Still-born comedy: stay in the toilet (sorry, dressing room)

Published by neil on April 18th, 2006

Are you available next Saturday for a gig in Birmingham and can you pick up a dwarf on the way?

If that’s the only remnant of my time in stand-up comedy, then it was worth it. Yes, that’s what I heard one day from a promoter who needed to get the (very short) headline act from near me, to Birmingham, with the offer of a ten minute open spot* in return. I took the gig, delivered the headline act (she was very funny, I might add) and went home having totally died on my arse more than any other gig I had ever done before or since. This particular public form of death is what jEN so colourfully and accurately described as ’still-born’.

Dying before an audience is a great grounding experience. Little in life is much tougher than delivering your finest gag to a tumultuous round of silence. And if you survive the experience more than once you’ll be a much more rounded person because of it - certainly taught me a thing or two.

So here are my top five reasons I died on stage during my brief standup non-career:

1. The very nice bloke but useless compere introduced me while the audience was still clapping the last act (so they didn’t hear him right) then left the stage, blocking my passage so that by the time I reached the mic, the entire audience had finished clapping and had been staring at nothing for a few seconds. Trust me, a start like that takes a lot of experience to pull back from! This is the Birmingham/dwarf gig mentioned above.

2. The increasingly drunk audience had been listening to 90 minutes of knob-gags and fanny-gags (that’s front-bottom to you Americans) and there I go on with my hilarious seven-minute routine about God messing up the creation of the universe, the world being taken over by intelligent onions, and finishing up with a garlic-themed rendition of the end of Planet of the Apes. A few people are clearly silently pissing themselves, while the rest of the audience stares in bemused silence.

3. The room was so packed I had the front row table almost touching my crotch. OK, so all the acts that night had the same problem and some of them didn’t die, but it sure made me feel uncomfortable. Thinking about it, somewhere on my hard disk is a video of that gig

4. Too few people know that bees dance in order to communicate the location of nectar to their mates. Though I have to say on a couple of occasions I did manage to pull this one back - perhaps Gervais and Merchant saw that opening and used it for the basis of the infamous David Brent dancing scene (no, they didn’t, I’m kidding). At least when I saw that I realised how sad I must have looked demonstrating how bees would communicate the location of every McDonalds in the Greater London area.

5. In a competition the compere selected the running order by getting all comics to select from an old tarot card deck. My knowledge of the card meanings meant when I picked “The Tower”, I knew it was going to be a bad night.

*Open Spot: an opportunity to stand in front of an audience and do your stuff for a few minutes without: a) any form of financial compensation; b) an ounce of understanding or respect from the less scrupulous promoter that you’ve travelled for two hours to get there; c) any real chance to get a better spot later in the season like they promise because you are actually just a means of them filling stage time for as little money as possible.

Tags: Comedy, Personal
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