5296/18216
I have been cracking away writing extra emergency questions for kickstarter backers in the front of dozens of books. I was even doing them in the small hours of this morning after a tough and tired drive back from Brighton, where every road in the world seemed to be closed, turning the journey home into a complicated maze with one solution.
This morning I pressed on, even though I should really have been writing material for my first preview of Oh Frig I’m 50 tomorrow. But coming up with emergency questions isn’t that bad a warm up for writing gags. You have to conjure up something interesting, funny or boring from nothing and get into that state of both having an empty and teeming brain at the same time, so that funniness seemingly magically appears. And I did my best to give everyone value for money with something that would at least surprise. They weren’t all gold, but they were all (I hope) new and exclusive (though I am going to use some of them in the new series). For some reason I got on to thinking about the sexual act of tromboning, which if you don’t know what that is, you might not be ready to know, but it’s a sensitive and loving act of some beauty. But what, I wondered would a tromboning carried out on a woman be called? Something with the necessary puckering but some complicated fingering. I plumped for clarinetting, though I believe that instrument uses a reed, and only the most hygiene conscious female tromboner would be that much of a killjoy. Getting right into that mouthpiece is most of the point of it, right. You can’t stick a straw in.
I threw it out to Twitter, who came up with some good suggestions, but predictably Viz had got there first. Playing the ocarina seemed to be the best equivalent, though I had some time for the idea of French Horning, though that technique involves sticking your entire hand right up the bell. Which some people might be into. But I prefer the subtlety of the ocarina. You know, if you are going to carry out a despicable sexual act, then do it with a bit of flair.
I was actually enjoying coming up with all the questions, though slightly annoyed that I hadn’t written them all down, as I was heading towards 228 more questions, almost enough to fill half a new book. I thought I’d better check I’d got that figure right. What if it was 226? I wouldn’t want to do two unnecessary questions and I might have misremembered.
Indeed I had. I was supposed to be doing 128 books with questions and a further 200 that were just signed and numbered. Not 228 and 100 as I had thought. So about 80 or so backers will be getting a bonus question that they didn’t ask for. But don’t worry other donors, I have selected the worst 80 questions for them, so it was actually quite a good weeding out process.
I did start to collate some material for the new show. There’s a very long way to go but I think there’s going to be enough to fill an hour. Not tomorrow though. But getting through these sticky and embarrassing first previews is part of the process. A horrible and embarrassing part. But one that spurs you on to do better and not feel so humiliated again.
