Stupidly drank a few glasses of wine on an empty stomach last night and boy did I feel the effects today?
Yes I did.
I was exhausted and low in energy and after a difficult drive through the rain from Hastings I just wanted to go to bed and catch up on the sleep that I missed out on last night.
But I am wicked and so there is no rest for me. I had to go out tonight for the Lyric Hammersmith Ladies' Night, where I was compering four of the best stand ups on the circuit (who also happen to all be women) Sara Pascoe, Isy Suttie, Nina Conti and Sarah Millican.
Although officially I was not a woman, I had agreed to hack off my own genitals and construct a rudimentary vagina from the bleeding wound, so I was allowed to take part.
I was far from being in the zone and my brain was not working properly. I hoped to just go out there and wing it and try and chat about whatever came into my head, using conversations with the audience to suggest new material, but even as I announced myself on the off stage mic I managed to fluff the words "Ladies and Gentlemen" and everything suggested I was not going to be on top form.
A functioning brain is one of the main necessities for a comedian, especially one who is hoping to improvise. Usually if there is a bit of a hiatus I would go back to an old bit of actual material, but my brain wasn't even working well enough to remember that.
Given these restrictions I think I started pretty well and all sorts of reasonably funny and disparate ideas were flying out, but I also seemed keen to deliberately send myself down blind alleys and experiment with being boring and self-critical and pointing out when jokes hadn't worked. Some of this was OK, but much of it was actually just rubbish. Not that it really mattered. On another day I would have blathered on and something else would have come to me, but my brain kept crashing and didn't seem to be rebooting and a lot of it fell flat. In some ways it was a transitional gig, because I was taking a leap in the dark and really leaving all script behind and on a day when I was fresher this might have worked better. One of my goals is to be able to go on stage with no script and just talk for an hour and be funny - I suppose we are doing that to some success in the podcasts, but these Lyric gigs are an excellent place to try and hone my compering skills. And there was plenty of wheat amongst the chaff and some really neat ideas, but too often the lovely audience just stared at me in silence as if I was a drunk uncle at a wedding dancing with his cock out.
And I was playing up to this a bit, to be fair, not by getting my cock out (it was after all in a bin backstage) but by pretending to be more drunk than I was and by sabotaging myself and punishing the audience by talking about "Saved By The Bell" for longer the less funny they found it.
Thinking back actually, this was very close to being amazing, but was just not quite right and I wasn't in the correct frame of mind. I really wanted to go home to bed and sometimes that really showed.
Luckily all the acts were amazing, and I had really helped to prove that women are much funnier than men (or than me at least). It didn't matter if the compere was embarrassing and unstable, because the actual comedians were marvelous. Nina Conti's act especially for me is going from strength to strength and reaching theatrical levels in its deconstruction and examinations of reality itself. And Sarah Millican is bound to become a massive star, though unlike some of the stadium playing comedians she will be joining very soon she actually has the material to back it up.
And I might look back at this gig as an important stepping stone in my bid to push the boat away from the dock and perform without anything prepared at all.
Unbeknownst to me, unfortunately there was a Guardian reviewer in to see my messy hungover shambles and doubly unfortunately for me it was Brian Logan, who maybe has a score or two to settle after the "racism" debacle of last year.
Here's his review. I think he is within his rights to give me the write up he does, although it might be worth pointing out that I was ad libbing whilst everyone else had scripted material and that on many occasions I managed to refill the room with the laughter that I had drained out of the room. It was definitely an off night for me though and it's a shame after all the exciting and funny nights I have compered at the Lyric that this is the one that I get reviewed for.
But everyone else was great and that is the main thing.
