4602/17261
I had my second go at trying out material for Happy Now? and managed to fill about 15 minutes of my allotted hour in a cinema in Crouch End with new stuff. There’s definitely some good ideas in there, but there is a long way to go on this. But it’s a big and important step to be trying it out. I’d spent the afternoon writing my perspective on my daughter’s birth, including some details that unusually for me have not been mentioned anywhere before (and that turned out to be the funniest bit), about how the supposed happiest day of my life was mainly horrific. I’d also spent some time refining the weird conversations I have with the voice in my head, which in its eagerness to help me protect my baby suggests the most horrible potential scenarios. Supposedly this is to help me stop those things happening, but I don’t really see how that works. It’s a bit less twee than the usual, “isn’t it weird having to change nappies?” material that I think most comedians do. Inevitably this show is going to focus at least partially on becoming a dad, which seems to fill some people with dread. But often by trying to find new material in a well-worn subject you can actually come up with much more interesting stuff. There’s so much that has to be rejected, so the stuff you discover can often be the better for that. I hope I managed to do that with Talking Cock, another very well-worn comedy subject.
I was following Jo Brand tonight who is working up material for a new stand-up show in Edinburgh. It’s always a delight to see her, surely the most unaffected and down-to-earth woman in show business. I always want to ask her to guest on my podcast when I see her, but when it comes down to it I am too embarrassed to impose on her. I don’t know why. Hopefully I will overcome this shyness the next time we meet. Last time I’d seen her she had warned me of the effects that having a baby can have on your relationship with your partner and how it’s easy to resent each other and keep score on who has been doing what. The brutal combination of tiredness, stress and responsibility could try the patience of Job. God should just have given him kids if he really wanted to test him. But love is about being able to shout and swear at each other and then forgive each other the next moment. Well maybe not the next moment. But within the hour. And only storing up a bit of residual resentment for the next explosive disagreement. They never made that into one of the weird cutesy, genital-less cartoons for some reason.
Jo was very funny in the "dressing room” (actually the tiny cinema kitchen) so that augurs well for her being a good bet at the Fringe (though I suspect her shows are sold out already).
I filled the rest of my hour with old routines that are already becoming familiar to me, but I have an awful lot of other ones that I still need to learn. The audience didn’t seem sure about my liberals being more racist than racists routine, so I slightly berated them for their caution. I slightly fear that the current trend for offence or even just worrying that something might be offensive is going to impact on comedy that employs subtlety or irony or just tries to make us question the way we look at the world. I thought a Crouch End audience would love the convoluted logic of this routine (which I consider to me the best thing I’ve ever created) but I think they were just worried that I meant it when I said that racists had a point. Even after I had clearly explained the ludicrous nature of that starting point.
But maybe they were just tired. It was a hot Sunday evening and they’d had nearly two hours of comedy by that point.
And it wasn’t a bad gig. The plus side is that Happy Now? is on its way. Though there is a long way to go!
