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Wednesday 17th April 2024

7800/20741
The Trigger warning might have to go on the show. This story of testicular cancer includes testicle peril. Took out another audience member tonight (though I didn't see this one). It's made the (comedy) news. Will this discourage or encourage men to come and see the show. Are you man enough to handle my balls?
It was a flatter audience tonight, for the first half at least, though I thought I did the material better. Though after the interval they were much better than last night, though I thought I did that half a little worse (though the puppet show was better). You stop trying to analyse it after a while. The comments at the end were effusive (though one guy, who was impressed enough to buy a book said it was a difficult subject to make funny but I'd done well in getting a couple of laughs out of it - I had hoped for more than that!) so they'd liked it, I think. You'd drive yourself mad if you tried to work out why audiences vary in this way - I don't think it was me, but then again I didn't feel quite as hyped up before I went on, so maybe it was me. It was still a good show, just a different atmosphere. Why did I say you stop trying to analyse it and then immediately try to analyse it?
I definitely need to sit down and work on the second half, but it's fun to try and wing it and it's improving every time, but three nights of gigs in a row and my brain was tired and I forgot a few bits and the ant trail went blank a couple of times, but I managed to stall until I picked it up.
And I was too tired in the daytime to do much work on the show. I watched Mammoth which is a lot of fun. Hard to know these days whether a TV show will make the leap and become a well remembered classic, but the character that Mike Bubbins has created here is fun and has a depth to his shallowness and they haven't gone the obvious route of this 1970s games teacher frozen in snow and now resuscitated railing against the modern world, but instead trying to learn and fit in.
I've also been listening to Heresy by Catherine Nixey which I happened to see in a book shop earlier in the week and knew would be right up my street. It's partly about the gospels and Jesus stories that didn't make it into the New Testament, where Jesus killed his playmates as a kid and someone got their hand burned off in the Virgin Mary's vagina - and reminded me of a sitcom idea I'd had myself about someone in the modern day being impregnated by some being not of this world and having to work out if the highly magical baby is good, evil or whether such concepts have any meaning. The angry and superior child-Jesus that we don't generally hear about does make a lot of sense. If you were a God and you were still a kid, imagine what kind of stuff you'd get up to. Heresy is about a lot more than this too. I hope I can get Catherine on the book club to talk about it.



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