Tonight's gig at the 99 club was my most disappointing of the year. It was a tough room to play as it was very hot and a lot of people had been let in for free, and I was doing my two new routines about Rudyard Kipling and monkey fucking which are a little esoteric and/or stupid. The Kipling routine played to near silence and my attempts to inject some energy into the room by being arrogant and offensive, just to get some kind of reaction did not really help. I like making things difficult for myself and break the rules (which say that it is foolish to insult your audience- what's that about?)and then see if I can ad lib and dig myself out of the hole I had created, but it largely did not work this time. I was just unpleasant and only occasionally amusing. The anger and insulting the audience thing is a fine line to tight-rope across and it must largely be controlled fury. I didn't get it right tonight and my irritation was too genuine. It was depressing for everyone involved. "You're not as funny as you used to be," observed a heckler, which although inaccurate is not the kind of thing you want to hear. There was a TV person in the audience and I lambasted the heckler for ruining my last chance to get back on telly, hoping people would catch the irony that this was all my own fault. It is tempting to play around with the whole washed-up has-been thing on occasions like this. It nearly worked and I think the routines will work on another occasion, but if the guestbook is full of complaints that I was offensive and shit at this gig then I won't really be able to argue.
It is still a fertile area to explore and I think there will be something in it and the failure was at least interesting, but nonetheless slightly gutting. Yet just like the fantastic gigs I made my way back to my girlfriend's with new ideas and thoughts washing over me and with my senses noticeably heightened, as if I was on magic mushrooms (I imagine mum). There was none of the elation of a great gig and a sort of tragic desponancy, but there was still something satisfying about it. I was reminded of the line we used to do in Lee and Herring, about pushing back the boundaries of comedy only to find that there was a very good reason why the boundaries had been put there in the first place. I could imagine big Glastonbury style walls with signs saying "Do not attempt to cross this boundary, for your own safety" and yet despite the signs you can't help yourself.
On the tube I was sitting next to a girl with a bleached moustache, which made me upset that we live in a world where we try to deny reality. I am blaming a society that tries to pretend that women don't have facial hair, rather than the woman herself. I don't suppose we're ever going to get over it though.
I had assumed she was on her own as she was sitting quietly for most of the journey, but then the young man almost opposite her began to talk to her. They were American. "Oh my God!" he declared rather camply, "I've just remembered. This is so disgusting, it's brilliant. I can't believe I haven't told you this yet. It's disgusting."
He was building up his story in that slightly annoying way that people do when they want you to say "Go on, tell us what happened?" But the girl remained cool and did not pursue this and just waited for him to tell the story, which she correctly surmised he would.
As the tube pulled into a station he reiterated, "It's so disgusting", but then the pair got to their feet and headed for the door. As he did so he said, "So the weekend he came happened to be the weekend that Jane went to France and...."
But then they were gone and I never got to overhear this brilliant and disgusting story.
Isn't that just what life is like? Hearing the first line of a disgusting story and then never finding out what happens next? It's almost tempting to attempt to come up with your own story starting with those lines. It could be the new Aristocrats gag (look it up on the internet if you don't know what that is).
My sense of smell also got sharper which was weird and I passed through a cloud of some obnoxious chemical style smell near London Bridge station, which made me feel sick. I figured it was probably sarin gas and convinced myself I was about to die both literally and figuratively on the same night. I was depressed to think that that would be my last gig.
I seemed to survive the late night and random terrorist attack though.
On my girlfriend's front door I noticed a tiny spider spinning a web. It was in a little universe of its own, struggling to toil to catch some kind of even tinier fly to eat. Normally I wouldn't have noticed it, but filled with comedy adrenalin and poisonous fumes it briefly fascinated me. The only thing we had in common was our self-involvement.
