It’s summer time, which for a comedian means lots
of gigs in sweaty tents at the music festivals that spring up in fields in the
middle of nowhere, only to disappear again like litterbug ghosts in the night.
They are quite tricky to play. You get very
mixed audiences: families, small children, people a little the worse for wear,
looking for somewhere to chill out.
The other weekend I was at the Nostock festival
near Hereford. I was only at the event for two hours; suspiciously fresh-faced,
clean, well rested and free from illegal substances. The tent had a very
peculiar smell in it, like someone had been cooking exotic herbs and I worried that the strangely glass-eyed audience
might recognise me for the square that I was, drag me out of the marquee in disgust and burn me in a
wicker man.
I
was following the wonderfully drunk and proudly half-arsed Bob Slayer (I am embarrassed
about how many years passed before I spotted the joke in his name), who lives
his art by refusing to spend a second of the day sober. He is exactly the kind
of act you want at a festival: a beardy shouting man, more out of it than the
crowd, reading the Hungry Caterpillar whilst getting a member of the audience
to act out the part of the eponymous hero encased in a green sleeping bag,
whilst force-feeding him apples. How do you follow that? I feared my blend of
pedantry and swearing would be totally the wrong thing for this family/drug-addled
crowd. I was down to do thirty minutes, but I only have about ninety seconds of
jokes appropriate for those under 14.
My
only option was to address this right from the start and explain that I could
make few concessions. To give any concerned parents time to leave I told the
only kids joke I know (which is still quite rude). “What’s brown and taps on
your window? A poo on stilts.”
There
was a wide-eyed and angelic looking boy of no more than four years old who was
sitting cross-legged on the front row. He quite liked the stilt-poo joke. I
would chat with him every now and again, apologising for saying that children
were incapable of love and calling them “sexual excrement”. He seemed OK with
it as hopefully it was going over his head.
I
wracked my brain for another kids’ joke and thought I’d remembered one, but
recalled too late that it was actually a parody, deliberately bad gag, “Where
does a bird leave its sexual orgnas when it goes to a nightclub? In the cloaca
room.”
I
acknowledged that that quip needed a knowledge of bird biology that would be
beyond most adults. But also would a child even understand what a cloakroom
was? “You can’t possibly know,” I told him, “Forget about cloacas, a cloak is a
rather archaic concept. I mean where do you leave your cloak?”
I
had intended this to be a rhetorical question, but the angelic scamp piped up,
“In my mummy’s bedroom”. Which is now the all time favourite heckle I have
received. It brought the house down. Or the tent rather.
Later
I asked the boy who was funnier, me or Mr Tumble. He didn’t even have to think
about it - Mr Tumble. So I did my impression of the slapstick clown by going to
have a drink and then throwing water all over myself. Which to be fair did go
down very well with the pre-school demographic. Maybe I have a child friendly
act after all.
For a comedian I come up with surprisingly few jokes. When I
do one it makes the newspapers. Here’s my latest. Hope you enjoy it. “My great-grandad had a trout shop, my
grandad had a haddock shop, my dad ran a cod shop and I have just opened a mackerel
shop. I guess I have inherited the sell-fish gene.” It’s all right. I won’t
give up the day job.
