Today I went to Hull and back a gruelling journey in which I covered well over half the distance that I drove doing five dates last week and which saw the magical 60,000 mile mark achieved on my milometer on what is very nearly the sixth anniversary of the purchase of my car. But that came just four miles from home and there was a long to go before that magical moment (which reminded me of the old Lee and Herring routine in which Stew claimed the arrival of the year 2000 meant nothing and I asked him whether he thought it meant nothing when you used to be driving in your car and the milometer reached a significant number and everyone went Woooooh!. He said that that also meant nothing and I said, So why does everyone go Woooooh! then Stew? If it means nothing why does everyone go Wooooh!?)
I was in philosophical mood, still slightly down after last nights gig and the shattering revelation of how little I knew about great literature. I was reminded, as I often am at times like these (I may have mentioned this before), of that bit in the Simpsons where the Comic Book Guy is strolling down the road alone, reading what he would no doubt refer to as a graphic novel and commenting to himself with his trademark sneer, But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills. Youre from two different worlds! He then looks up to see a neutron bomb about to hit him and has a rare moment of self-awareness as exclaims, Ive wasted my life!
If Warming Up has one overall message to impart, it must surely be that. It is a document of nothing more than how my life has been frittered away, but I guess I am not too unusual in this. After all, you are frittering your life away by reading it, when you could be catching up on the lifes work of Balzac, which probably is more enriching and has more to say about the human condition than me (I dont know, I havent read anything by him and am even now wondering to myself whether actually he might be a painter or composer. Or a woman).
I thought about my grandfather, who proudly tuned in to one of my early radio shows with some of his friends, who then proceeded to listen to our childish sketches without raising a smile. As the credits ended, one of his friends turned to him and said, What a waste of a good education! But then he was probably wrong about that. I had pretty much wasted my good education by not really bothering to do any work and instead writing comedy sketches and eating crisps and playing fruit machines, whilst Michael Cosgrave watched me.
I was not too down about this. Reading Balzac (or looking at him or listening to him. Or her) is just as much a waste of time as anything else in the long run. All we are doing is wasting time, until time decides it has had enough of being wasted and decides to waste us.
Last nights gig had been interesting. The guys from
Big Cook, Little Cook (Electric Forecast) were on before me and the idiotic heckler at the back had started barracking the red-haired one, because he had red hair. Ginger pubes! was as far as this heckler could go in comedic terms. When he started having a go at me I had said to him, Ah yes, youre the man with the amazing ability to judge the colour of the pubic hair of a person based only on the evidence of what colour the hair on their head is. You go round fair-grounds displaying your talents, only really coming unstuck if the person you are looking at is bald. This didnt really work on the night, but I think it is funnier than they gave me credit for. After I had destroyed him and advised him to kill himself in a few moments of genuine unshackled fury, I ended my tirade by calling him brown pubes which seemed a fitting insult for someone so dull. He dared to mock someone for having ginger pubes, when he himself had nothing of any interest to recommend him to anyone. If he had had ginger pubes himself that would at least have been something mildly interesting, but he didnt. he just had brown pubes and a sense of humour that had not developed beyond the fact that the idea of someone having ginger hair and ginger pubes was inherently funny.
What was the point in trying to make such a person laugh? He is an adult, but yet has not got beyond the idea that ginger hair and ginger pubes are somehow amusing and that it is enough of a joke just to point out this evident fact to a room full of people, with no additional poetry or wit. What chance did I have doing my carefully crafted material about potatoes to such a person? I had so little in common with him and my sense of humour is so much more developed than his that I might as well have tried to make an ant laugh. I didnt think to say this at the time, but wished I had. And next time I chance across someone like this I will have a go at informing him of his true status. But I guess it proves that there are degrees to which you can waste your life and whilst all of us probably waste it, some of us waste it more offensively than others.
My gig at Hull Truck went very well, though I had suspected it would. Its a venue that I have always had fun at and the people of Hull are very happy to have the piss taken out of them and their town. And by the end of it the unpleasant residue of yesterdays gig had been washed away by having done something that was appreciated by the people who saw it. Not that yesterday had entirely been the audiences fault. I had been tired and in a bad mood, but that had been true of tonight as well, but the audience lifted me.
I am enjoying blending stand-up with theatre and think that this might be the way I go with this years show too.
The drive home, that I had been dreading, passed quickly and my mind was more balanced and my thoughts more light-hearted. 6 Day Riot were on the radio, talking to Janice Long about being on Loose Ends. That seemed like a whole lot of time ago and it was weird to have my weekend interconnect with itself in that way. But my life is weird and varied and I think an acceptable way to waste my limited remaining time on earth. Sometimes you need to go to Hull and back to appreciate how lucky you are.
