of stand-up but I’m most excited by those comedians who speak truth. Not the mundane truths of observational comedy, but the deeper truths. Stanhope is one of the best comedians calling bullshit and speaking truth today. And his misanthropic filth is exquisite too. I was really looking forward to seeing him live.

Sarah was driving. She was late. She usually is. We went to pick Fern up, who took a few minutes to come out to the car. We sped across Snake Pass because Sarah knows every bend, but we hit traffic in Manchester. The time on the ticket was 7.30pm and we arrived shortly after 8pm, but thankfully it hadn’t started yet. We sat down but I needed to pee and thought it would be best to do that before the show started. Fern needed to pee too. She also thought it would be best to pee before the show started. It’s generally better to pee before the show starts, I think. This doesn’t just apply to comedy shows, it applies to most things you have to sit through for an extended period of time. Things that require your attention and can’t be halted for your bladder or other distractions. You can pause live television now, but not a stand-up comedian in mid-flow. The technology to pause flesh and blood performers hasn’t been invented yet. Best to empty your bladder beforehand.

This is partly so you don’t miss anything. If you’ve paid £20 for a ticket, you must want to see the show. And then there’s other people. In a theatre venue, with an actual living, breathing human being up there talking directly to the audience, it’s also a decent thing to consider the enjoyment of the other people there, who have also spent £20, presumably because they too wanted to see the show. So rather than making people stand to let you out, blocking the view and distracting others with the sound of the doors closing and footsteps stomping on a creaky floor, you should piss before it starts.

In fairness, bladders don’t always work that way. Sometimes you just don’t need to pee until after the show has started. In the space of an hour and a half, it’s very possible you’ll genuinely need to pee, and it’s unreasonable that you should have to sit in discomfort. So I’m not saying you shouldn’t go and pee during the show if you must. But if you spent the last few hours drinking pints, you should endure a little discomfort. It’s your fault. You know your own bladder, and you made that decision whilst sober. And I know it’s hardly like Stanhope’s stagecraft encourages sobriety. Drinking on stage is a motif of his. But if you’re that intent on being intoxicated to watch the show, there are alternatives that will result in you needing to piss less. They’re worth considering. It’s your money. It’s my money. There’s 90 minutes of Stanhope. You and everyone else there paid for them. You’re not going to get any of those minutes back once he’s left our shitty little island. You can drink and piss your pay away some other time. For his part, Doug Stanhope once suggested that you do it at work. For my part I suggest I cut your cock off and catheterise your bleeding dick stump with a garden hose fed down your throat.

So I went for a pee before the show. In the gents there was one urinal and one toilet cubicle. There were a couple of blokes waiting. One guy let another guy go ahead of him and use the toilet. Then the urinal became available and I asked him if he wanted it, seeing it was his turn, but he said no. He indicated his belly and said he had digestive issues or something along those lines. He seemed like an affable bloke, but he looked hazily uncomfortable and had a sweaty, slovenly sheen to him. He wasn’t winning. I surmised that he’d spent the last 24 hours or more drinking and eating crap and was suffering the consequences. As I was peeing the cubicle was vacated and he went in. The sound of his tempestuously flatulent shitting spree commenced instantaneously, probably before his pinguid buttocks touched the seat.

The show hadn’t started by the time Fern and I took our seats either side of Sarah, but they announced it was going to within a couple of minutes. A lot of seats immediately either side and in front of us were still empty, and not one person was seated in the row behind. It was odd considering the rest of the room was more or less full, and I was sure all the seats around us were taken when I ordered the tickets. At around 8.15pm the lights were dimmed and Doug Stanhope walked on stage. We wondered if he’d have a support act, as we’d read on his blog that he likes to try and find local acts, specifically the more eccentric ones, to open for him in the States. We mused on who amongst our comedy peers would meet that description, but it wasn’t to be.

A bottle of Corona in hand and another on the table, Stanhope began his show. I can’t recall exactly how he started, but it included having a pop at Ticketmaster, something the entire audience were behind, and having a pop at Manchester, which the audience also seemed to be behind. This was the final show of four, and if his Facebook status updates of the last few days were anything to go by, his sentiments were pretty heartfelt. Someone shouted out ‘you haven’t been to Liverpool’ and he retorted with ‘Oh, I have. Once,’ and recounted the tale as to why he’s never returned.

Between this paragraph and the last paragraph, several months have passed. I really wish I’d carried on writing it much sooner, because my memory is now a little faded, so the rest of this lacks a little detail, but I thought it’d be a shame not to finish it off seeing as I really would like to update this more often than annually.

Stanhope warmed into the gig like most comics doing an extended show. I remember particularly a bit he did wherein he discussed the royal wedding and what a perfect opportunity it would be to gun down the royal family, physically emulating their bodies being perforated by a shower of bullets. It was much enjoyed by the audience. He also read a letter from someone who claimed to be an associate producer for Have I Got News For You, asking for complimentary tickets to his shows in London. He had his response recorded and put on YouTube, if you want to see what he had to say about that.

15 or 20 minutes had passed, and I was enjoying the show a lot. It was a long enough amount of time for me to think the rightful occupants of the empty seats might not arrive at all. Perhaps they had all died in a horrible accident on the motorway. Perhaps they had been gunned down in the fashion Stanhope had so brilliantly illustrated. Unfortunately not. The door creaked open and several people in their early 20s made a meal of walking up the steps and finding their seats. There were so many seats free they seemed spoilt for choice as to where they should sit. A couple sat across from us, a few in front of us, and the rest sat behind us. Stanhope turned to look in their direction briefly during this but he carried on and I continued watching and listening.

A couple of minutes passed and the door opened again. It was a few more occupants of the empty seats, who, it was obvious, were all the same party. They too clomped up the steps and found their way to our row, and we stood to let them pass. They filled the whole row bar the seat next to me. Stanhope’s attention was again briefly drawn to them due to the noise their door opening and step climbing was making, but he carried on. I was having difficulty concentrating on him though, not least because the row behind me were whispering at some volume and length and a young woman in the row in front of us was just plain talking at the normal speaking volume you tend use in a wind tunnel. When they did stop doing that, all I could hear was the clicking of the phone of the lad behind me, who, having turned up late, thought now was the time to catch up on his correspondence.

A minute later, the door creaked open again and the missing members of the twat brigade were waved at by some of those already seated. One of them took the spare seat next to me, and one sat somewhere up and across from us. I hoped that was all of them, and it was. And now everyone was seated, they could begin their game of musical chairs. Or one of them could, at least. Within 5 or 10 minutes one of the latecomers must have felt lonely and vacated his seat, walking down the steps (have I mentioned they were noisy steps?) and towards the exit and stopped before it. He leaned on a railing right in front of the first row of our section and began talking to his friends a couple of rows back in that loud whisper/Dom Jolly telephone voice they all seemed to talk in. He must have been obstructing the view of at least one person, and making it impossible for everyone in the vicinity to watch Stanhope.

His back and forth seemed to go on forever, until someone in the row behind us waved and whisper-shouted to him to come and sit with them, perhaps in a genuine attempt to end his interruption. He stomped up the stairs and clambered over friends’ knees and plonked himself down. I thought they might finally want to start watching the comedian they had paid to come and see, but of course they just carried on intermittently vomiting noise at each other. It also happened that two men directly in front of us, though not members of the twat brigade, started talking to each other a bit. Fern and Sarah vented their irritation at them and simultaneously shushed them (one or both of them may have used the more colloquial ‘shut the fuck up!’ synonym for ‘shush’).

Shortly thereafter Stanhope made the most tentative reference to race during a set-up, at which point the musical chairer behind us shouted ‘THAT’S RACIST!’, much to his own amusement. Taking the cue from Fern and Sarah, I turned around and told him to ‘shut the fuck up!’ too. Stanhope, having overlooked all the commotion they’d caused up to this point, retorted with an exquisite put-down, one probably honed in response to similar heckles by other idiots over the years. But this idiot was a multitasker, simultaneously managing idiocy and twattishness with no apparent impingement on the quality of his cuntery whatsoever. Within a minute or so he shouted ‘THAT’S RACIST!’ again. This time his friends shushed him, suggesting he’d actually managed to make even them feel self-conscious, and Stanhope carried on, probably not wishing to humour him any further.

For a short while after that the twat brigade just about managed to sit and watch the show. A short while. But then everyone in the theatre decided they needed a piss. It was like a piss relay. As soon as someone returned from the toilet, someone else would get up. I can’t emphasise enough how noisy the steps and flooring were. Every footstep boomed and its wake was followed by the creaking of floorboards that sounded like they were haunted by the ghosts of baritone mice. Bloke after bloke after bloke got up, fee-fi-fo-fummed down the steps, let the door slam shut behind them, and repeated the process on the way back. If the incessant piss-tag wasn’t enough, one bloke topped it by literally falling flat on his face before he even reached the doors. I could not believe it. ‘Are you kidding me with this shit?’ I thought. I even turned my head to the twat brigade member sat to my left, as if even he might agree that it was getting ridiculous now. HE WAS ASLEEP.

Apparently, 50% of the audience were so drunk and/or twatty that they were either on their way to or back from the toilet at any given moment, heckling infuriating nonsense for their own amusement, tweeting about watching a comedian they were paying absolutely no attention to, having a REALLY INTERESTING conversation, or simply getting an early night without any of the bother of going home and getting into bed.

The end of the gig was a relief. I had enjoyed every moment of the show I could concentrate on but I was angry, and not because Stanhope had riled me up in a misanthropic rage, but because his audience had. We descended the steps and queued along the aisle towards the door. Sat there on the first row was the man I’d seen and heard in the toilet, and now I could smell him too. He had an oddly content if barely cognisant expression on his face and he stank of shit, yet he was still by far one of the least noxious people there.

I’m pretty dull, as far as one might commonly measure such a thing. I spent most of my early to mid 20s getting pissed with variously abominable consequences. I dread to think what I’d have been like if I’d done drugs. Now my hangovers come with a cold and generally leave me unfit to do anything apart from watch TV and eat for a period of 24 hours. It’s lucky that I really like TV and eating, but not so much that I’m inclined to impose a sick day from life (as uneventful as mine is) upon myself with any great frequency. It’s pathetically typical that I will limit myself to a couple of pints before going home to settle into bed with a hot chocolate and Newsnight. On Thursdays I like to be home in time for This Week, even though a substantial part of me hates that show really hard. As I sit down to edit and continue writing this very post, several weeks after writing the previous sentence, This Week is pleasantly irritating me in the background. I’m also just getting over a day long cold induced by two pints and a bottle of lager.

