So I found myself in a slight quandary today. I realised that I would probably like to have a go at doing something involving yesterday's entry on stage. But to do that it would be really helpful to have one of these ridiculous toilet rim fresheners as illustration. Yet that would mean buying one of the stupid things. And if I bought one of them, wasn't I myself culpable for the continued existence of the ridiculous and dangerous items? What if the product had only been invented because the manufacturers realised they would make enough money from stand-up comedians who would buy the pointless, wasteful item in order to do a routine around it? Or what if that one extra sale just convinced the company that they were shifting enough units and would continue churning these things out?
I could argue that by buying one toilet freshener and spreading the word of its evil I might be able to stop dozens of other toilet fresheners being sold, by convincing my audience of their redundancy. But as so often with stand-up comedy I fear I would be preaching to the converted. I don't think that many people who attend comedy gigs would even consider buying such a product and would already agree with me about its detrimental influence on the planet. All the people I needed to convince - old women, the ludicrously house-proud, all those who wish to deny to the world that they or their family defecate - would be at home, scrubbing their bathrooms lest one stray spot of faeces of urine might betray the fact that they are nothing more than an animal.
To really make any progress in changing the world I would have to do guerilla comedy, perhaps taking the rim block to the houses of people who look like they're a bit anal and shouting my ideas through the letter-box. Or it might simply be more efficient to stand in the detergent aisle of the supermarket and lambast any poor fool who even considers picking up the double sided rim freshener. I wonder how long it would take before the management asked me to leave.
Yet I am only one man. I could only cover one supermarket. To be efficient I would need an army of converts willing to give up their entire lives to angrily deconstructing the point of existence of a relatively minor bathroom product. And many supermarkets are 24 hour now. So my army would need to work in shifts. How would I pay them? How would they feed themselves? They could steal from the supermarket I suppose, but surely they would soon be found out. Especially when they were involved in a very specialist saboutage of one of the products that the supermarket was presumably hoping to shift.
In the end I decided to buy one of the offending items, because ultimately it's probably about ten minutes of material for me, which I can do for the rest of the year and thus make quite a bit of cash out of for my £1.99 investment. For all my pontificating, just like everyone else, when it comes down to it I only care about myself. I am glad the awful rim block of Satan exists because in thr short term it will probably earn me four or five hundred pounds and fill a sixth of my as yet unwritten Edinburgh show. In fact if my crusade against the rim block proved too successful and caused it to be immediately stripped from the supermarket shelves I would have really shot myself in the foot. I must make sure that the power of my satire is strong enough to make people think, but not to make any kind of difference. Imagine if every utterance that came out of my comedian throat was powerful enough to be acted upon immediately. I would very soon run out of material. I am like a parasite on the back of society, feeding on wrongness and corruption, but making sure I don't destroy my supply, lest I starve to death. Really I want to propogate the filth and stupidity, thus giving myself more nourishment. Until I get fat and complacent and think it's enough to do routines about how one should ideally stack a dishwasher and writing musicals based on the back catalogue of an aritistically barren pop band.
Yet for the moment I can pretend that I am on a crusade, a jihad if you will, against the complacency and selfishness of others, whilst never admitting that I am just as bad as the others. Worse if anything.
