A bit of a weird gig tonight, though ultimately it came out OK. Last night I had been talking to Sean Hughes about how getting old was making my memory a bit worse - "Not on stage, though?" he asked.
"No, not on stage. I always pretty much remember what I have to say on stage.
Perhaps this was tempting fate or perhaps staying up late into the night drinking whisky had something to do with it, but I knew from the start of tonight's show that I was going to struggle a little bit. I had considered going through the show beforehand, but it's not even a fortnight since I last did it and I've been through it all over 50 times in the last three months, so surely it would come back to me.
Yet as I began the show to an enthusiastic sell out crowd (I always seem to sell tickets in Brighton) my brain was already taunting me. As I think I have discussed before when one is performing (or at least when I am) it's like there are two of you. There's the you saying the stuff and then there's a voice in your head carrying on an internal monologue, often keeping track of what is going on, but sometimes filling your mind with doubts. Perhaps I am just mentally ill.
Tonight the voice was telling me that I was never going to get through the show, that I would fuck things up through lack of rehearsal and asking me what would happen if I just dried up and couldn't go on. "You're going to fuck up this joke" it was saying as I went into an early one-liner. I didn't as it happened - everything was coming out more or less right, but I couldn't think too far ahead because I was finding that I wasn't sure what came next and had to trust the pathways in my brain were intact and that one thought would lead to another.
I had another slightly eccentric front row, though they weren't as disruptive as
the man at the Arts Theatre. When I accused a man in the front row of being a paedophile and said he had a pocket full of sweets, the group laughed and pointed out to me that they young man sitting next to him was holding a gigantic stick of rock. I was able to riff about how this was the staple food of the Brighton people and that they had to have some with them at all times, and ascertained that this surly young man was 19 years old. I questioned whether he might be a bit old to be buying rock. It was all pretty funny at the time.
But a few minutes later as I was halfway through a routine he started unwrapping the rock noisily and eating it. I had to get through the bit, but then I chastised him for sitting in the front row of a comedy gig and eating rock. I told him I was an idiot and that I was glad I wasn't 19 now I'd met him and thought being 40 was great. "Do you realise I am under half your age," he sneered.
"Yes," I replied, "But you're not a girl, so I'm not interested!" It got a good laugh and then I added, "Although when in Brighton...."
It was all just about the right side of disruptive and it meant that a lot of the early part of the show was ad-libbed, but I was coming up with jokes and it was all good humoured.
But the interruptions continued and during the
Hot Dog bit another man questioned my definition of buns being buttocks. "Buns are breasts," he shouted. I have heard this before from a couple of people, though never during the show, but they are wrong. Buns is the American slang term for buttocks. If you don't believe me, look in
a dictionary. Baps are breasts. But buns are not. I took the man to task for his lack of knowledge and it was all amusing enough, though one of the other front row idiots unamusingly commented that buns were actually bread. But the disruption meant I got a couple of pieces of the routine in a different order to usual and then as my evil brain had been predicting my mind went blank, I froze and I couldn't remember what happened at the end of the routine. I knew there was a significant chunk to go and I knew it was the funniest bit of the story, but I had absolutely no clue what it was. This happens every now and again and usually if I bluster around a bit then the right piece of information will come into my head. But with rock eating and ignorant comments about buns and a week and a half off from doing the show and a slight hangover, nothing was occurring to me. I admitted to the audience that I had forgotten what came next, hoping that that would give me time to remember, but as hard as I tried I had no idea. It was very unsettling for me. How could I be so lost in something that was actually completely familiar to me? I had to admit defeat and press on to the next bit, now worried that I would dry again. Once was funny and forgivable, but if it happened again I was going to be short-changing this lovely crowd. Although there were a few bits that I didn't do as well as I possibly can, I did get through the rest of the show, but was still troubled by this blank page in my head when I got to the dressing room. Like someone had just deleted part of my brain. After a few minutes of thinking hard about it I realised that the stuff I had got lost on was the discussion of the arrow on the T-shirt insulting the intelligence of the anal-sex-with-strangers fan and my hypothesis on how the arrow got there. I had remembered much too late though and was annoyed with myself. Luckily the rest of the show went well, so I think I got away with it.
I have only ever dried like that once before in my solo work, when I was doing Talking Cock and forgot my place entirely when I was about 100 shows in! Then I had arrogant tour manager Simon Streeting to prompt me from the script - though he hadn't been paying attention and it took him a while to find out where I was. It's an uncomfortable feeling to have no idea what's going on when hundreds of people are waiting for you to say something, but luckily with comedy it is easy to make light of it and ad-lib something. Which you can't do if you're doing Hamlet and forget what comes after "To be or not to be?"
Later in the I chatted about my failure to Mark Steel who'd been on in another venue. He admitted that totally drying was rare, but that he sometimes had to fill when he forgot what was coming next by pretending to be an elderly lecturer who has lost his place. Reassuringly he also talked about how lonely and depressing touring can be, having had the exact same experience as I did earlier in the year of finding it hard to cope with going from a room of people laughing, back to a hotel bar or bedroom on your own. It made me feel better that I wasn't the only one to have suffered, which is a weirdly human response to other people's misery!