My regular gigging companion on the other hand is an accomplished and largely unfazed piss artist. So when I’m home on a Friday night, doing any number of dull, bookish or geeky things (assuming I’ve already watched Coronation Street which is not dull but bloody brilliant) Sarah will usually be drunk already, like so many people with one of those social lives that everyone informs the internet of, vaguely and often sans context. If we share snippets of our lives for everyone to see, with too little information to paint a full picture but just enough to arouse curiosity, then we might look forward to being asked for further details. Always leave them wanting more. A philosophy I militate against in the writing of this blog. I seldom post but when I do it’s more than enough.

(As an aside, I’ve taken to writing my own private gig diary. Because this clearly isn’t going to work. When I have something interesting to say I’ll post something here.)

On those occasions on which she’s not found anyone else to be drunk with, she has sometimes called me as, I can only assume, a last resort. It takes considerable effort on my part to recommit myself to going out when I’d rather just not move at all, so I must have been feeling modestly peppy on the particular Friday night in question. She was in a traditional, real ale pub on the site of the now redeveloped industrial quarter just outside the city centre. I’d never actually been before but I managed to find it after a little bit of wandering. It was really busy at the bar so I looked for Sarah before I got myself a pint and found her sat at bench in the beer garden with a bloke she was chatting to. I surmised that he was someone she’d struck up a conversation with as opposed to someone she knew. He was slightly short and slightly stocky and in his 40s. It’s surprising how many presumptions you attach to someone upon first meeting them, but as well as his accent telling me he was of working class stock I also thought he probably worked in a trade. He reminded me of most of the men I knew growing up. Maybe he was a gas fitter, or an electrician perhaps.

I can’t remember what they were talking about at that stage, but it wasn’t anything I felt like I could join in with after brief introductions. I’m pretty rubbish at small talk. I really don’t have much to say about most things, besides a few specific interests I can get geeky about, my brain tents to kick into gear when discussing big pretentious ideas. I sat and listened for a couple of minutes, giving the bar time to quiet down, when another bloke sat down opposite me. He was a big guy, tall and broad with a proud gut and thickset features. Aside from a completely shaven head, he sort of looked like Big Daddy. The British wrestler, Shirley Crabtree, that is, not any of the other Big Daddies.

We greeted each other as two people who didn’t really have anything to say about what what our friends were saying to each other and I went and got my pint. When I came back the conversation had moved on to dog ownership. Apart from family pets, I’ve never owned a dog, and from his continued silence I got the impression that Big Daddy hadn’t either. I shouldn’t call him Big Daddy really. I’ll call him Shirley instead. I’ll dub the other guy Mel.

Mel and Sarah were talking about dog owners who don’t know how to handle dogs. They mentioned with irritation those owners who preciously pick their tiny little dogs up when a bigger dog bounds across to them for a closer inspection. Typically the inspection consists of little more than a good anus sniffing, but sometimes it can escalate. Sometimes an anus sniffing will leave certain dogs unable to restrain themselves. Of course, this described me. Not the anus sniffing but the picking up of a tiny dog to shield them from the possible advances of a bigger dog. When the look on your dog’s face is the universally interpretable facial expression for ‘oooooooh shit’, I think it’s okay to save them. I’d feel negligent if I didn’t. The one time I didn’t do this the larger dog started sexually assaulting my tiny little dog. As when we put dogs down when their quality of life is so poor that letting them live would be cruel, yet don’t allow humans that same courtesy, there’s an similar double standard when it comes to sexual assault. Why should dogs be allowed to get away with it? I must note that prosecution levels are so low that most humans get away with it too. But we don’t expect that they should. Apparently when you have a small dog you’re supposed to just let it happen. You’re supposed to watch. And then what? Take your little dog home and leave it whimpering next to a garden sprinkler until it feels clean again? How could you look it in the eye? And anyway, why would a really big dog want to bone a really little dog at all? It’s practically paedophilia. Sort of. All these dog owners walking their paedo-pooches, letting them loose to have their sordid way with our little furry babies. Though perhaps that’s prejudicial. Small dogs aren’t children, they’re adult dogs, just a smaller subspecies. Perhaps it’s like asking why a fully grown human would want to bone a homo floresiensis, the 3ft tall ‘hobbit’ hominid. If they were consenting adults warm for one another’s form, who would I be to judge? But with the dog situation it’s more like a homo sapiens running up to a hobbit and getting all Premiership footballer on it. So if you’re a dog owner and you have a problem with me preventing the sexual assault of my tiny dog by your big dog, then fuck you. Would you rather watch while your big dog tries to get its big dog penis inside my little dog’s tiny dog vagina? You sick fuck. Keep your rapist on a leash.

They talked about dog owning and dog walking for ages. It was the dullest thing ever and I was wishing I’d stayed at home. Gradually though, the conversation expanded to other topics. It turned out that both Mel and Shirley taught in a college. In a previous job Sarah had supplied equipment to schools, so there was some common ground there. I can talk about education, throw in a couple of opinions. Shirley got more involved in the conversation and I started to quite like him. He had a dry, cheeky sense of humour. They talked about some of their experience of teaching. They both taught more vocational topics, I can’t remember specifically what. Perhaps electronics or design technology. Shirley wasn’t fond of paperwork or box-ticking exercises. He liked to teach his own way, keep his lesson plans in his head and cultivate an affable rapport with his students. Sarah mentioned that we knew each other through doing comedy together, and comparisons were made between performing in front of those two different audiences.

Somehow they got on to a story about a cultural exchange of some kind. A group of foreign students visited the school for a short time and they explained how they both wanted to take them on a trip somewhere but only Mel got to go. Mel explained how much he enjoyed making the most of their visit and took them for a nice day out. Then they mentioned that they worked with a Chinese teacher for some time also. They described what he was like, how they took him under their wing. Mel went into more detail, doing impressions of his accent. Perhaps in an effort to counter any impression we might have got that he was being borderline racist in doing so, he emphasised how much he liked the Chinese teacher, and how he used to be in on the joke when they called him ‘teacher-san!’ and got him to say it back to him. Mr Miyagi was Japanese, sure, but why let that get in the way of ethnic hilarity.

I can’t remember the exact path the conversation took, but pre-emptive denials of racism inevitably led to a discussion about immigration. I was not surprised that Sarah, sustaining her negative levels of sobriety, would be agitated by the impression Mel was giving of himself. It may have been her who took the conversation in that direction, curious to see what lay behind Mel’s self-conscious but increasingly dubious attitude towards race. Mel was also inebriated more than Sheila and I, who were cautious to weigh in. We exchanged helpless glances now and then, knowing it was getting a bit dodgy. We both tried to offer light-hearted interjections here and there, Mel was expressing tabloid views about ‘too many immigrants coming in’. It was turning into a debate between the left and right wings of our little party. I tend to prefer gently diplomatic discourse with complete strangers. Sarah, as she will confess, tends to get angry when her political beliefs (and, you might argue, basic sense of human decency) are perturbed. It’s not that I was unperturbed or am apathetic. I felt both a desire to not stagger into an unpleasant confrontation, and subsequently a curiosity to understand.

The conversation wasn’t going away. Sarah was challenging his views and he was reasserting them. I briefly played devil’s advocate by admitting that I was of the opinion that immigration was poorly managed, increasing so rapidly after the opening up of EU borders that some public services in certain parts of the country were stretched beyond capacity for a time. But my own concerns about immigration are less about numbers and more about how immigrants are integrated into British society, and how we can better ensure social cohesion. Population is certainly a concern but if we can incentivize vast swathes of Daily Mail reading, Tory-voting middle England to emigrate to Australia or Spain (or any other country where they can export their way of life to expatriate enclaves, ensure their financial security, not have to learn another language or understand another culture) and replace them with people from all corners of the globe, then all the better. Mel’s concerns were motivated less by fear of that within than by fear of that without. That without white skin, you might say, though that would perhaps be inaccurate. Specifically, he was fearful of Muslims.

This is what we began to realise as he gradually became more frank about his views. To begin with he was relatively apprehensive. He thought he could state his position on immigration, namely stopping any more Muslims from coming into the country, without being too specific. But as I’ve stated, he was rather drunk, so over a matter of minutes he changed his position from saying that he didn’t vote BNP to saying he would vote BNP if there was a candidate in his constituency. Sarah and Mel had gone from bonding over their thoughts on dog ownership to tense disagreement, to the point where both were raising their voices. Not in outright anger, but in incredulity, frustration and defensiveness.

Even at this point there was still a sense that Mel was just a misguided right-wing tabloid reading tit who would reconsider his views if they were properly challenged. I thought that he might, if Sarah were to let him, feign open-mindedness for a less confrontational Friday night down the pub. I was sober though so my judgement was inversely compromised. The more Sarah, and then both Shirley and I, questioned his opinions the more extreme they seemed to become. Even though Shirley seemed a lovely chap, I had been unsure as to whether he was on the same page as his friend from work. But he would be as taken aback by Mel’s views as we were.

As it became clear that Mel held the same views on immigration as any proud BNP voter would, his defensiveness turned into a refusal to be shamed. Sarah put it to him that what he was saying was plain old racism. He denied that in a sense, but not by refuting the accusation. Instead he alluded to all the people he knew that held the same views as him. Again, he was modestly guarded at first. He said he had friends who went on marches. He didn’t go on them himself, but he knew those who did, was friends with them and told us there were lots of them. When he revealed that these friends were members of the EDL, Sarah, Shirley and I were a little speechless. It shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise given everything he’d been saying, but to realise we were having a drink with someone closely affiliated with, if not a member of that band of far-right, openly racist hooligans, was mildly stunning.

