Before today if you had asked me what I would save from my house in the result of a fire I would have said (in order):
1: My laptop
2: My Bodum Latteo Milk Frother
3: My girlfriend
Oh yeah, so you're now thinking - "Typical man, putting his possessions above his lover, that is appalling and sexist!"
But you're wrong. Just because she is a woman it doesn't mean my girlfriend is weak and useless and in need of rescue whenever there is any danger. She is perfectly capable of looking after herself. It is you who is the sexist. A ha.
But say my girlfriend was overcome with smoke, then once the laptop and the Bodum were safe and secure I would go back into the house to revive her. Mainly because I would need her help to carry out my 4th most important item, my widescreen TV.
Ha ha. I am funny.
But today, I think I certainly have a new top three possession - it might even be the top one. I finally cracked and got an iPhone. And it is (almost) totally phenomenal. My laptop must be seething with jealousy, even as I punch away skillfully at its keys this very second (it loves it, the computer whore), because I walked around all day with the big smile on my face that can only come when you have a new love in your life. I am ridiculously excited and giddy about it. It's brilliant. It is slightly unsettling how a tiny little box of plastic and wires and bits of metal can do this to a human being. But I have internet access wherever I go. If I am lost I can find out where I am on a map. I can watch comedy shows (God bless you
Handbrake) or listen to music or podcasts. I can play Yahtzee on the tube. I can get emails when I am far from my computer. It's so exciting that I believe it might actually be possible for me to reach orgasm just by thinking about my iPhone and nothing else. I am not going to try it, but I am very scared that that is entirely possible. Put that quote on your website Steve Jobs. There can surely be no better advert.
Oh and it's a phone, which works better than my last one. Foolishly 15 months ago I decided not to take the iPhone plunge, but went for the Nokia N95 that everyone was going on about, but I found it confusing and fiddly and the phone reception was never that great and it had big compatibility issues with my Mac and the battery life was shockingly bad and the charger very fiddly so if you even brushed the phone while it was plugged in the connector would fall out.
The iPhone's battery is not meant to be great either, but as it charges from the computer this means I can have it plugged in as I work. But the ease of operation is (for an old confused man like me) the best thing about it. Nowadays too many gadgets leave me befuddled and clueless, but this is pretty much just touch and go. I've accidentally rung a few people as I get to grips with the controls and it took me ages to work out how to get the sim card in and tonight I accidentally flicked the mute button and it was half an hour before I discovered where it was. But these are nothing compared to the issues I have had with some phones months after purchase.
It really is like being in the future and I can't imagine what the 15 year old me would have made of having so much capability in such a small object. I actually think the 35 year old me would struggle to believe it. In fact the 41 year old me is, as you may have noticed, somewhat in awe of this incredible device. There is no way that in the future I will ever look back at it and think of it as incredibly clunky and limited and ridiculous, like I do now when I look at my first iPod. Nope, science can not possibly get any more advanced or better than this. It's beautiful.
I might marry it.
It's ridiculous how happy this made me all day. I have also now got mobile broadband for my laptop which makes me just ridiculously connected to the internet. Which isn't necessarily the best thing for me as I waste enough time on here already, but it all makes me a hub of possibilities. I feel like I must be running the most important business in the world, rather than writing knob gags.
I had a gig in Barking tonight (and having iPhone maps made it very easy to find the venue when I was running a bit late- I'll shut up about it now). When I got there the guy showing me to the dressing room said the gig was going well, though explained that there was a large group of people with "special needs" in the audience.
I don't think I like that term and am not sure in current times whether that is politically acceptable or not. But it seems to me patronising and inappropriate. We all have special needs. I certainly do, as you'd find out if you ever went out of me. I need to think of electronic equipment to ejaculate for starters. I am very special.
Despite my work with SCOPE I am still largely unsure of the correct terminology to use in order not to offend anyone (which is probably impossible anyway) and to be honest I was unable to really see many people in the audience so I can't be exactly sure of what the exact special needs of the party were, but although it gave the gig a different dynamic, it actually made it... well a bit special.
