In the twenty or so years that I have been performing comedy on stage I have never, as far as I recall, been assaulted by a member of the audience. You may recall I got into a fist fight after
that gig in Liverpool, but the woman kicking lecturer hadn't been at my show. I have had to be snuck out of a few venues,
like this one in Northampton and sometimes there have been stand offs on stage
like the time a squaddie came practically nose to nose with me on stage in Aldershot warning me not to condescend to him. And practically a quarter of million people have now seen
that bus driver lunge towards me and he did try to
start something outside. I have occasionally tried to start something with an audience member, as documented
in this New Statesman article. But until today, no audience member has laid a finger on me, even if sometimes I might have deserved it.
Tonight after my gig in Nottingham, a disgruntled and I am guessing rather inebriated young woman came up to me after the gig and slapped me in the face. Alas she was not eloquent enough to explain what it was in particular that had upset her, but she had to be restrained from continuing the assault, merely saying that I deserved a lot worse.
It's fair enough not to find me funny, or to be offended by something I've said (especially, if like a proportion of people, alcohol seems to flick off your irony detection switch), but to physically assault someone, as pretty much the opening salvo is, I believe unacceptable. Luckily her slap had been weak and had not hurt me at all, but it was a strange occurrence, especially as other people coming at me to tell me how much they'd enjoyed it. In fact the next two women who arrived must have been a bit bamboozled by my reaction, as I was worrying that they were friends of the first one and about to pinch me and give me a Chinese burn.
It had been rather a lovely gig and I had come up with some funny new stuff and handled a female heckler (possibly the same woman) rather well. But in an electric set where I played around with offensive ideas it's hard to know what might have got to her - which is why it's always best to use words rather than violence to settle problems.
I had, as usual, lightly mocked Nottingham's Tales of Robin Hood Experience, but also chastised the city for making so much capital from the lives of people who did not actually exist. I enjoyed rubbing the Nottingham people's faces in the fact that Robin Hood was at best a composite, who had probably not even lived in Nottingham even if he wasn't made up and that their city was built on lies. Even Friar Tuck isn't real, I informed them. "Oh surely not," I mocked, pretending to be one of them, "Not Friar Tuck. He must be real. What about Little John. You couldn't make him up. They called him Little, but he was actually really big. No one could make up something as brilliant as that." So maybe that was the cause of the offence.
The woman who had heckled me had been annoyed by the "Give Me Head, Til I'm Dead" routine. Just as it ended to a large round of applause she shouted, "Could you talk about something else now please?" Of course I had been just about to, but instead ended up talking about it a lot more to annoy her as well as laying into her a little and pointing out that everyone else had enjoyed it and it wasn't my fault if she wasn't capable of concentrating for 10 minutes on one idea."But you might be right. It might be shit. And only you have realised. The majority is not always right. Was the majority right when they crucified Jesus? On that occasion they were, that wasn't a very good example."
So that might have annoyed her.
Or maybe it was the old joke I did from menage a un about the vagina being my third favourite sexual orifice after the anus and a stab wound in the stomach. Maybe she thought that was sexist, but a) it does not specify the sex of the stomach, so my wound fucking activities are open to all comers, b) that show has been praised by a feminist writer in her thesis that I mentioned the other day - she understood the overall point I was making and c) it's obviously a joke.
I had then done my small handed wanking off paedophile material to show the complaining woman that by complaining she had just made me be more offensive. She might not have liked that, if like some people she had just heard the word paedophile and made a knee jerk reaction that that was not a subject for comedy. But the routine is about society's attitudes to this problem and in no way mocking the victims and on a literal level is saying wouldn't it be better if paedophiles were satisfied by consenting grown men with child-like hands rather than raping children, which is hard to argue against.
Not everyone was enjoying this routine as much as the rest of my stuff, but there was a real frisson of excitement in the air. A couple of women in the front looked disapprovingly at me and I said, "Yeah better we don't talk about this subject at all isn't it? Better it's kept secret and no one mentions it. That's the way to deal with it." I then took a chance on another idea I've been mulling around, but have not done before. I am concerned by the consensus that paedophiles should be killed or castrated. Whilst I feel that they are doing something deplorable and indefensible, they are doing it because they are unbalanced or unwell and at worst I think they should be locked away, but somewhere that they can be helped. It's not a normal thing to want to do and I don't think it's a choice that the majority of people would even consider. There's a lot to argue that by treating paedophiles like pariahs that should be killed that we are driving them into hiding and making them a lot more dangerous than if we treated them with more sympathy or attempted to help them rather than kill them and anyone who sounds like they might be one, such as the paediatricians who are supposed to have been attacked. So my new satirical response to the people who claim that paedophiles should be killed is to point out that most paedophiles were actually abused themselves as children, so if you really want to sort out the problem then we should really just hang any child who has been abused. (I am wondering if that is my original idea - not that I have heard anyone do it, just that it seems like it might be an obvious comedic leap to make, so if you've heard it somewhere else then let me know).
Now if you're drunk and not thinking or don't understand satire that might be the kind of thing that makes you want to slap someone. But the point of it is clearly to point out the stupidity of wishing violence on someone who might actually be the victim of the thing you abhore so much themselves. Really I am trying to get people thinking about things, especially a subject like this where there is so much unfocused anger and refusal to consider logic.
So maybe that's why she hit me, though another man passing by beforehand had said, "You were really funny. I've got kids, but that was still really funny."
The promoter rang me later to say that the woman was from quite a right on bunch and that she works in a local Arts Cinema. So it's interesting that she felt it was acceptable to resort to violence over this issue. When I originally did my Maxine Carr joke, before I had really got it into the form that it finally was in, where I think there was a satirical point along with the naughtiness of it, a man had approached me after a gig and reasonably told me that his young daughter had died and to ask me if I would still make a joke about that subject if that had happened to me. I said that I thought I still would, because whatever I might say I don't think the death or the abuse of a child is funny. He was satisfied with this response, but certainly made me think long and hard about the joke and whether it was acceptable. Talking to me in a calm and dignified manner and explaining the possible grievance was a much more effective weapon than a girly slap in the face.
Even if my jokes had been unacceptable (with the caveat that being unacceptable is part of the job and you have to buy into that) then her response was massively inappropriate. But this is drunken Britain combined with the new moral and judgemental Britain and maybe there will be more slaps to come. To be honest I was quite relieved it was a middle class girl ineffectually slapping at me, rather than one of the brawnier working men. I guess there is a danger to this job.
And I think if she was sober and we talked rationally about it all that she's see we were actually arguing the same thing.
Unless it was the Friar Tuck crack that had enraged her. I will never change my views on that. Nottingham is built on lies and it must be hard for the local populace, with their humdrum lives, to have that truth rubbed in their face.
