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Off to Ealing tonight for a rare (these days) twenty minute set at the Ealing Comedy Festival. I had decided to try a bit of the stuff from the CIHMBB live show, but was a bit worried that it might not fly in front of an audience that wasn't my own or that it might be a bit of a depressing subject matter for a Friday night comedy crowd.
To be fair though, I didn't have much choice. I have elected to bin all pre-Covid material and I don't have anything else. The ball stuff has been going well in preview and there's plenty of ball jokes near the top, so I thought I'd be OK. But it's one thing doing it in a room with 80 comedy fans who probably know all about you and another doing it to 1000 people as part of a mixed bill.
I have always shied away from doing anything but my most crowd pleasing stuff at gigs like this - mainly my one liners and my cruder longer routines (aside from the year that I did Someone Likes Yoghurt where I did whatever the Hell I thought was funny even if it wasn't). So to try out some stories (about cancer) in such a big gig felt risky. But like i say, I had no choice. Even if I wanted to try something else, I couldn't really remember any of my old jokes.
I have done this gig before, but many years ago. It's in a tent on the common in Ealing. A tent is always a weird place to do comedy, as the sound can be dampened and the laughter can disappear into the roof, but for some reason this one really works. It was a fabulous bill with Jo Caulfield MCing, me opening, Alan Davies in the middle and then Mawaan Rizman and his band to close. So until that closing act it, as Alan pointed out, it could have been a bill from the Screaming Blue Murder comedy club in 1993 (he was wrong, I gave up stand up in 1992, but the point was still a valid one).
I was basically free of nerves as I waited backstage, which was weird in itself, given how new this material is and how many people were there. But once I got out there it all pretty much flew. I had to work out where I was going next based on how much time I had left to me, but got enough of the story and jokes in to keep things going and it was an incredible buzz to get big laughs from a big crowd. You can choose to ride the waves of laughter or plough through them and I enjoyed mixing that up too.
I went out the front to watch Alan and Jo in the next section - all of us doing material about visiting the doctor, showing that the edgy comedians of the 1990s were now all falling apart. Both were great, but sitting slightly outside the tent, looking in at the audience and the stage I couldn't believe that I had just been up there or that I would even dream of having the brass ball to even attempt such a thing. As much as I had enjoyed being on stage and had been in control, if not command, that felt like something beyond the person now sitting watching. It's partly because I haven't done this for a while, but also partly because I still can't believe I am a comedian or at least a capable one.
This job is absolutely insane.
It was cool to hang around with the other comics and the promoter (who had a much more terrifying testicular cancer story than mine and some solid jokes about it too) and felt a little bit too good to be back on stage. As you know I don't do drugs, but I guess this is a similar thing - the confidence and feeling of power it gives you, the delight at making people laugh (or disgusted) and then the come down afterwards where you start to question if any of that was actually real. Though it's a mellow come down where you buzz for hours afterwards. On a good gig. The bad ones are like bad trips too. This is why giving comics cocaine on the top of all this is a very bad idea. And some comics start to mistake the stage feelings for real feelings and actually believe they are gods amongst men all the time. So I am glad that all I feel afterwards is a queasy sense of disbelief.
I have a feeling though, that this will be a very strong stand up show when I have done more work on it. It's got that great combination of being personal and serious, whilst also containing ridiculous and comedic events at every turn. Though I think when something new and different happens to a comedian they are much more open to spotting the ridiculous and focusing in on why it's funny. Noticing the dent in the CT machine is a prime example of that.
So the one ball juggernaut rolls on.
