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After tonight’s gig in Sutton there are only ten more Happy Now? tour dates. Even after more than fifty shows I am still enjoying performing this one, but aside from some future insanity where I decide to do all my 24 one man shows, I can’t see me performing this show again. And I don’t think it would be right to put any of the material in next year’s Best Of show - there are some routines which I think are up there with my best, but I don’t want to repeat the same material in two consecutive tours and will be very much favouring the earlier shows that I feel most of my current audience haven’t seen.
I’d sold about 150 tickets in Sutton tonight, which meant the theatre wasn’t half full, but I am still amazed that that many people is now a poorly attended gig. The dressing rooms were downstairs from the stage and there was a Stannah stairlift tracking its way up to the stage right door. Given my eyesight has gone and the fact that I am delighted that the Guardian has introduced a whole new page of puzzles recently, I thought it seemed appropriate for me to use this. It was a bit slow, but still very exciting, like an extremely safe fairground ride. And I was going to my job in style. I felt like a superstar.
I had to make a tricky decision with the show tonight. I have a big routine about the awful things that I imagine might happen to my baby daughter - they’re cartoonish or outlandish, but horrific - which ends (spoiler alert) with me imagining that the voice in my head tries to drive me insane and actually kill my own daughter. It’s a dark end to a routine that skirts around what is said and what goes unsaid about parenting, but I think it’s an interesting area to explore: the point where our fear and our madness collide and it was prompted by genuine thoughts that forced their way into my head, thankfully, as in the routine to the disgust and distress of the sane majority of my brain.
But Sutton has recently experienced a very high profile and distressing case of a father murdering his own daughter, so I had to work out whether I thought this routine would seem too tasteless and would actually take on a very different meaning in the circumstances, or whether to change the script would be to patronise the audience and maybe even allow catharsis. I was also aware that I had only noticed the location of this crime by chance last week and that there’s every chance that I have done this routine in a town which has recently experienced such tragedy. And almost certainly, at some point, everywhere will have had some such occurrence.
It’s a very difficult tightrope to cross as a comedian, but there are times when something seems needlessly distressing. I was at a comedy festival in a small town where a terrible crime had recently happened and it was clear that with the community in such pain it would have been insanity to joke about certain subjects that would not have had the same associations somewhere else.
And sometimes even if the audience doesn’t mind the joke, your own self-knowledge and worry about causing offence can change the performance. I was in two minds even when I started the show tonight as I was fairly sure that my audience would understand where I was coming from and know that I wasn’t laughing at their personal tragedy. But in the end I decided to omit the final part of the routine where things turn from fantastical disasters to horrifying possibility. Even in the previous parts I thought I sensed some unease, but it was not possible to know whether that was really there or whether people were just reacting with the kind of mock horror that sometimes greets my compulsion to twist off my baby’s head.
I am not convinced I made the right decision. But then I am not sure there was a right decision. At least this way the people who would have liked to hear the full routine didn’t know they were missing anything (until they read this).
Generally speaking I think comedians think much more about this kind of stuff than people think they do. Offence is a valuable weapon in the comedic arsenal and sometimes it is a good thing to leave people smarting a little bit or to push things in an inappropriate direction. But with minimal power comes great responsibility and just because it’s sometimes a good thing to cause offence does not mean all offence is justified. Or that you should blithely launch into the same jokes regardless of context. In fact it’s nearly always context rather than what is being said which is the key issue.
The gig went well and the audience was offended in the right way or for worthwhile reasons.