We looked to each other, not knowing what to say. Mel filled the silence. As he talked he stood up from the bench and walked around to the end of it. We looked up in bemusement as he loudly proclaimed how many of them there were. They were a silent majority, he said. We might not have thought there were many of them but there were. There were lots and lots of them. And they weren’t giving up and we had better believe that they weren’t going away. We would see how many when they voted at the election. It was almost as if he were delivering his own drunk, clumsy rendition of a speech he’d seen someone else make. “We’re going to take our country back, just you wait and see!” he declared. “Anyway, I must go for a wee.”

He went into the pub and we sat in perplexed silence for a moment until I said “well, this evening got a bit weird!” Sarah was in a state of genuine disbelief. Shirley was perplexed that his workmate was espousing such views. I wondered if Shirley was actually aware of Mel’s views to some extent, but simply didn’t care enough to challenge him on them. When you consider though that they both worked in a college, it’s unsurprising that Mel would want to keep his affiliation with racist groups to himself.

Now that Mel had all but admitted his membership of the EDL, I found that I wasn’t particularly angered or outraged by him. I found his views offensive, of course. Hateful, wrong and incredibly misguided. But this was racism filtered through propaganda. This was racism strained through a cause. A manipulative, spurious, illusory cause fabricated to satisfy the agendas of truly vile men. I found it hard to be angry with Mel because it was clear these ideas were not his own. He seemed more like a pitiable victim of brain washing to me. His inherent, pathetically childish, Jim Davidson-like fascination with racial stereotypes, in which he derived great delight from getting a Chinese man to call him ‘teacher-san’, served as an fine starting point. But the distortions of reality, which he presented to us to argue the case that Muslims were a morally bankrupt people out to destroy Western civilisation, were contrived in the imaginations of more devious men to be disseminated to unthinking dupes like Mel.

I wanted to try and understand the thought processes that allowed him to buy all the bullshit he’d been fed. It’s not just condescending to say he was a bit of a thicko, it’s too easy, just like it’s unhelpfully simplistic to conclude he was just a racist. But I struggle to find any more compelling explanation than a combination of the two: he was a bit of a racist and bit thick.

I remember reading that a study into BNP voters found that many were doing alright for themselves. The image conjured up is of the young male with a shaven head, marginalised by society, suffering intergenerational unemployment, unwanted in a post-industrial economy; this disenfranchisement providing fertile soil for sowing fears and growing hatred. But some research has found to the contrary that many are people with decent jobs and mortgages doing alright for themselves. Who exactly is coming over here and taking their jobs if they’re still affording new cars and holidays abroad? Perhaps it makes sense though. Those who feel they have more to lose may be easier to scare.

Mel seemed to fit this description. He didn’t seem that angry, or give any impression that he’d been hard done by in life and wanted to blame someone. So when he returned from his post-rant piss, I tried to direct at him questions that might elucidate me as to why he held the views he held. What was his problem with Muslims?

Sarah, however, seemed just as curious, only drunker and shoutier in expressing it. It might have been difficult to interrupt her forthright interrogatives but it was also just fun watching her rip into him. They were essentially just shouting at each other. It wasn’t aggressive, just alcoholically impassioned. She was attacking him on the general notion of his opinions. I wanted to hear him explain the specifics, and I would have an opportunity to do so when the shouting attracted the attention of a spectator. For much of the exchange a man on a bench near us, drinking alone, had been listening in. He started to join in and echoed sentiments generally supportive of Mel’s. Some of what was being discussed was the usual ‘coming over here taking our jobs’ stuff and our spectator wanted to tell his story of having worked in the steel industry and how those jobs weren’t there any more. I didn’t catch how this was the fault of Muslim immigrants. His contribution coaxed Sarah away to shout at him for a while. Shirley asked me if she’d be okay. I had a feeling that if the exchange were to escalate aggressively it wouldn’t be Sarah we’d have to worry about. ‘She’ll be reight,’ I said.

With her fight taken elsewhere, I asked Mel what his problem with Muslims was. He initially tried to convince me of their growth in number. Not being able to recall statistics or refute undoubtedly flawed forecasts of population growth, I thought it best not to engage him on this. What he had failed to account for is that, not being a racist myself, I didn’t care how many Muslims there were or was going to be in Britain. He seemed to be trying to argue his case to me as he would to someone who already thought Muslims=bad. Racists don’t do non-racists the courtesy of not being racist for the sake of argument, so I didn’t see why I should either. Thus my response was largely ‘so what?’

This threw him a little but he kept trying. He explained that there are ‘mosques everywhere’. So? They’re just places of worship, like churches. There are churches everywhere too. ‘Not reight big ones though’. I told him about a large evangelical mega-church down the road. ‘They’re not the same though, they don’t stick out.’ They’re not as pretty, I admitted. But they’re just buildings. There are massive gyms and huge call centres too, what’s all the worry about a building? ‘They’ll turn Britain into a religious state’, he told me. I reminded him that we were already the only Western democracy with theocracy at the heart of our parliamentary process. Bishops get to vote on the laws passed in this country by virtue of the fact they’re bishops. Didn’t he think it was better to worry about religious influence in government that was actually happening now than religious influence that might or might not happen one day? ‘But Muslims would make us live under sharia law’. There’s already a Jewish court that acts with the legal authority of the crown. They resolve matters between Jewish people who choose to have certain disputes mediated by a religious body. They have for years. Did he not want to stop that before worrying about sharia courts that don’t even have any legal legitimacy and don’t look like acquiring it any time soon?

It went on like this. Essentially it boiled down to him saying ‘MUSLIMS! BOOGA BOOGA!’ and me saying ‘eh’. While his arguments weren’t compelling me, I didn’t feel that I was persuading him to reconsider his views either. I might have undermined his arguments but it didn’t faze him. Rigorous logic was not the the source of his opinion. It was fear and hate with bogus explanations slapped on, as if a tin of alphabet spaghetti were poured on a pile of manure. Anyone who can read it must have shit for brains.

He kept trying defend his cause though, kept repeating the basic notion that Muslims will definitely take over in time to start chopping off our children’s hands with Qur’ans. Shirley shared my complete lack of concern for the Muslim peril, but Mel was convinced that we should definitely be scared because Britain was going to be an Islamofascist dictatorship within 20 years. You only had to do the sums. Mo’ Muslims, mo’ problems.

By this point Sarah and the heckling spectator were essentially shouting directly into each other’s faces. Sarah seemed to have had enough of the stupid man, but I think he had had more than enough of her because he left the pub. I didn’t really catch much of what he’d been saying to her, but something about his demeanour made me feel like Mel was a nicer bloke relatively speaking. His exit provided a brief intermission in the debate. Mel went to the toilet again and I sat in the heckler’s vacated seat and conferred with my drunken debate team-mate. We concluded that this was a bit of a weird night and that bloke she’d been arguing was just a dick.

We moved inside thereafter, with Mel and Sarah keen to continue where they left off. Shirley and I felt like referees, hovering about the ring, ready to step in and remind them that we wanted a nice clean fight and no low blows. The first such intervention was to stop them from ruining an unsuspecting couple’s evening when they plonked themselves down at their table. I found a free table and got Sarah and Mel to stand back up and follow me. The couple looked relieved and Shirley gave me an approving nod.

When we settled at the free table, at a safe distance from normal people having normal nights out with friends as opposed to arguments with racist strangers, mine and Shirley’s supervisory oversight began to wane. We told them to be nice but then we just let them get on with it. Shirley was a lovely and interesting bloke who seemed to have a joy for life. He had a passion for teaching but disdain for teaching to the test. He felt there was all too often a disconnect between the theoretic, bureaucratic demands on teachers and the reality of reaching and inspiring the young minds of real people in the classroom. As a young man himself he had gone to Ukraine to work, and he’d even written a book about his experiences. We had a fascinating conversation and warmed to each other.

Meanwhile things between Sarah and Mel continued to heat up in the other sense. Shirley interrupted them, suggesting they calm down. Sarah said they were getting along fine, gave Mel a hug to prove peaceful relations, and continued shouting at him. Mel had expressed disdain for Unite Against Fascism, saying they were the real problem. Sarah had friends who campaigned for UAF, and naturally took offence at this. Shirley suggested he and Sarah go for a smoke. I gave him an approving nod.

From things I’d heard said I wondered if Mel’s championing of Islamophobia was more to do with some sort of camaraderie he had with other people like him. He’d professed his atheism, but the football hooliganism from which the EDL was born has a religious nature to it. Football fans will often say football is their religion, and academics say there is truth to that assertion: the ritual; the garb; the chants for hymns; a spiritual belief in ascension despite all evidence to the contrary. If football is a religion, rife with sectarianism, then hooligans are its religious extremists and the EDL are Britain’s very own secular fanatics warning the end is nigh lest we banish the heathen hordes. They are Albion’s army on their mindless crusade; away game after away game minus the game. The absence of reason behind their hatred mirrors that of jihadists. It’s all the same irrational hate. Besides, I suppose, the hundreds of thousands of Muslims that have been killed by the British government’s foreign policy, which might be a reasonable reason for them to be angry. It’s certainly a reasonable reason for reasonable people to be angry.

But what could I say to Mel? He was slurring racially now, and perhaps he hurled racist slurs on his weekend jollies. I wasn’t going to change his mind, certainly not in the state it was in. I was a little tipsy by this point myself. I pressed him for better reasons. Not the United Kaliphate of Great Britain and Northern Ireland twenty years from now, what was it that British Muslims had actually done that could possibly warrant such sentiments? What was the problem? What was his beef with Muslims? I was bewildered when he said his problem was beef.

Specifically halal meat. Because it’s cruel to animals to slaughter them in the way halal requires. He couldn’t actually explain in detail what was cruel about it, he just knew it was crueller than the normal way. I didn’t know the specific method of slaughter at the time myself either. Apparently one swift cut to the neck through the veins and arteries is required so that the animal bleeds to death and as much blood as possible drains from the body. This is as opposed to the standard methods, the most typical of which is an electric shock to the head to render the animal instantly unconscious. Another is gassing them. Another is a captive bolt gun to the back of the head. Another is a bullet to the head. It’s difficult to say that the halal method isn’t a tiny bit crueller. The animal will have more time, perhaps a matter of seconds, perhaps up to two minutes, to experience the blood draining from its neck until it loses consciousness. It can’t be a pleasant experience, even if it does only last a few seconds. Incidentally the same requirement exists for kosher meat, but he didn’t mention that. Jews are so yesterday’s peril.

