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Heading out for my last gig of the year, though with the unrelenting awful news and slow plod towards global disaster it felt like we might not need “of the year” at the end of that sentence. It makes life more exciting when stepping outside your own front door feels like you’re going on a life-threatening adventure.
But to be fair the gig totally lifted my spirits and made me forget about the horrible world, which is one of the lovely things about my job (as much as I enjoy the comedy gigs where we wallow in the horror - that just has the same effect with a different method). I was a guest on Pappys monthly gig at the Soho Theatre and the place was packed. I love these guys and they are purveyors of the kind of clever dumbass silliness that I think is my basic sense of humour. Brooding, no-joke, anti-comedy political stuff has its place, but adults being silly for the sake of it is the thing that has most consistently made me laugh throughout my life, from Morecambe and Wise and Tiswas, through Python and the Young Ones, right up to the stupid sketch (usually trios) of today like Pappys, We Are Klang and Peacock and Gamble (and Naughty Keith making up the trio). It’s not necessarily the stuff that gets the critics and the awards people (who view comedy as the lowest art form, unless they are comedy awards in which case silliness is relegated to the lowest of the low in favour of soul-baring and icon toppling), but the stuff that makes you laugh uncontrollably until you forget the stuff that was weighing you down when you entered the room… fuck how isn’t that viewed as being the greatest artistic achievement ever? It’s not like it’s easy to do. It’s arguably easy to be serious and cynical and hit those buttons, but to transcend reality with just a rubbish costume and a well placed fart joke….
Anyway, I arrived to see Tom from the Pappys introducing one of their other guest acts Stuart Goldsmith in an innocent but inappropriate way in front of the liberal elite crowd (also known as reasonable regular Londoners)… “He’s British.. and he’s straight”, his colleagues protested about this, heightening the gag, “He asked me to introduce him this way…” December gigs are often a nightmare of drunken office parties and released frustration, but this crowd was awesome and Stuart was brilliant and playful, though talked a lot about his baby son, meaning that I couldn’t really talk about my baby daughter as I had planned. Then Pappys returned and did a semi-improvised sketch about the ghost of Christmas Past, with Tom sat astride Ben’s shoulders to make him eight foot eleven and pretty much as tall as the ceiling of the venue. They wobbled around and it felt genuinely dangerous, adding a frisson of excitement to the silliness. Especially when Tom steadied himself by continually holding on to a thin bar that held up the lights. Was he about to pull everything down on top of the sketch team, giving a typically gruesome finale to this last gig of 2016.
Joyful, un-selfconscious, not looking to be cool comedy (thus making it actually cool). Pappys have always reminded me a bit of the Seven Raymonds, the sketch group I was in at University (the spirit of which lives on a little bit in AIOTM - both included Emma Kennedy too) and I think it was always my comedic forte to be a bit ramshackle, show-offy and silly. These guys are way better at it than me. And their live shows are a real delight. It perhaps has never quite been captured on TV. But you know maybe TV isn’t all that important after all.
I didn’t have much Christmassy to do, but looking at myself in the mirror in the dressing room, with a burgeoning beard flecked with grey (I haven’t shaved for over a month) and my T shirt stretching over my growing belly I realised what my opening line should be. I said, “I am not going to do anything very Christmassy, although backstage I did notice that I am a dead ringer for Tim Allen about thirty minutes into the Santa Clause.” It was, from the reaction, an astute observation.
And I had a lot of fun in my last gig ever* (*depending on how quickly things escalate), mocking Stuart Goldsmith’s baby and apologising to Matthew Crosby’s wife, whilst still hoping that Windsor Davies outlives her (and the fact that the audience got that reference showed what a roomful of comedy nerds I was performing to - the lowest of the lowest of the low and thus the fucking best).
And as a little extra gift the driver of the black cab that I got home, who didn’t talk to me until right at the end, berated Stewart Lee for being fat and slagging off cockneys and told me that he liked me on the rare occasions I was on TV because I didn’t seem to mind taking the piss out of myself. It was like the ghost of Christmas present giving me a slightly back-handed compliment to end the year on
But thinking about it that taxi driver might have just been Tom from Pappys in a rubbish hat and beard.
All in all I went to bed more cheered up than I'd been when I left the house, even with Trump confirmed as President and Armageddon thus fully on track.
