Days Without Alcohol - 91.
It had been a long drive home after a difficult gig in Taunton - massive hall, people having dinner at tables, very drunk and not prepared to listen - I had battled through for an overall victory, but it was a long way to go to be shouted at. It meant there was plenty of spontaneous material though. At one point a bloke shouted that I should just tell a joke and someone else shouted "Knock Knock". Rather than answering him with "Who's there?" I said, "Knock Knock" and he was drunk enough to allow me to take the upper hand and said, "Who's there?" I said, " You are, you twat. Now fuck off, you're ruining the gig. In any case these are flats which have a bell based system, so stop knocking, you idiot. Join the 21st century!"
Anyway I got home very late thanks to a diversion off the M4 and the fact that the government decided to steal an hour from us (I will not be voting for John Majors and his cronies next time, after this farrago) and didn't go to bed until about 6am.
So today was bound to be a bit disjointed and odd, especially as I was ploughing through more childhood memories, taken, rather poetically out of black bin liners.
I read my diary from the time of my year off and it was embarrassing, hilarious and slightly unsettling reading. Practically every single day I argued with my girlfriend, broke up with her and then made up and decided to give it one last go. It is simply incredible how relentless this pattern was and how we allowed it to continue. And rather telling that even though I was writing about it I didn't really learn the lesson and think that maybe it was time to try and break this cycle.
I was clearly massively confused by my sexual feelings both for my girlfriend and other women and my moralistic code that decreed that such feelings were base and I should be acting on a higher spiritual plane. But there is little self awareness in the writing. I went away on an archaeological dig, leaving behind my first girlfriend, fell in love within about four days with the only girl my age there and wrote about how different and more suitable this woman was than the one I had been declaring everlasting love for just a week earlier. Then once the dig is over and I am back at home, I suddenly realise that actually it is my girlfriend who I love and how unsuitable the girl at the dig had been. So in essence I am in love with whoever is nearest. It's sweet and pathetic and yet ultimately entirely human, but it's my inability to assess myself or my actions that makes it funny.
I was, as I am sure most of us were, a sensitive and insecure youth, yet then every now and then there are passages of such breath-taking arrogance that it actually makes me gasp as I cringe. At one point I describe myself as a mixture of Christ and Gandhi and am convinced that I am going to come up with a plan to bring peace to the world, though helpfully comment that I haven't quite formulated the plan yet so can't share it with the reader. It is in this entry that I make the point (quoted in the play Excavating Rita) whilst reading a Gandhi biography, that it's amazing to see my own ideas reflected back in Gandhi's life, adding "I wish I could have met him. I think we'd have had a lot to share." Which conjures up a beautiful image of Gandhi sitting next to this self-conscious, sexually frustrated 18 year old, listening attentively to everything he has to say, nodding and looking amazed at the revelations that he is hearing.
I particularly enjoy the fact that in later entries it becomes clear that I haven't even finished the Gandhi book and keep saying "Yes, I must get back to that and finish it." It is literally breath-taking what an idiot I was and slightly worrying as I am not sure that I am all that much different now.
I wonder how that 18 year old me, with the utter conviction that he is going to do something monumentally important with his life, would feel if he could see what that he ended up more or less just telling cock jokes and telling drunk people to fuck off.
Yet somehow, though much of my idealism was misplaced, I kind of respect that young man for his attempts to have a moral code, even if I have failed very badly to keep up with it, even if he was chiefly saying the stuff he said to try and hide the feelings that were welling up inside him and which scared him. The stupid, over confident, under confident virgin.
With all this swimming around in my head, still pretty tired, I headed into Soho for a gig at the former Raymonds Revue Bar. This was
The Wam Bam Club, a mixture of comedy, burlesque, magic and sketches. It was a charming evening, with a crowd who seemed very open to enjoying themselves and I assumed (as I have done a few times at nice gigs) that I would have a fun and easy gig without drunken idiots yelling at me and demanding knock knock jokes.