Still, I was thoroughly persuaded by this argument. It was at that moment when I agreed we should round up all the Jews and Muslims and put them all on a plane back to Israel and Islam.

Just kidding! Halol! I think there’s probably some middle ground between ensuring that animals on British shores are mass murdered nicely so we can feast guilt-free on meat that never knew what hit it, and demonizing billions of people for carrying out a ritualistic practice embedded in their culture for thousands of years. The kind of practice that we used to do for no good reason in particular until as recently as the 1930s.

I had set about trying to get answers out of Mel hoping I might understand his motivation as an Islamophobe and I found it hard to believe that any of the reasons he’d given were genuinely motivating factors for him. He sounded more like a conspiracy theorist than a hateful bigot. Somewhere deep down he wanted to believe and so was willing to be compelled by the uncompelling. Unlike a conspiracy theorist however his belief in bunkum legitimised something far more dangerous than trawling moon landing videos on YouTube. It was conspiracy in theory but racism in practice. Racism was the beginnings, racism was the ends, but propaganda was the means. To be racist he needed to believe he wasn’t being racist.

He’d expressed some frustration with the ‘three main political parties’, and said a vote for the BNP was a protest vote. For my part I tried to tell him his anger was misplaced and suggested he consider left-wing options if he just wanted to protest by ballot. But from the purely anecdotal example of this chance meeting alone I don’t know how much mileage there is in engaging in dialogue with politicised racists. Anyone convinced by such arguments isn’t going to have their mind changed even if those arguments are defeated. They want to be racists and any old excuse will do. Changing that is a matter of reaching into people’s hearts. Many take hate to their grave.

As we were discussing his voting intentions Mel received a phone call. His wife was picking him and Shirley up from the pub and she was calling to say she was waiting outside. She had pulled up not long after Sarah and Shirley had gone for a smoke. Sarah had been telling Shirley what she thought of Mel. So when Mel told his wife that he’d be out in a minute she told him in no uncertain terms to leave immediately because some woman outside the pub calling him a racist. Mel said ‘oh, yeah, I’m coming now.’ He wasn’t concerned that he’d been called a racist, but he was clearly alarmed that his wife wasn’t best pleased about it. She had shouted out of the car at Sarah: ‘that’s my husband you’re calling a racist twat!’

Mel and I shook hands and said our farewells. I told him again to reconsider his vote and he rushed outside to mitigate his bollocking. Sarah returned and informed me of being overheard by Mel’s other half and I described the look on his face and his hasty exit. For a racist twat he was an affable chap. That’s what troubles me still about our odd encounter.

I know, right? You didn’t have to wait six weeks for this one. What the flip? Well, if I don’t catch up a bit quicker then I’m going to leave myself with a backlog of pointless writing so overwhelming that I’ll be utterly disinclined to embark on any of it whatsoever. In this entry I’ll be discussing a gig I did as well as a gig that I caught the end of on the way home. Which should involve less waffle. Well, not less waffle, where would the fun be in that? I mean less words. Concentrated waffle. As well as an attempt at relative brevity I’m not covering the following gig/s right now because the next comedy related happening, chronologically speaking, wasn’t a gig. And though it was a partly entertaining experience, it was also frighteningly unfunny and will be best dealt with on its own.

The gig was at a local pub in Tyldsley just outside Manchester. Sarah got us the gig and may or may not have nearly killed us on the way there by rolling cigarettes whilst driving. Memory fails me as to whether or not it happened on the way to this particular gig, but it’s statistically probable. Also doing this gig were Tony (who surprised me with his tallness after being sat behind me for two hours on the way to Newcastle that time) and Pat, another Leeds based act I’d come to know. Headlining was an act from New Zealand whose name I won’t mention as per my policy on that sort of thing.

James, who books and compères the gig, seemed like a very pleasant sort indeed. It’s just nice when you turn up at a venue and the person running it greets you with a welcoming smile and free drinks. I could handle the lack of a welcoming smile given the provision of free drinks. At least one, for pity’s sake. Acts have typically travelled some distance at their own expense and even if they die on their arses they’ve still given the audience something to gawp at for 10 minutes. It’s only fair the daft buggers are allowed to wet their whistles at not their expense. But it isn’t a given and though perfectly understandable in some circumstances (free gigs with a small audience and several open spots), it’s a tiny kick in the genitals in others. Like being hoofed in the crotch by a dik-dik. Piddling but not cool.

There was football on at the opposite end of the pub which might have caused mild distraction but fortunately nearly everyone was there for the comedy and it was a good audience. Being as the only thing they had in common was that they all lived in the area, there was a nice mix of people of all ages and inclinations. Still, with having not done brilliantly at the other local pub gig I’d done recently, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

I got talking to the headliner because Sarah, Tony and Pat, knowing each other well, had plenty of catching up to do. It was interesting to hear about his experience of getting into comedy, and particularly how different the NZ comedy scene was to the UK’s, most notably being dominated by improv rather than stand-up. He’d worked in the US and Canada also, so I was probably irritatingly keen to listen to someone with his experience. As an open spot I’d been advised to watch and learn from professional acts rather than just splashing about in the shallow end along with the all the other open spots. We were leaving early to catch the end of a pro-night for that reason.

My gig went alright. Better than the previous three and with some constructive criticism to take on board. James suggested I edit one of my jokes so I did and have kept it that way ever since. They were another audience who wanted to feel involved, and join in a little bit along the way. I wasn’t great at accommodating them but I did meet the headliner again the following week and he said the same about them. Once he realised they wanted a bit of back-and-forth he was able to supply them with that alongside his material.

Clearly they overlap but compèring is, to me, a skill quite distinct from those of writing material and saying it in such a way as to make people laugh. Watching new acts compère for the first time is regularly and unsurprisingly painful to watch. I’m in no rush to inflict that on myself just yet, but doing so has obvious long-term benefits, namely developing a knack for establishing a rapport with audiences, sussing them out and tailoring your delivery and material to them. Being able to deploy all these skills seamlessly is a mark of the adept. Put less pretentiously, it’s far harder than they make it look.*

Tony and Pat, having gone on before us, had already set off to catch the end of the gig at XS Malarkey at Remedy in Fallowfield. After Sarah and I did our spots we caught them up and watched the last 20 minutes of the headline act. Walking into XS Malarkey for the first time, particularly after coming from an (albeit pleasant) local pub gig, was like being a kid walking into a massive toy shop for the first time. It’s a veritable comedy cathedral. The headliner concluded on the guitar with a song the audience could sing along to, adding to the vague sense of communal comedy worship.

Though we arrived too late to see his act, a comedian I knew of from his podcast was present and I decided to tell him I was a listener. He was disappointed I was myself an act (though very new), as he was keen to extend the listenership to the general comedy-going public as opposed to other comedians. We chatted briefly about how he’d progressed in comedy and how that compared to his friend and podcast co-host. One started out being very conscious of the sensitivities of audiences and concerns of promoters, the other began with a determination to say whatever he wanted to say. Over the years they each moved more towards an appreciation of both approaches.

A woman came over to speak to him, specifically to tell him she didn’t get one of his jokes. She seemed a bit odd. I’m not sure she even remarked on enjoying his set before zeroing in on one joke she didn’t get. He was bemused that she didn’t get the joke and of course turned to me for a second opinion. He repeated it, but having not actually seen his set and hearing it retold without any of the context, timing or emphasis, I didn’t really get it. Put on the spot by a comedian I was quite excited to meet, I found myself doing one of those polite fake laughs we often do without thinking. I hated myself in that instant. Having done the fake laugh I either had to commit to the lie and tell him I got it, hoping then that he didn’t ask me to explain it, or I had to tell the truth. So it went like this:

Him: [Joke]
Me: Hehe!
Him: Do you get it?
Me: No.

I’ll think twice before approaching professional comedians I like again. I’m sure to make myself look a dick. I explained that I hadn’t seen it the first time round. He realised he was talking to two idiots and made no plans to drop the joke from his act. The conversation moved to other topics such as his cycling back to his hotel, probably because we’d made him keen to get out of there. The slightly odd woman seemed to think it would be unsafe. He went to the toilet and left me standing there with the odd woman talking at me.

She was originally from Devon and told me she was afraid to take her car as far afield as Wakefield, for instance. She said people didn’t understand her in the North. She did have a pretty unusual way of speaking but I don’t think it had anything to do with her being from Devon. I think it had more to do with the oddness factor. I asked why she thought a 20 minute bike ride up the road would be unsafe and she informed me that some of the surrounding area was populated by ethnic minorities. Obviously she expected me to make the inference that a white man on a bike was asking for a racially motivated bike-jacking. I told her I thought he would be alright, that I found it hard to imagine a group of non-white youths shouting ‘WHITEY ON A BIKE’ and pursuing him on foot. I made my excuses and took my leave of her.

Sarah and I chatted a bit more with the aforementioned comedian on the way out, commenting on the odd woman’s dubious concern for his safety. A bloke in uniform combats happened to walk by us and Sarah joked that he should ask for a military escort. Suffice it to say, I’m pretty sure he got back to his hotel that night without any harm coming to him or his bike.

As vaguely peculiar as the brief meeting with the odd lady was, it was nothing compared to one I’d have a few days later. Epically shocking by comparison, I’ll attempt to do it justice in the next instalment.

*Disclaimer to all of this rambling in which I’ve pretended I know what I’m talking about: there is no one way to do comedy, be good at it, or progress in the field.

Perhaps it’s because the next three gigs were pretty mediocre affairs (in terms of my performance) that I’ve put off writing this one for a while. Not that frequency is something I can otherwise make a claim to, but even so. I had three gigs on consecutive nights, travelling over 300 miles in 56 hours to not make people laugh very successfully. Awesome.

At this point I had done ten gigs. Ten gigs and I’ve already managed to amass several thousand self-indulgent words about it. I know I already broached this topic but fuck me, the internet is an endless abyss of navel-gazing, it really is. I may as well poke around for fluff while I’m here. This is the cutting edge of the species right here. This is what we’ve evolved to do. Provide a narrative for our inconsequential lives for everyone in the world to not read.

