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The long haul to 2027's Oh Shit I am Sixty! began tonight (more accurately I did the earliest version of some of the material in the more recent Michael Sheen RHLSTP and he came up with some great lines that I fully intend to steal).
I was doing a charity gig in Oxford to help feed the Ukranian army. In fact the poster promised to "help feed the Ukranian army with Richard Herring". I am happy to do my bit, but not sure, even with me quite porky at the mo, that there's enough to go round. I wondered if I would turn up in a room which was full of Ukranian soldiers, all holding knives and forks and just have to go along with it.
As always whenever I have agreed to do something, especially if it is some distance from my house, I was regretting agreeing to do this gig this morning. Oxford is further away than I realised and I didn't think I had any stuff to do and I hate Ukraine and love President Putin. I'd woken up very early again and was very tired and worried about the drive home.
Simon Munnery had already cried off with a dicky tummy, so I had no recourse and so after an early morning game of tennis, I spent the rest of the day trawling blogs for good jokes (surprisingly few funny entries recently) and listened to that RHLSTP to see what jokes I'd done about my failing, hairy penis.
I got a bit of stuff together. I thought I could busk a bit about those ultimately murderous butterflies and I thought I'd try out the AI script for the show to see how it played in front of an audience. I think the butterflies might find a place in the show, though I need to work on it, but the AI stuff, although it went well, felt a bit too long and like something that was fun just the once, though I did find a new joke is the fact that the script refers to "that wizard from those fantasy films" when AI has access to all the information in the world and it would surely be easy for it to be more precise.
The mistake the AI script really makes is that there's nothing about male genitalia in the set, yet aside from me reading that script and the bit about the butterflies, everything I did was about broken dicks and missing balls. I thought I'd just take an unrehearsed run at some of the Ball Back material to make up my time, and even though it's six weeks since the last time, I pretty much remembered it.
It was a lovely audience in the unusual but excellent venue of Cowley Working Men's Club, but we raised a good amount of money and it was nice to hang backstage with the other comics and Paddy the promoter (who now spends most of his time in Ukraine helping the war effort).
I had considered breaking my resolution not to do any pre-covid material in stand-up sets (I think I've stuck to that, though might have done a couple of old jokes at one of the stand up nights I put on for the kids' old school), but now I can't really remember any of the stuff I used to do. Even doing Ball Back stuff felt like slightly cheating, but I never did that show in Oxford and I'd have been hard pressed to do 40+ minutes of new material. I'm good, but I am not that good.
Some early promise for my next stand up show, but a very long way to go. And I don't want to work too hard on it yet, as I don't like to assume I will be alive in 2027.