Because these two tables of people were really enjoying themselves, whooping at the rude words, laughing and shouting out. As I did my joke about meeting a girl in a bar and me being interested in her and her not being interested in me, a young man who I could see had Down's Syndrome shouted out "Shame!" and laughed with his friends. I agreed that it was a shame and said I appreciated that he cared so much, explaining it was nice to get empathy, especially given the fact that it was just a joke and the situation had never occurred. It was kind of fun, but also interesting for me, because had a drunken man been interrupting quite so persistently I would have had to go a different way.
The reactions though were making me laugh and a few minutes in I stepped back and said, "This is quite an unusual gig isn't it?" The audience laughed along. "I mean, I like it," I said, "It's fun and I'm really glad you're all joining in, but I can't deal with this in the way that I usually would. It would be a different dynamic. I'd just look bad. But I'm actually quite enjoying this new approach to heckling, just being polite and thanking the hecklers. I can't go the way I usually would. It would seem too harsh." So I found a way round the problem and said to the most excited heckler, "You are the opposite of a cunt." It got a good laugh from everyone, the young man included. It was good to have addressed it and good also that everyone understood where I was coming from and it really made me happy to be making this particular group laugh. One suspects that for them, a night out like this takes on more importance than it would for the other people in the crowd, with their ordinary needs.
Later a woman at the back was talking in a loud voice to a friend - loud enough to be disruptive, but not loud enough to hear what she was saying. I pointed this out and then said, "See the problem is I can't see you because you're too far back and so I don't know if I'm allowed to call you a cunt or not." I could see a man at her table, who was in a little patch of half light. "Can I call her a cunt?" I asked him. He laughed and nodded vociferously. And so I did. There was no taboo about laying into her.
Who really had the special needs here?
It was one of those gigs where I decided to leave behind the safety net and just launch into stuff and see where it went. It was all going OK, but I wasn't storming it and some of the more graphic bits weren't flying. I ended up asking a man who turned out to be 19 whether he'd ever had a blow job. Sitting next to his girlfriend he was very embarrassed and I ploughed on regardless, making it more embarrassing for him and for myself. I questioned what kind of a man it made me to make my living this way. I love the excitement of leaving the script behind and sometimes digging myself in deeper to see if I can get out of it. It becomes a bit more like theatre than comedy. I discussed this fact and deconstructed it.
I said I was unsure of how I was going down and asked if people were enjoying it. One man gave a cheer, which turned a bit half-hearted when he realised he was alone. Luckily everyone else was laughing - they were enjoying it too. But I discussed something that I often think about, but rarely talk about on stage - the question of whether it is better to make everyone laugh a bit all the way through or to have one person for whom a gig is the funniest they've ever seen, or if they see something in the performance that everyone else misses. Because as I was freewheeling there was something properly special going on here. Whether it was good or bad, it was unique. The stuff I was saying would never be heard again, it was a live experience, and maybe only one person would recognise that and take that away with them, but perhaps they would remember what they'd seen forever. And wouldn't that be better than making everyone laugh, but then the next day none of them could really remember anything I said.
I was just talking rubbish and seeing what would come out, but there was something interesting in it all. I let the mask slip and explained that I was different to the persona on stage. I explained to a young woman that I had been flirting with that I actually had a girlfriend and so the offers and suggestions I had made to her were bogus - "I mean, not entirely obviously, I'd still like to do all those things. But I can't because I'm already spoken for. Unless we kept it really secret. No! I'm merely satirising old men who chase after young women. They're disgusting." I gave a sardonic laugh before I explained that I was unsure where the persona ended and the real me began and how that made it even more theatrical and unpredictable and visceral. I was on a roll. Some of the stuff was great, some of it was awful, but I was well away from any script. I wish I remembered to tape my gigs because it's a bit like speaking in tongues when I get into this space and I never have any real hope of recalling what I actually said.
But I was playing with the tragedy and the comedy and it was at least interesting and often funny. A bit of a lull came as I struggled to work out whether I should do a joke or carry on and one person started to applaud. Coming at this exact moment it could only sound sarcastic and I laughed and said, "One person applauding a silence, that can only be a sign that it's time for me to get off."
But the person who had clapped was a woman from the party of disabled people. "No!" she protested, "I'm really enjoying it. That's why I clapped."
"Oh thanks very much," I replied.
"You're really funny," she added, beaming from ear to ear.
"Now this is the kind of heckling I can cope with," I told her, complimenting her on her excellent taste.