So, gig number eleven was back at the Frog and Bucket gong show in Preston. Me and Sarah were both doing it so we drove across and I was pleased to be able to stay for the clap-off rather than leaving early to catch the train home. If I survived my 5 minutes without audience dismissal, of course. You can see where I’m going with this.

Not that I presumed I would go through to the clap-off. It’s a gong show, shit can go wrong, cards can go up. Shit can go right and cars can go up, but on this occasion I only had myself to blame. I started off okay, and everything seemed to be fine, but within a minute I drew a complete blank. I forgot my lines. I had, by this point, done the material ten times, and I’d rehearsed beforehand. I knew it perfectly well, I just had a case of cerebral flatulence. My brain had decided to blow raspberries at me rather than supplying the words I desperately wanted to say. Or even the thing I wanted to talk about. Or just the respect we all deserve from our brain for carrying them about everywhere.

This was the first time I’d really forgot my lines. Occasionally it takes an extra second or two to go from one point to the next, but I wasn’t used to drawing a complete blank. Rather than trying to take a second to compose myself, perhaps by having a sip of my drink or taking a pregnant pause, I just furrowed my brow and started swearing. ‘Fuck! I’ve forgot my lines! Shit!’. This actually turned out not to be the worst idea because it was my honest reaction. I was sharing my fuck-up with the audience quite animatedly. It would have been worse to panic inwardly, with them watching me die a quiet, painful death and leaving them with no choice but to euthanise me. But cursing myself and overtly racking my brain at least kept their attention and allowed me to maintain my stage presence.

It also provided them with the opportunity to empathise supportively with my plight, as opposed to pitying me for my patheticness. One woman at the front suggested I ‘just pick on someone’. There was little chance I’d be able to think of something witty to say off the top of my head when I couldn’t even remember the witty things I’d prepared to say. And I don’t really like the idea of picking on people. I’m not a massive fan of being picked on as an audience member so it’s not something I’m eager to inflict on others, at least until I have the tact and ability to do it well. I told her I wasn’t going to pick on someone because I was too nice.

Of course the ‘picking on people’ that the best stand-ups do is good natured and just for laughs, and a quick wit or a surprising response can make for some of the biggest laughs of a gig. But I’ve seen more inexperienced acts redirect their own on-stage failure into blame and hostility towards the audience and it’s never pleasant to see. Being honest and good natured about my failure seemed to win their support and they spontaneously offered me an encouraging round of applause. I managed to recall my lines all thanks to them being such a lovely crowd.

Then, within seconds of returning to my material, the cunts carded me off! They didn’t even let me get to the the next punch line, the bastards! ‘Come on Richard! We’re behind you! You can do it! That’s it! Now get off.’

They were simply toying with me, like making a dog roll over, stand on its hind legs and hold out its paw only to then stuff the Jaffa Cake in your fat fucking gob. You don’t even like Jaffa Cakes; you’re suspicious of soft biscuits. Which is what they are. They’re not cakes. Jaffa Cakes are only cakes like koala bears are bears. If you can dunk it in your tea then it’s a biscuit. So why is it soft? Has it been pre-dunked by someone else in their tea and left to dry in the sun? Despite the multitude of reasons to let your dog eat the Jaffa Cake, you make it watch, its mouth watering with each bite as you do the full-moon/half-moon/total eclipse trick. You only do this because you know your stupid dog couldn’t possibly understand the phases of lunar illumination despite the popular mythology associated with its lupine cousins. You do it for the same reason tyrants commit genocide and Piers Morgan judges Britain’s Got Talent: to hide your own festering inferiority. You make me sick. Shame on you.

I didn’t mean that, obviously. Who doesn’t like Jaffa Cakes?

So that was my rubbish gig in Preston. I thought I was going to pull it back after stumbling, but no. They built me up to knock me down, making it two Preston gongs in a row in which I’d failed to Beat the Frog. I’d have to return at some point and attempt to redeem myself. I was pleased that I had another gig the next night; hopefully I would be able to counter failure with success, or at least remember my lines. The following night we drove all the way to Cradley Heath near Birmingham for a pub gig.

It was a nice local with a warm atmosphere and an eccentrically charismatic landlord. I was particularly looking forward to the provision of chips and bread at some point during the course of the evening. As it transpired I made the schoolboy error of getting the drinks in before first securing my chips. Sarah did her best to preserve what was left for me bless her but my butty was a cold and crunchy affair. They’ll have to form an orderly queue behind me next time because that was some disappointing shit. It was almost as bad as the time a mate fetched me some chips and I SPECIFICALLY asked for CURRY SAUCE but he came back with chips and CHILLI SAUCE. I was fucking livid. I’m not just saying that for hyperbole. I only sort of forgave him after he got me on the guest list for a Bloc Party gig. Bring me anything besides a generous serving of curry sauce on my chips and I’m likely to harbour a deep-seated resentment against you for the remainder of your living days. And long after your death. I think the only time I’ve ever raised my voice to my girlfriend was when I suggested she get some curry sauce with her chips — advice she declined to heed — and later proceeded to DIP HER FUCKING CHIPS IN MY CURRY SAUCE! I’m annoyed just thinking about it. I’m not an only child or anything; this is purely a curry sauce related selfishness. Fuck knows what incident in my childhood might have triggered my sensitivity around this. It’s probably best not to speculate.

So. The gig. The first thing to note about this one was the presence of a stand-up virgin. A young lad from Birmingham doing his first gig. It’s a decent venue for newbies because there’s usually a decent and friendly crowd who will be pleasant and supportive to the acts. This particular chap had, not unusually, brought along a group of mates for moral support. This was good because it boosted numbers and added a bit of youth to an otherwise middle-aged to elderly audience (I’ll come back to this).

I reckon it’s quite easy to look like a bit of a dick on your first gig. Some degree of self-belief verging on arrogance must be present to even try stand-up. And though you’re incredibly nervous, you’re also incredibly fired up. This combination generates a sort of swagger, but a swagger that everyone else can see has developed around the fact that you’re wetting yourself and have adopted the gait to mitigate the pissy chafing. Besides being a bit dickish, things new acts do when they bring their friends include delivering their material to their friends, referring to things that are in-jokes between their friends, and leaving early with all their friends. This particular lad was guilty of all of the above.

So it was a little quieter in the middle section and, like the other acts that night, I was a tiny bit distracted by the fact that there were two elderly ladies in the audience, sat slap bang in the middle of my line of sight. They weren’t regular attendees of the comedy. They weren’t even regulars at the pub, or hadn’t been for decades. It used to be their local many years previous and they had returned for a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Only to be confronted by a series of foul-mouthed clowns.

Of course, they’d no doubt heard it all before. Who knows what they got up to back in the day? Perhaps they’d make me blush if let loose on a mic. Just because they happen to be elderly and female didn’t mean to say that they were prudish. And they showed no signs of offence at any point as far as I recall. But they were sat there all wrinkly and attentive and when you see an old lady you just think of your gran. And I would never have emulated the masturbating Christ in front of my gran. Not even the gran I watched Reservoir Dogs with that time.

At one point during another act one leaned in to explain a punch line to the other because she was evidently hard of hearing. Not that I hold that against her. I’m hard of hearing in one ear myself. It makes half of the conversations I have in public houses a bit of an abortion, what with the ambient noise and loud music. People who know me get used to talking into my good ear. So I have the aural capacity of an old lady, which is something I’m only ever likely to say in written form. Assuming the potential for denture removal, an old lady’s oral capacity is sure to exceed mine by a small but significant degree.

I’m not sure I did anything wrong specifically, but my performance must have been lacking in some sense or other as I got a middling response from the audience. During the second interval the landlord took to the stage as a manic Bruce Forsyth to host an insane version of play your cards right. He stormed it. It was surreal and brilliant easily usurped the chip butty as the highlight of the night.

Writing up three gigs in one go is too wordy so I’ll trim it down next time. I might also experiment with taking a different approach and making them less journal-like. It’s not only self-indulgent but fucking tedious too. The next entry will cover a gig and a non-gig; a trip to the pub with Sarah during which we got talking to a couple of interesting characters.

Unfortunately I haven’t even covered the third gig in this batch so, in conclusion: we went to a regular gig in Newcastle which had a decent but slightly odd audience. It was one of the first rooms I’d done where the audience was seated only at the front of the room, not the rear. The stage lighting meant that I could only really see darkness and I made the mistake of talking over their heads throughout. I may also have talked over the heads of a group of young chavs, which were the odd thing about the audience. They weren’t typical attendees of the night, they’d just walked in on a whim.

I feel somewhat uneasy using that word. I’m not keen on the classist overtones of ‘chav’, or ‘charv’, which is what my girlfriend, being from the North East, would say. But they were thick and loud and annoying and intermittently unable or disinclined to resist the temptation to chat and play with their phones. I was also heckled just before the end of my set. Not by one of the chavs, and not a ‘You’re shit! Get off!’, just a mildly facetious contribution. It came immediately before a my final punch line and so couldn’t have been more inconveniently timed. My ponderous response to it engaged the audience a little too much at a moment when I only had that one bit left, so I clumsily regained the focus and delivered a deflated closing line. Rubbish.

It wasn’t the crowd though, not that night nor the previous. Something was lacking in my performance. I was still building confidence, learning to feel comfortable on stage, and having difficultly delivering my material with consistent zeal and conviction in front of different types of crowds at different kinds of gigs. I’ve heard some acts talk about having second thoughts about stand-up after bad gigs. These weren’t ‘bad’, just mediocre, but I can’t imagine feeling anything other than an impatience to gig more and get it right.

Lesson Learned: get a chip butty straight away next time.

It’s nice to have a few lovely gigs in a row, and this is what this blog post will be about. The following post will be about a few mediocre gigs in a row, thereby maintaining a tidy balance reflective of the ups and downs of gigging. I’m like the Cylons, I have a plan. Hopefully it won’t make fuck all sense and culminate in a woefully disappointing conclusion.

