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Hanging around with a tiny and newish human being is a lot of fun, as long as you don’t have anywhere to be. Being a slave to the priorities of a 19 month old can be a bit distracting and exhausting. We were at the park and heading to the sand pit, but Phoebe loves splashing around in puddles (of course, I men who wouldn’t? And what on earth possesses us to stop doing this) and we had to stop at every single dip containing rain water, no matter how small, for her to gleefully stamp in it. I could only really encourage her onwards by pointing out other, as yet unstamped puddles ahead of us.
No puddle must go unsplashed. That’s a life philosophy. It’s all about having fun, enjoying the small things and never getting jaded or bored by something that others might see as pointless. Puddles are fucking awesome. The look like they’d flat and solid but if you splash in them then water goes everywhere and they make a brilliant sound. How did that ever get old?
I used to like that too. And now look at me. Hardly ever splashing in puddles and getting annoyed when I accidentally do. Who is the real lunatic? It is clearly both of us.
It’s great hanging out with this tiny idiot, who provides me mirth and terror in equal measure. She’s had a bit of a cough and woke up in the middle of the night sounding like she was finding it difficult to breath. And that’s where the responsibility and ultimate powerlessness hits you. But she managed to keep breathing and stayed upbeat and happy all day, even if I was pretty much wiped out for the whole day.
Tonight I did a charity gig in Balham for DKMS https://www.dkms.org.uk/en, a very worthy cause, please take a moment to read the website to find out what you can do to help. There was a large bill of maybe 10 or so comedians, most of them not household names and very much weighted towards guys you’d see in clubs rather than Live at the Apollo, but they were all amazing. As I watched them deal effortlessly with a slightly languid crowd I thought about the arbitrary nature of fame and “success”. They were mainly middle-aged men, slightly crushed by life by now, but fantastic at their jobs and all deserving of greater fame. Rich Wilson is a man with funny bones, who had the difficult job of following a woman with blood cancer appealing to the audience to have their cheeks swabbed to see if they might be a match for her and be able to save her life. She was brilliant and inspiring, but you don’t really want to have to do comedy after that. Carey Marx is an utterly fantastic comedian, really great at doing crude and disgusting stuff, but genuinely witty. And Dave Fulton who I chatted with on an Edinburgh Fringe Podcast was able to chat about quite opinionated stuff that I think was at odds with most of the audience in the room and still get them to laugh along. There are just too many comedians for them all to be on TV and all get the acknowledgment they deserve. But in a sense these older guys, lucky to have a lifestyle and a job like this, but slightly dented by age and the knowledge that they haven’t had the breaks that they maybe deserve, are more interesting as artists than the TV comics who have it all. They have something to say about life and are perhaps too easily dismissed by snooty critics as dealing with well-trod subjects. But that wouldn’t be entirely fair anyway, as they all found interesting new angles on nearly everything they talked about (actually harder on subjects that are well covered), but also it’s about the spirit they convey. All of them have lived and all of them had a sprinkle of tragedy in their souls which made them more interesting to watch than youngsters full of hope. And they were all excellent comedians. Too excellent in fact. I knew it would be hard for me to follow them. They were in their comfort zone of doing short spots in front of an audience who they had to win round. I don’t really so this stuff any more.
And indeed I struggled to begin with. I don’t know what happened. My opening joke, which takes a little while to get to the punchline but almost always works well, played to pretty much nothing. It threw me a bit as I tried to work out why. Had I missed something out? Were the crowd distracted by some talking (I think coming from the woman with blood cancer, so I couldn’t really tell her to shut up, but that would have made the gig a lot more interesting)? Was I just too different in style to the preceding comics, all of whom had come on natural and chatty, whilst I launched into a convoluted piece of material? Or did they just sense I was thrown by whatever had just happened or failed to happen and were nervous that I might be terrible? They didn’t know who I was (and why should they?) but most of my audiences do now, so it was tricky to show them who I was, especially as I was tired and messy and just wearing a baggy T shirt.
It picked up a little bit as I went on, but I know that I wasn’t as good as this as any of the guys who had preceded me and it was discombobulating to have to dig in and find a way to get the laughs. Nothing got the reactions I expected and after some of my more risqué stuff had been shocking, they really went for the bit about my Hermione hands. Which seemed odd. I sort of enjoyed the battle. But had I been in the audience and asked to pick out the comedian who was able to make a living by touring in his own right I don’t think I would have chosen me.
Success in this business is down to hard work and talent in various measures, perhaps also by having the ambition and belief to keep pushing. But I’d say a lot of it is fairly arbitrary. There’s a good deal of luck. Sometimes I feel unlucky, but other times you realise how fortunate you are.
