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Back to work today (if only for the evening) with a return to Norden Farm in Maidenhead. My show was up against Paul Ross, which is always a dangerous place to be, but came out victorious with me having more than double his audience (which sounds impressive as long as I don’t tell you how many people he had in). Take that Ross. In the battle of the nearly men I came out on top (or does a win mean that actually he’s the best nearly man?)
I wasn’t really feeling in the mood to do the show and was mildly annoyed to have been dragged away from my holiday to perform to relatively few people, but aside from a grumpy couple in the front row who left during the audience, it was a great crowd and one of the most relaxed performances I’ve done. Maybe I should take five days off before every show.
Having arrived much too early I amused myself with some deliberately bad tweeting in a pretend attempt to attract sports fans to my feed. What’s interesting about being rubbish on purpose on Twitter is how many people fail to understand. Or do they understand and are joining in and it’s me who has failed to understand. It’s complex.
As England stormed to dominance in the Test Match I tweeted "Sri Lanka? More like Sri Notverygoodatcricket-a.” I was surprised that only a couple of people came back with "Sri Wanka, more like”, thinking I might not have spotted the more obvious pun and failing to note that my tweet was a deliberate miss. Which takes some doing. Given that “Not very good at cricket-a” is not really a pun on Lanka.
A few people tried some proper puns so I tweeted "To clarify, the reason I call them Sri Notverygoodatcricket-a is because they are not very good at cricket. And it's a pun on their name. And their name is Sri Lanka. Hence the joke."
I then moved sports and noting that the Championship playoff was currently 0-0, I tweeted, "Hull City, more like Hull can’tscoreagoal.” Someone suggested “Hull Shitty” of course, thus failing to join in with the spirit of things. Someone else tweeted “Null City” and I told him that wasn’t as good as mine and to leave the jokes to the professionals. But what kind of person reads those tweets and thinks I am looking for or would be interested in genuine puns?
And then for the sake of balance moved on to their opposition and an attempt to parody poor observational comedy by tweeting "Sheffield Wednesday. Maybe lads,but it's Saturday today. No wonder you haven't scored if you turned up on Wednesday. Not Saturday as planned."
Come the interval I saw that there was a European cup final between Real Madrid and Madrid Atletico and so tweeted, "Hey, I hope Madrid win! Geddit. Just doing more sports gags for the sports guys. I hope Madrid wins!” Again the tone very much, “I am doing deliberately shit jokes here guys”.
Then followed it up with "And I hope the Real Madrid wins, not those other fuckers pretending they are Madrid! Am I right? You wish you were Madrid."
I admit this was a little harder to spot as a parody and that if I was a certain type of act this might be my genuine on-stage material, but I’d hope my followers could spot what I was up to. But one tweeter responded, “That was a fucking stupid thing to say.” Joining in or genuinely annoyed? I think the latter, but who knows?
"The other team should say they are Real Madrid too. Or what's the point?” I continued, before preempting those with long memories and saying, "And the winner gets a bowl of jelly."
And to prove I could be on panel shows and prime time TV if I wanted I added, "Athletico Madrid should get back to the shot putt and high jump. That's what they trained for. Come on sports fans. I am smashing this."
Given I was playing an ignorant man trying to join in you’d assume surely that no one could get upset about me misspelling Atletico, because of course it’s partly to make the “joke” “work” and also highlights that I am a man pretending to like sport whilst knowing nothing about it. You’d be wrong though.
Others thought my jokes were sincere (or were they joining in?) @Boredstoopid: said "Hahahhah. Athletic. Shot putting and high jumping. #TopComedyContent” so I thanked him and said, “Because it’s like athletics at school."
There’s little more enjoyable than someone trying to show they are comedically and intellectually superior to you, whilst completely failing to understand what the actual joke is because their own sense of humour is not sophisticated enough. Unless they were being stupid deliberately in order to add to the joke/take the piss, in which case there is little more enjoyable than me claiming to be good at comedy whilst failing to understand that.
Comedy is a tricky business. I certainly have no idea how it works.
