Motivations and how to make 5 minutes last 3 hours

Published by neil on October 27th, 2005

I met up with a chum yesterday to discuss a potential writing collaboration project over the next few months. Davey Butler started having a bash at standup about the same time I did, so the conversation soon meandered its way in that direction.

Our standup comedy activities have pretty much fizzled out, and it seems for very similar reasons.

Living near London does have the advantage of offering a saturated supply of potential gig venues within an hour or two of travel. In fact, Berkshire offers access to quite a number of clubs outside London within a couple of hours journey too. But life is not rosy on the comedy circuit. Since I took my first tentative steps there has been a veritable tsunami of training courses more than ready and willing to consume the pennies of wannabe comedians. Moulded, standup automatons pour out of such places all clamouring for those first elusive 5 minute open spots, and tearing at each other for a place on every standup competition they can squeeze their how-to-be-funny know-how into.

This all makes life as a wannabie standup very unpleasant. The wannabies discover that it is increasingly difficult to secure a gig. Not only because there are now so many wanting gigs, but also because club promoters are booking fewer unknowns in an attempt to keep the dross at bay and ensure their audiences are getting value for money. The wannabies then team up and start their own clubs. Knowing nothing about promotion or proper scheduling and having an act budget to match, they fill the listings with other wannabies and those desperate for any stage time they can grab. Thus the audiences discover a world of poor comedy in poorly run clubs and a great proportion will never go back - to that or any other comedy club. It is clear that things just go down hill from there. Too many cooks, too many broths and most of the punters are choking on the lumps.
Now I’ll be the first to admit I’ve fallen into exactly that pattern of behaviour, though a little more life experience and some idea about the logistics did help, I am no longer running any clubs.

The difficulty in acquiring good gigs - gigs where there is a mostly professional lineup (after all, how much can you learn on lineups where everyone is no more experienced than yourself?) - inevitably leads to traveling greater distances. My record is a journey to Exeter and back for 10 minutes on stage (a 6+ hour round trip plus 3 hours hanging around at the club). That was a great gig as it turned out, but Dave described his last gig as a round trip to Derby (around 3 hours each way) for 7 minutes during which he died on stage (it happens to all of us). That’s no fun. Like golf, one good laugh can make you keep coming back for more - but at what price? So many of the open circuit comedians I met and got to know when I started out are still pretty much at the same level three years on. Even if they do make a few extra steps up the ladder, the possibility of earning a proper living out of standup comedy is still a very long way off.

Dave’s last gig seemed to be the last straw and, like me, encouraged some soul-searching about what was the true motivation for getting up there in the first place and was this the best way to fulfill that motivation.

So why did I do it?
My life was quite different three years ago - in some respects. Or perhaps more accurately my state of mind was very different. I needed some form of creative expression and standup seemed to be a means of securing pretty immediate pay-off - good or bad - from the sprouting in my head. My inspiration at the time was nowhere near as deeply rooted, but looking back I can now see what drove me to get up in a small room above a Tapas Bar just off Oxford Street (The Troy Club - no longer in that old crappy venue).

It was an essential experience in my life. I discovered that, given the right circumstances, this usually socially inept and generally shy person can be comfortable, no more than comfortable; at home, in front of a crowd of people struggling to make them laugh. That discovery changes one’s perspective on life.

Where does it go?
With that understanding of the core motivation, it is now much easier to sit back, take stock and discover other ways to express the creative urges which do not require the near permanent establishment of my bum in the driver’s seat of my car. With a new life now settling down, the need to be creative is once more there tweaking at my increasingly baggy pants. I mentioned in a previous post about once more putting pen and paint to paper just for the sake of it, and so words to paper are also beginning to flow.

So now something starts. A plan is afoot. A collaboration is about to be… collaborafied… (see more on made-up words in a future post soon).
I don’t want to say too much about it because, well, there is very little to say. The remit is to develop a radio comedy of some form - to be initially recorded and distributed as a podcast, but with the remit of high-quality writing worthy of attracting the interest of ‘proper’ broadcasters. The exact nature of the project will evolve over the coming weeks - we are not pigeon-holing it too tightly at this time. but suffice to say it will have more than a touch of our slightly quirky and surreal outlook on the world. Expect death, destruction and dentistry… or maybe squirrels, who knows?

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