Warming Up

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Thursday 27th October 2005

I had spent the morning talking about offensive comedy for a Channel 5 programme. I was pontificating as usual about how the job of the comedian is to push back boundaries of taste to act as a release valve for society. Blah Blah blah. You've probably read enough Warming Ups to know what I said.
It didn't put me in the best frame of mind for my gig in Hastings tonight. I was appearing at a friend's club which hasn't been running for too long.
Being a comedian is a strange profession. On Tuesday night I did a great gig in Manchester and was totally on top of my game, in command from the start and able to ad-lib elegantly and eloquently (there’s a lovely review of the show here ) and yet in Hastings just 48 hours later I was distant and gabbling and my attempts to banter and riff were leaden and unamusing. I was tired and stressed and a little depressed about stuff in general which didn’t help and I had arrived a little bit late and flustered having had to drive down dark country roads.
The audience seemed slightly shocked by an early gag that I consider fairly tame and my reaction to this was to try and turn things up a notch. I decided to experiment a little bit more with the more angry and misanthropic side of myself, which sometimes can turn things round, but often make things much worse. There had been a little dissent in the audience and I started turning on people who were heckling me, even though in hindsight I can see that most of them were being lovely and trying to help. This might have been the correct way to behave at a rowdy Saturday night in Glasgow when Scotland have just been knocked out of the World Cup, but I was much too aggressive and rude.
It wasn’t a total disaster, though I felt embarrassed and ashamed of myself as I drove home. It’s good that I am experimenting more and taking chances and trying to make stuff up on the spot. It’s just interesting that one day you can be so good and then the next performance you do is barely adequate. I suppose it’s what keeps this job interesting.
I had written a much better version of this entry, but cleverly managed to delete it before pressing the button to put it on the site. And I didn’t have time to recreate it well. So apologies for that.