After meeting Sarah, the Sheffield-based stand-up with a car, the gigging possibilities seemed endless. No longer was I restricted by trains, coaches and associated costs to the peripheries of the South Pennines. The surging arteries of the great British motorway would take us to distant metropoleis. So we went to Newcastle. They were doing road works so there were reduced speed limits and crawling delays.

We got there eventually, after dropping by Leeds to pick up another act by the name of Tony. It was dark and being as I was in the front and he the back, I didn’t know what he looked like until we arrived. Subconsciously I must have been trying to picture him, like you do when you speak to a call centre operative. Only you never get to see a call centre operative. He was taller and skinnier than I expected him to be so I suppose I must have imagined him to be of average height and average build.

Perhaps I imagine everyone in my own image. A god complex for people who aren’t good enough or dickish enough to have an actual god complex. Having said that, if I was creating a sentient species with free will they’d have to be a vast improvement on Homo sapiens. Their sex holes and piss holes wouldn’t be one and the same, for a start. And the poo hole would be as far away from that area as possible. Dedicated sex organs would definitely have to be part of the design spec, none of this multi-purpose malarkey. Perhaps I would feel differently if I was into water sports, but I’m really not. Although it might actually be a good thing for people into water sports if the sex organ and urinary organ were separate. They’d love that. They could have sex and piss on each other simultaneously. Maybe that was god’s plan all along. ‘At least if I make the sex bit and the piss bit the same bit then they can only do one at a time.’ Perhaps more consideration went into our “theme park in a sewage works” construction than I’ve been giving the imaginary friend of millions credit for.

So Tony was a bit lankier than I thought he might have been for the duration of a 2 hour car journey and while we were chatting about topics ranging from sitcoms to bitchy gossip, I was feeling pretty nervous. It’d been almost a month since my last gig and when you go for a prolonged period without gigging you can feel rusty. Being as I was still in single digits at the time an interlude of that length certainly induced heightened anxiety levels as we pulled up to the venue.

Weirdly though, this dissipated the moment we got into the place, specifically the room underneath the pub where the gig was. It was a nice little room and the modest number assembled there seemed pleasantly relaxed and welcoming. After a friendly greeting from the promoter and the compère I popped upstairs for a piss (thereby extracting the vinegary dregs of my body via my romance muscle — the very same one that I have to put inside a lady’s baby manufacturing facility if I want her insides to know I love them too) and fetched a pint on the way back.

Being a new act and new material night in a small room, it wasn’t unlike similar gigs in that the audience was comprised of acts who were on, acts who came to watch, or friends of the above. I believe there was one non-comedian on this occasion. Considering the modest numbers the compère did an incredible job of warming everyone up. I’ve made a decision in writing this blog not to refer to people or places with a great deal of specificity because I don’t want it to be about critiquing gigs or other acts. But his name was Nick and he turned what could easily have been a sedate gathering into a gaggle of shits and giggles. He didn’t get around to me when asking which fruit we would put up our bums, which was good because I hadn’t thought of anything funnier than anyone else had said. I couldn’t get courgette out of my mind but kept telling myself it was a vegetable. It turns out it is actually a fruit. I should always remember to follow my first instinct when it comes to potentially penetrative foodstuffs.

I went on second, after Tony, and I had a very enjoyable set despite forgetting my material a couple of times. Because I felt relaxed in the environment and the compère had done such a great job of cultivating a fun atmosphere, I had the confidence to be natural despite forgetting lines and mucking up wording. Rather than trying to conceal or skim over my fuck-ups, I provided a commentary as I was making them. When I realised I’d forgotten to say something which provided the set-up for a subsequent punch line, I told them they wouldn’t get one of the upcoming jokes. When they didn’t, noting why provided a laugh the joke didn’t.

It’s important to remember that it was an audience of acts. Other comedians are likely to find this sort of off-the-cuff internal monologue amusing because they identify with the thought processes you’re sharing. A comedy savvy audience might also, but typical audiences may not. Even so, it was nice feel relaxed enough to piss about. Despite the fact I made mistakes, most of it went according to the script and it was good fun to improvise around the bits that didn’t.

We trundled home at reduced speeds between closed lanes and when we stopped for petrol and a snack I had a wee in some trees because the services were closed or too far away or something. I won’t remind you of how biologically uncouth it is to spray pungent, steaming kidney brine out of your very wooing vessel; the very same vessel more generous lovers lick with their tongues; the very same tongues they taste food with. I got an egg mayonnaise sandwich but wished I’d got cheese and pickle. We don’t always make the right choices in life. God knows what I’m talking about.

The following week a last minute cancellation allowed me to pop across to Manchester to attempt to Beat the Frog again. I quite like catching the train. I like the idea of public transport, being the lefty I am. Despite sharing public space with other human beings, I mostly enjoy sticking my earphones in and listening to various podcasts, both comedy related and otherwise. Occasionally I’ll stick on some lyricless classical or jazz on so I can go through my material in my head. I try not to but I usually end up muttering the words under my breath so fellow passengers likely assume I’m a bit unhinged. Considering the not infrequent swear words and religious references I probably sound like I’m mumbling a profane sermon like some foul-mouthed priest.

I think it was at this gig that I noticed I yawn when I’m nervous. A sleepiness comes over me, perhaps my body’s natural defence to the surge of adrenaline. So I’ll sit watching other acts while my incessantly gaping cakehole gives a false impression fatigue and boredom. I just can’t stop yawning. It might be a more general problem I have, in that just sat here now typing about yawning has caused me to yawn a few times already. Yawny yawny yawn yawn!

The bill that night included an act with Tourette’s, a stand-up virgin from Nigeria, a bisexual Glaswegian and couple competing against one another. Despite feeling a little lacklustre compared to my previous gong show at the Manchester Frog, I exceeded the previous time of 4.25 and made it through to the clap off. It went well enough and was happy to go through, but my performance was a less deserving than last time. I felt a little sluggish that night, as if the nervous yawning had actually tired me out. If anything I should have got through before and been gonged off on this occasion, but as I explained before gong shows is some random bullshit.

As I also explained before, the overall winners are usually the most deserving, and that night was no exception, with the bisexual Glaswegian and the female of the couple dividing the crowd’s support such that they were awarded a joint victory. I was happy to survive longer than a couple of my competitors, but I was keen to get some feedback from the compère who kindly gave me some advice I’ve tried to take on board, namely to enunciate and intonate so as to indicate to the audience the immediacy of the punch line. In material that includes a multi-syllable vocabulary and some degree of subtlety, it often helps to animate the delivery somewhat. Sometimes, if you’re relaxed and perky, that comes quite naturally, but if you’re tired and torpid, it requires a conscious effort and risks overt contrivance.

It’s easy for a performance to look forced and learning how to make a carefully prepared script seem like a free-flowing stream of thought is a mixture of intangible psychological circumstances and a learned skill you have to craft around your own persona. Individuality is primary in this context as there are some styles, such as one-liners, that militate against any illusion of spontaneity. This surely makes it harder for such acts to cultivate a stage presence the audience will deem authentic, and all the more impressive when they succeed.

Before I headed home that night I bumped into an act/promoter from Birmingham and booked another gig. It’s nice to leave gigs with more gigs in the diary, but this one wasn’t for another six months so I managed to find another via Facebook. Besides the various regional comedy forums, Facebook seems to be the networking facility of choice for we aspiring stand-ups. I don’t really like Facebook, I pretty much hate it, but it is useful for keeping abreast of what other acts are up to and what events are occurring and whatnot, and via some group or other I got a gig at a student halls in Preston.

It was being booked and compèred by a Preston-based act/promoter for the manager/activities organiser person who wanted to do something different for a fundraising event. It might have been for Children In Need. Or Sports Relief. I can’t remember and didn’t really care at the time, but I have technically done a gig for charity so don’t be surprised if you find yourself questioning what you’ve ever done to make the world a better place. I’ve done a charity gig that raised maybe £100. Maybe a little less. Maybe a lot less. I wasn’t really paying attention but the point is that you should try not to feel too bad if my magnanimity makes you feel like you’ve spent your entire life taunting starving babies by sticking courgette fruits up your bum.

It was like doing a gig in a sixth form common room, if all the students lived upstairs from the sixth form common room. Not to disparage it, it was a fun little gig and I’d happily do more like it. As they were all first years they were delightfully shockable too, with several disgusted or stunned gasps throughout the night at material that was relatively tame by typical club standards. The first act seemed to appal them with a bit about a dog licking a lady’s vagina which, frankly, wouldn’t even make my nan blush.

Maybe it was their youthful innocence or perhaps their unfamiliarity with live stand-up; either way I couldn’t help but get a little kick out their reactions. The activity supervisor person even had a sort of maternal presence that made it feel like one of those late nights when you got to stay up and watch telly after the watershed. You regretted pestering your mum for the privilege when an awkwardly prolonged sex scene came on. Which reminds me of the time my grandparents did some holiday house sitting/child minding when I was 14. They were feeling liberal and let me put Reservoir Dogs on. My granddad nodded off intermittently, stirring at louder expletives and severed appendages, and my nan knitted throughout without so much as batting an eyelid. Perhaps she wasn’t the best example regarding the shock value of canine cunnilingus.

Hyperbole aside, it was a fun night. When one of the acts engaged a couple of young women in banter one of them insinuated that the other had a sexually transmitted infection. Chlamydia? Gonorrhoea? I can’t recall but it did seem as if there was indeed some truth to the statement. Not so innocent after all! Like the other stand-ups, I only discussed carnal acts, I didn’t have an actual festering sex plague between my legs! They didst protest too much, methinks.

A lad who lived upstairs made a decent first attempt at stand-up as the night’s ‘headliner’, receiving a warm response from his peers. There was a pleasant amount of appreciation all round, and I received a hearty handshake from a scriptwriting student who enjoyed my set, which was nice. “I’m going to shake your hand,” she said. “Okay,” I replied. We shook hands in an amusingly awkward fashion and I went on my way, into the rainy night. I was okay though because I had my brolly with me. Not for much longer, unfortunately, as that was the night I left it at the train station. It’s okay though because it wasn’t mine anyway. If you live in Preston and happened across a foldable, designer label umbrella a few months ago, it’s my brother’s. You can keep it though. I’m just benevolent that way. You probably need it more than he does anyway, and I’ve still got my own.