"Would you say I'm the greatest comedian you have ever seen?" I inquired.
"Yes!" she shouted back.
Her enthusiasm and joy was infectious. "There you go ladies and gentlemen," I said, "She's the one person. She's the one person in the audience for whom this gig means everything. I don't care what the rest of you think."
I was joking around, but it was genuinely heart-warming to have touched someone in this way, even though I knew it wasn't really me that had made this night great for this women, it was just the fact she was here. She understood the magic, that the woman chatting at the back had completely missed. The magic of being here, in the moment, of being a part of something that you might not always be a part of.
None of us are that special. We all like to laugh. It's great if it happens.
If I had to choose between having this woman say that to me or having an iPhone, then I would have an iPhone. Luckily I am able to have both. And unlike an iPhone a mugger cannot take this moment away from me. Unless they beat me around the head and I suffer brain damage and amnesia.
I had had fun experimenting in front of a crowd who were relatively placid and who I knew wouldn't give me a hard time. To be able to get to a point where I am just talking and seeing what happens and where I am more honest about who I am.... well that's a newish world for me too.
But any pride I might have felt at being a part of this woman's night was pricked a little, when the girlfriend of the 19 year old lad laughed and commented, "You don't half talk a load of shit."
Yes, that's my job. It's quite a good job to have.
Travelling back on the tube I was struck by the numbers of drunk people around me - the man next to me was falling asleep on my shoulder, the man opposite me's eyes were rolling around. When I got to Shepherd's Bush a man rushing up the escalator beside me stumbled as he tried to pass me. He looked like a zombie as he staggered drunkenly around. In fact he was so affected by booze that I wondered if he actually had cerebral palsy. It was a possibility, but I am pretty sure it was all down to the booze. It's possible he had cerebral palsy and was also drunk. But as he got through the barriers he started to run, lolloping like a giraffe. Some of the underground staff looked at him concerned and followed him at a distance to check that he was all right.
I honestly can't be sure that he wasn't disabled, but I am 90% certain he wasn't (he didn't have the coordination of someone who had lived with this condition) and if so then to get that drunk that you become disabled.... it's kind of an odd world we're living in. Where if we don't have special needs we have ridiculous needs. Maybe I'm struggling to connect two unconnected events and maybe I was just a little high on that post gig intoxicated clarity. The world is an odd and beautiful and ugly and ridiculous place and it's sometimes surprising where the ugliness and the beauty displays itself.
Then as I walked home a mad eyed, black eyed, raggedy man came staggering towards me. He caught my eye and I knew he was about to ask me for something, though all that he wanted was some money. "Do you travel on trains?" he asked me as we came close to being level. "Yes," I said. By now we had passed each other. "Can I ask you a question," he pleaded as he stopped and turned to me. But I had gone too far now. He'd had one question, one way in and he'd blown it. It was an odd question and it was hard to see where he was going with it. Was he after my travel card? It was 12.30 and it would be useless to him now. Was he going to try the "I've lost my wallet and need to get the train to Birmingham - can you help me out?" routine and was trying to establish some common ground? If so then he had come in too obliquely. If you're going to try and get money off strangers on the street you need to hone your opening line down to something pithy and relevant. Maybe he was the tramp version of me. Tonight he was freewheeling and seeing where things would end up for him. Could he start with a ridiculous tangential question and yet still get round to getting money off me?
In hindsight I wish I'd stuck around to see where he was going with it. Had I been in a different mood it might have worked.
Or maybe he was just conducting a survey for British Rail and had been unlucky enough to be smacked in the face and pushed in a puddle by the last person he'd met.
Or maybe he was a clairvoyant and his first inkling about me (walking away from the train station) was that I was the kind of person who travelled on trains. OK, it's not a brilliant opening, but maybe he was going to lead on to other things.
But concerned for my iPhone and anxious for my bed I never got to find out.
Isn't the world special?
By the way, I've been edited out of the Tonight Show about swearing in comedy on Friday night - I am quite relieved actually as I thought it was potentially quite embarrassing - so no need to watch it, hey!
Plus I am recording a radio where I talk about my school diaries on 28th January. It's on at the Drill Hall on Chenies St, off Tottenham Crt Rd. Apparently it's first come first served for seats on the night. Record starts at 7.30pm so get there earlier if you want to be sure of a seat.
