I was gigging at the University of Sussex in Brighton tonight. I arrived early and the show is easy to set up so I got to spend half an hour sitting on the grass outside reading my excellent Dave Eggers book. The sun was shining and all around me young students were sitting laughing, drinking beer and Pimms and enjoying the warm evening air. It felt so idyllic and yet such a simple unaffected pleasure and I envied these youngsters their freedom. In hindsight I realised that these days lolling around doing nothing with your peers are amongst the best in your life. Sadly, enjoyable as you may find it, you don't realise this at the time and as with so much when you are 20 you have no idea how lucky you are. It's not to say you can't loll around in the sun at 40. Heck, I was doing it myself now and really appreciating how marvellous it was, but I was detached from what really makes it great, which is the social aspect of being around so many people of the same age as you, with a similar outlook plus the fact that aside from a few essays and a lecture or two you really have nothing to do. And if you were like me, you'd just not go to lectures and copy your essays word for word off of Paul Clegg who had the same tutor as me, just earlier in the week. And though I am not really sure I think I probably didn't spend too much time at college lolling in the evening sun drinking beer surrounded by pretty girls. I think I mainly stayed in my room, eating crisps on my own, writing sketches about turd beetles. Because I had no idea that I was in the midst of what should be the greatest days of my life.
I wasn't bitter (very much) and in fact unlike most 38 year old men I can at least get a small taste of that experience again, because I don't have a proper job and because of I am emotionally retarded I can fit back into these old ways reasonably well when I come back here. And I can spend all my days sitting in the sun if I wish, though it's something I am still loathe to do, preferring it seems to stay indoors and play poker on the internet.
In the gig I thanked the hundred or so people who had turned up (a disappointingly small number, given recent figures and the fact that I sold out the show last time I was in Brighton) for leaving the sunshine behind to come and see me. It became a little bit of a theme of the show, as I let out my inner frustrations at being a middle aged man back in an environment where there are pretty, intelligent girls all over the place. I chastised the young men for not understanding what they had and told the young women what I would do if I could get my hands on them and how I would appreciate them in a way that these young male idiots they were with could never do. It was an interesting area to explore and hopefully my flourishing mid-life crisis will once again produce some funny comedy for your amusement in this year's show.
The audience were really fantastic though and I think that this was probably my best performance of this material ever. I seem to have found a new lightness with it and also to be ad-libing around it a lot more. There's no rush and by lingering over routines that are already very long I am finding that they go a lot better. The show gets better and better and the only people who will ever know are the few of you who venture along to my remaining performances of it (only Newbury, Hereford, Nottingham and Bromsgrove to go - see gig guide for details). I am hopeful that I can get this playfulness and looseness into the more restrictive hour long format in Edinburgh. Though maybe my journey on the road to becoming a stand up comedian is only just beginning. I find I still have much to learn, or at least that every time I perform I seem to discover something new that I hadn't considered before.
Today I learned that lolling in the sun is as important as
dancing in the rain.