There’s not much point apologising or accounting for six weeks of dormancy. It’s a blog, no one cares.

I’d done four gong shows where I left off, and had yet to do my first actual open spot, which turned out to be a bit impromptu. At the Manchester Frog and Bucket I’d met another Sheffield act who’d dropped in to watch. She gave me a lift home, which was a much more welcome option than waiting around past midnight for the train. One Friday night a couple of weeks later she asked me if I wanted to accompany her to a gig she was doing in Derby, so I went along to watch.

It’s a pub in the town centre, and the gig is run by a Glaswegian bloke, himself an act, who offered me a spot as soon as we walked through the door. I was hesitant to accept because I hadn’t rehearsed. I was sure I’d forget my material and I hadn’t done a pub gig before. I hadn’t even done a non-gong gig before, so felt unprepared, mildly daunted and rather nervous. Contrary to what I’ve said previously, this didn’t really give me any of that adrenaline fuelled charismatic energy. I just felt nervous.

I realised that I’d been spoilt in a certain sense by the gong shows. In a pub there’s often the background chatter of people who’ve come out for a drink, not comedy. There might be people walking past you on their way to and from the toilet. And if they’re free nights, audiences won’t necessarily appreciate that they’re getting free entertainment, they’re just less likely to feel invested in the experience. Added to all that, there’s no disguising the fact that you’re really just stood in a pub talking at some strangers. A stage and a spotlight give you a certain power and this had played an important role in increasing my confidence at the gong shows. That and a large audience warmed up by cheap drinks and a professional compère.

So I did forget my material and had to bumble through as best I could, trying to spit out jokes sans the structure and wording that sharpens their impact. But I needn’t have been as nervous as I was. The audience were a little rambunctious, and there were a few people in the corner who talked throughout (apparently they were Christians who didn’t really appreciate my somewhat unholy subject matter). Still, when I stumbled the crowd were really encouraging. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d forget my material, and I seem to have got the knack for the flustered, apologetic swearing that somehow engenders sympathy in an audience. Hopefully it will come in handy during the many fuck-ups I’m sure to commit.

Then on the way home we got pulled over by the police and the car was impounded.

My next gig was another pub gig, but in an upstairs function room in Manchester city centre. There were probably as many acts in the audience as audience members, though that included acts on the Manchester scene who came down just to watch. Despite there being a really relaxed atmosphere in the room I felt a bit nervous again, still more comfortable being stood on a raised platform talking to an audience shrouded in darkness. So I went through my routine at a slower pace and with a more understated delivery. It went alright and I was content. It was interesting how different the same routine felt and came across to the audience depending on the mood I was in.

In a more energetic mood my material felt pacey and cheeky, but in a less confident mood it felt verbose and cerebral. The material is both lewd and clever (intelligent wank jokes, essentially) so an adjustment in delivery can emphasise one aspect over the other. After that gig someone described the material as ‘literary’, but the following night the compère referred to me as a ‘dirty boy’. Presentation and tone can change the mood and impact of a routine while the words remain unchanged. Learning how to control that is what I’ll be doing for a long time yet.

My seventh gig was a bit of an anomaly. At such an early stage I should have been doing more gong shows, pub gigs and new act/new material nights. Due to beginner’s luck helping me along at my first gong show, perhaps making me appear a lot more able than I actually was, I was offered a spot at a pretty wonderful venue in Liverpool, on the Albert Dock. It was a professional night with three paid acts plus the compère. I shouldn’t have been there really, but there I was.

It’s wonderful to be offered gigs like that as a new act, but it’s also potentially unwise. It’s one thing to die on your arse in front of a casual crowd at an amateur night, but if you were to die at a professional night, with paid-up bums on seats and pros watching you, it wouldn’t be a very beneficial experience. With a gig list still in single digits, it might be a mortifying disincentive to carry on.

Luckily it wasn’t nearly that bad, and I enjoyed myself very much. The stage, the lighting, the superb compère; all of it served to boost my enthusiasm and confidence. Sure, I did a bit of dodgy ad-libbing at the start, and lost them slightly with some clumsier material at the end, but the bulk of my routine went down delightfully well. I even got a few extra laughs out of a bit of spontaneous interaction with people in the front row. Considering it was gig number seven, I was well chuffed.

I realised it wasn’t a reliable indicator of the direction my delicately embryonic stand up career was going in, but oh how it whet my appetite. I’m supposed to be a vegetarian but I got a kebab that night.

So far in my first two blog posts I’ve covered my first two gigs. I’m probably going to speed it up a little and over time I hope the stuff I write here to be a bit more flexible, rather than exclusively being a chronological record of my gigs. Most other stand-up acts would probably find this tedious and self-indulgent. Which is why I’m not going to be telling most other stand-up acts that I blog about my gigs. They might think I’m a ridiculous nob. Still, one other act reminded me that all blogs are self-indulgent, so I guess I can only try to avoid being tedious. No promises. At this point the only people reading this are my mate Steve, my girlfriend Gillian, and maybe my friend Sara if she’s torn herself away from her crack pipe. I mean Xbox. If you’re not one of those people then what follows is just going to be a figurative wankfest that you’re not obliged by any personal relationship to tolerate. Why aren’t you having an actual wankfest? Do I have to explain the internet to you? Fuck.

Right then. At my second gig in Preston I was fairly rubbish (what with the new material and delusions of funniness) but despite the fact the audience weren’t really laughing much, I managed technically to avoid being gonged off. The third and decisive card was raised just seconds after my time was up. It wasn’t by any means a success, but was recorded as such. Conversely, my next gig in Manchester was somewhat of a success in the laughter department, but I got gonged off at 4 minutes 25 seconds. Thus I discovered that gong nights are some random bullshit.

Obviously. Only a few people have cards, and they’re going with their own judgement. Even if the majority of the audience just applauded one of your jokes, it’s entirely possible that a card-holder will insist on being a motherfucker. Or perhaps they found you offensive. Or perhaps one of their mates offered to buy them a drink if they raised the card for a laugh, which is apparently what was happening at my third gig. So you have to take gong nights with a pinch of salt in both success and failure. And if some motherfuckers motherfuck you over while the rest of the audience are LOLing to their hearts’ content, then you’ll have plenty of time to forgive them for their motherfuckery on the long and fucking expensive train journey home. Fuck.

Despite the random bullshittery, the overall winner of a gong contest is, more often than not, the best and most deserving act. And I’ve not won a gong contest so I say that with all the objectivity my gloriouslessness grants me. I say it having seen only a handful of gong shows too, but also having discussed the topic with other stand-ups. Gong shows divide opinions amongst stand-ups. Without getting stuck too deep in the controversy, they’re often seen by the more established acts as being a lazy option on the part of promoters, potentially discouraging for new acts, and as a detrimental formative experience. By which I mean they teach bad habits and encourage the wrong aptitudes for typical gigs, where factors such as the pacing and relationship with the audience are quite different. Obviously, I’m not an established act, but I try to take their advice on board so I might have a slither of a chance of one day being one. If I’m not arrested for mutilating a motherfucker with a laminated card before then. I jest, of course. There’s glasses and stools and all sorts of things I’d reach for first. I actually hope they’d keep hold of the card so I could manically taunt them to “RAISE YOUR CARD NOW, MOTHERFUCKER!”

I wasn’t actually annoyed by being gonged off. I’m just trying to keep you entertained. Because I got a good response from the audience, I felt pretty darn good, motherfuckers be damned. And I’d tripped over my words a bit, to be fair. Because it was my first gig at the Manchester venue, bigger and somewhat more daunting, I had that same nervous energy that turned into an adrenaline rush just before I went on. I was feeling so artificially confident that I actually opened by telling the audience to ‘shut up then’ when they continued to chatter. To the crowd and other acts this was an impressive demonstration of confidence and stage presence. This amount of confidence has not been typical, and was all thanks to the adrenaline produced by my excited nervousness. I’ve done more gigs now so I’m more relaxed about them and as I explained previously I’m therefore less full of this chemical confidence and more like my normal self. That being pretty unassuming and mild-mannered. Yes, like Kal-El, I aspire to find a balance between my Clark Kent, kind but unremarkable and underwhelming, and my Superman, strong and fast but dressed like a dick. Perhaps that isn’t such a good analogy. I should have gone with Jesus.

This psychological fuckery was demonstrated at my fourth gig, back at the gong show in Preston again, when I was gonged off after little over a minute. It was a weird one. Weird gigs do happen, though it’s quite often the case that one act will consider them ‘weird’ having not done very well, and another act will consider them to be ‘lovely’ having had a good response. It all depends. Sometimes an audience can take a while to warm up. Literally, in this case, because they hadn’t turned the heaters on in time and it was still fricking freezing. There might also be some malcontents in the room. At my second gig there had been a large table full of squaddies, which I’ve just realised I forgot to mention. I still blame my material for the lacklustre response, but one of them was removed by the bouncer for talking while I was on stage. Things like this can make it all a bit of a struggle, particularly when you’re still getting used to simply talking to a room full of strangers.

Primarily though I noticed that my comparatively relaxed state made the delivery of the same material seem a little spiritless. I was lacking that intangible energy that had made it so effortless. It was indeed going to be a problem. And I didn’t want to put on a pair of overpants and a cape and pretend I was Superman. Or, rather, I didn’t want to overcompensate and make it seem forced and contrived. So though I’d gotten over the initial flutter of novelty and exhilaration, my beginner’s bubble being duly burst, the real learning process would now commence at the appropriately bluff curvature. And so it continues.

I’ll try and spare you too much of the anally retentive analysis. Eddie Izzard has said that you don’t get a sense of your own talent until you’ve done 100 gigs. Rather than detailing the minutiae of it all, which I’ll no doubt do in my head and to anyone who’ll indulge me when they haven’t got a choice, I’ll attempt to maintain an arching narrative of observations and anecdotes interspersed with ramblings on related topics. And if you’re not one of the individuals named at the start and you’re still reading this then it’s seriously time for that wankfest. For the love of sweet Ganesh, stimulate your genitals now.

What most surprised me about that first gong show in Preston was that my nerves transformed into an unexpected adrenaline rush, manufacturing in me a rare surge of confidence. There was an energy about my delivery that was more of a biochemical by-product than a rehearsed performance. It’s an exhilarating feeling. I came down from the stage after five minutes but didn’t come down from the high for hours. After that though it just feels like you’ve injected taurine into your eyeballs.

I wasn’t gonged off but I couldn’t stay for the clap-off to decide the winner. I might have had a chance of winning, it’s hard to say. Perhaps that would have been more excitement than I could handle. It’s all very well having a good first gig, but all you’re actually doing is setting yourself up for a fall when you try to replicate it in different circumstances. Change the material, the audience, the compère, the biochemical balance, and you’re left feeling less than exhilarated when a barely responsive audience stares back at you.

If one lacklustre chuckle emerges from a dark corner of the room, it does not fill you with hope of winning the rest of the strangers over. More like a dropping a pin, it accentuates the silence that dominates both space, a never ending darkness, and time, which suddenly slows as if to make an example of you, as if the fabric of the multiverse has snagged on your cosmic unfunniness.

That may be an exaggeration of what having a crappy gig feels like, but it is rubbish. And I haven’t even quite died on my arse yet. When that happens I expect the multiverse to respond by opening a black hole in my gut just long enough for me to be erased from the continuum at the subatomically ahilarious level without disturbing the stillness around me.

Still, that first time was all good, despite the compère priming the audience by telling them that watching first-timers do stand-up can sometimes be like watching someone contract Aids right in front of your eyes. There must be some accuracy in that hyperbolic description, because when you have a shit gig no one wants to talk to you.

The observation has been made by another comedian, so it must be true. It might be because they think you’re shit and they don’t want to talk to someone so shit so they just let you sit on your shitting own feeling all shit. But I think it usually has more to do with not knowing what to say to someone who’s just been rejected by the audience. You can’t say ‘well done, good stuff’ because that would be a transparent and insulting lie. Nor can you say ‘that was a bit shit’ because that’s not going to help, is it? And it’s difficult to know what else to say without sounding patronising or arrogant about your relative lack of being shit. So, generally speaking, if you’ve had a bad gig you end up sitting on your own feeling a bit shit while everyone talks to the people who weren’t shit.

I used the time spent feeling very alone in a crowded room to ponder the social dynamics of the situation. Still felt shit though.

I had made the mistake of trying new material for my second gig. Being in the same venue only two weeks later, and thinking perhaps that the student crowd that populated the audience might contain a number of regulars, I thought it would be a good idea to do something different. It wasn’t. It was a terrible idea. That first gig, having gone pretty well, left me under the deluded impression that I was funny. I thought I could write material, and say it, and it would be funny. I couldn’t. I could write the material and I could even say it too. But it wasn’t funny. It was shit.

But it wasn’t all bad. During my first gig I had managed somehow to impress a promoter (though I would later discover that I hadn’t impressed said promoter as much as they thought I had). So I had another gig offer, an open spot (no gonging!) lined up, and from my shitness I had learned a lesson. I learned that I’m not funny. I’d just written a pretty good routine, spent quite a while trying to make sure that it was jam-packed with funniness, crafted it over a period of time, slept on it, rehearsed it, run it by friends and even tested it successfully in a comedy club. It worked. It was good. I had written a funny routine. I then decided, for no good reason, to not use it. Because I thought I was funny. I’m not funny. Lesson learned.

Another factor in the shitness of my second gig, besides the rubbish material, was that I was underwhelmingly calm. I was a little nervous, but not very. I thought I was funny, after all, and the deluded are never nervous. But I was lacking that adrenaline fuelled, confident energy. I felt pretty normal. I had no special powers. I was Dumbo sans feather. Gregory House minus excruciating leg pain. Bruce Banner, who, despite there being shit in need of a good fucking up, has spent the afternoon eating cannabis cakes, playing with kittens, and getting a blowjob. I hadn’t spent the afternoon doing any of that, I just wasn’t really feeling so adrenalized. I tried to pretend like I was, to replicate the same confidence of delivery, but it’s difficult to fake a fluke. So as well as the material being shabby, the performance felt forced.

This surprised me. I was confused to feel so calm about something that had previously terrified me. I’d have thought it a good thing if it hadn’t actually made it harder. Not having that nervous energy left me feeling flat by comparison, and instead of bouncing along with an electric effervescence, I was trudging sluggishly through the mud of my inferior material. Having conquered the fear and overcome the nerves, I was now worried that I wouldn’t be any good without them. Which would be a bit of an arse.

A few months ago now I attempted stand-up comedy and I want, here on this blog, to record my thoughts about the continuing experience of doing so. There might be a spattering of humour but that’s not the purpose. It’ll be a journal of sorts, I suppose. We shall see. The first thing I wanted to try to capture is what it’s like to attempt stand-up, to be inclined, despite the mild terror, to get up in front of a room full of strangers and talk at them.

Others may not experience that mild terror, but it was the mild terror that put about a year between my first wishing I had the confidence to attempt stand-up and actually attempting stand-up. Even so, I’ve met others in the ongoing process of attempting stand-up whose terror is less mild and seems unlikely to dissipate, despite their proven ability to make strangers laugh. I write this purely from my narrow spectrum of experience at the very beginning of a rainbow which will almost certainly end with little more than a pot into which I might piss my fragile dreams.

I may already have misled you into believing that my first attempt at stand-up was a few months prior to the time of writing, but it was in fact about a year ago now. It was a one-off open mic night in Sheffield, my hometown. I’d been invited to perform poetry, which I used to do every month or so. I was consistently very nervous every time I read or performed poetry at open mic nights. I’ve always been nervous when talking to an audience or in front of a crowd, but once I started reading I was usually okay. I even once managed to compete in a poetry slam while on holiday in New York City. I came third, which I was chuffed to bits with.

By this time, however, I was tired of poetry and wanted to try stand-up. I’m not entirely sure why, really. I’ve a sense of humour but I’m not a particularly funny person, and despite the poetry I’ve certainly never felt like a potential performer. But precisely because I was fearful of the prospect I wanted to challenge myself to face it. So I spent the day evacuating my bowels and did ten or so minutes of material that night. It went alright. Despite considering myself more of a writer than a performer, it was my performance that seemed to work better than the material itself. I forgot bits here and there but babbled and blundered through it and had the benefit of a very kind audience. But they weren’t a comedy audience. They’d have clapped if I’d done karaoke to Coldplay.

It was another six months before I got around to attempting stand-up in a bona fide comedy club. I was still crapping myself at the prospect, and that’s the main reason why I took so long to write some better material and find out where a complete newcomer could perform to a comedy audience. I hadn’t seen much live comedy. I’d seen a few big acts, but I’d never even been to regular comedy club night. After rectifying this by attending the marvellous Sheffield comedy night, Abbcom, a couple of times, I approached the compère who kindly gave me a list of comedy nights for newcomers. They were mainly gong nights in Manchester. Manchester was where all the funny happened, apparently.

Gong nights seemed mildly daunting for a mildly terrified newcomer like me, but it wasn’t entirely dissimilar to a poetry slam. You have a time limit on stage and three members of the audience are randomly selected to judge your performance. In a poetry slam, those judges must wait until your performance is over to award you the points they deem you to deserve. In a comedy gong show, they must signify any disapproval during your performance. If all three think you unfunny and therefore unworthy of their attention, you’re gonged off. If you survive the five minute limit, you’re given the chance of winning the audience’s approval in a clap-off to decide the winner.

The Frog and Bucket comedy club in Manchester has one of the most successful gong nights in the region, if not the country. Dubbed ‘Beat the Frog’, they run every week on a Monday night, and I went to see the 2009 World Series Final before contacting them for a spot. The venue is wonderful. I’d been there before to see Richard Herring’s Oh Fuck, I’m 40 tour. It’s pretty large, with two floors, but retains a certain intimacy. Being a free entry and cheap drinks night, the place was much busier for all the people standing. I’ve since found that it’s about as busy most Monday nights, filled largely with students. The atmosphere is cracking. Every city without a fully fledged comedy club is lacking real culture.

I learned that gong shows require a high frequency of laughs to keep the crowd, and the cardholders in particular, interested in listening to the rest of your act. There are exceptions to that; some stand-ups have an innately confident or likeable demeanour that might allow them to occupy the audience’s attention simply with raw charisma or some inexplicably engaging presence. Generally speaking though, a gong show audience wants the funny. They want it immediately and they want it in rapid concentration. There are gong shows which I’ve still to frequent where I’m told they ‘want blood’. Beat the Frog can be harsh but is mostly fair.

I tried to write material that was packed densely enough with laughter triggers to give me a fighting chance. There’s probably an obvious and much better term than ‘trigger’ but I’ll go with that. A more traditionally constructed punchline can be a trigger, or a particular turn of phrase can be a trigger. Either way, I hoped they would laugh with reasonable frequency at particular moments. Learning then to let them laugh in those moments, instead of being so excitedly nervous that I talked over their laughter, would come later.

When I finally got around to contacting the Frog and Bucket for a spot, I was offered spots in Preston before Manchester. They’d recently opened a new club and were doing gong nights there too. The Preston Frog and Bucket is really nice. Being newly furbished it’s a bit plush and being smaller it’s a little cosier too. I like it. I got the train to Preston for my second attempt at stand-up, my first gong show spot, and my first spot at a proper comedy club. I was on first, which was a bit daunting, but I found that mild terror had been numbed a little by the adrenaline. By the time the compère introduced me I was just excited. It went pretty well. I didn’t get gonged off. They laughed and everything. I was mildly elated.

Now, countless people have done this. Loads of people are doing it all the time. The comedy scene is oozing with nascent talent shitting their pants in terror one moment and jizzing their pants in self-satisfaction the next. I just decided to sit down and write a self-indulgent blog about it. And that’s it for now. There’s more, but I intend to keep these fairly digestible and write them with a reasonable time lag after the events, so as to have sufficient perspective to say vaguely sensible and considered things. I hope to have marginally interesting observations to make about the ups and downs of attempting stand-up and what, if anything, I learn along the way.

In a few days or so I’ll probably talk a little more about that first gong show and just how quickly my beginner’s luck wore off. I will also try to be less boring.