There was a table of middle aged men at the front filming or photographing the show, who seemed particularly keen to document the acts that were taking their clothes off. I started by questioning them, asking if they were officially sanctioned and whether it was strictly necessary, given how close they were to the stage, to be using such massive telephoto lenses. I commented that it was a bit worrying, especially given that they were all bald and of a certain age.
A man started shouting out that that was unfair and I ruffled my hair at the men and said, "Look, remember this!" The barracking continued and I realised it was coming not from the men at the table but from a younger man behind. He was clearly ridiculously drunk and was yelling incoherently at me, as was the woman seated next to him.
I dealt with it all pretty well, but it was clear that the man was so inebriated that he was never going to shut up and when I got to actual material he started shouting "Bollocks" or something equally witty just before my punchlines. I couldn't quite believe that I was going to have another difficult gig and so launched a bit of an attack on the guy, trying to explain how difficult it was to time a joke if someone was going to shout out "bollocks" in the carefully timed pause between feedline and punchline. He said something about that fact that I hadn't told a joke yet, which I thought was quite rich as the only reason I hadn't was because he'd been going on. He said that he would tell a joke and staggered to his feet to do so. I decided to let him, but once he'd got a couple of lines in I just shouted "Bollocks" at him and he said, "Hold on, I haven't got to the joke yet," which I explained was sort of the point I had been making. His friends told him to shut up and pulled him down into his seat, and he slumped there for a little while. But soon enough he was shouting out rubbish again. I went into my bit about how we could get rid of him by taking a leaf out of "Murder on the Orient Express", each stabbing him and then telling the police that a man snuck into the gig and stabbed the guy 100 times. The heckler went mad - "you can't joke about that!" he cried indignantly, back on his feet. "Are you that much of a fan of Murder on the Orient Express?" I wondered.
"No, you can't joke about stabbing. Kids are being stabbed on the street every day. It's not something you should joke about."
"I am a comedian, sir. I will joke about whatever I like. And I don't think you'll be too happy if you stay cos I've got quite a lot of material about paedophilia."
But he wouldn't be swayed, "No, no, it's not something you should joke about." It was tiresome for me, but rather entertaining for everyone else, who I think suspected that this was all a set up sketch. Indeed the man was being so ridiculous that it could easily have been written. I mocked him some more, and he was getting angry, "Don't talk to me like that. I'm a bus driver!"
"Well done," I said, "I like going on the bus." Though secretly I thought that he might have more sympathy for me if that was his job, after all he must have to deal with hundreds of drunk, shouting idiots in his job so you wouldn't think he'd want to put someone else through this.
But he was now determined to stand up for the hundreds of kids who were being stabbed, that I had insulted by my joke about Murder on the Orient Express and he was making his way towards me in rather a threatening pose. As always, I was not scared, because being on stage gives one a false sense of safety and physical dominance. Luckily though the bouncers at the club realised it had gone far enough and the man was taken out of the venue, shouting that he had been mugged and that it wasn't funny. I said it was a shame they hadn't done a more efficient job as he went.
The rest of the audience were right behind me and all this had been an entertaining ten minutes. They enjoyed my exasperation at how a seemingly lovely gig had turned. I had coped very well with an impossible situation and made it funny, with a little help from my stooge. I then went on to do my actual set and it went very well. Stuff like this is good for a comic as long as he doesn't get punched. And as long as you are filmed getting punched (which I might well have been tonight, though the bald men didn't seem as interested in documenting my act for some reason) then it can still be good. It had been a happening. The atmosphere was electric. It was all good.
I left fairly sharpish at the end and typically the drunk idiot was waiting outside the venue. "There he is!" he slurred as I exited. I turned and faced him, "Do you want to make something of it?" he drawled, stepping towards me. His friend holding him back. "Not really," I replied confidentally, whilst turning to walk away. Luckily I was not drunk and this was not going to be a second Liverpool. I doubt he could have hit straight in any case. But I walked away with his crapulous threats ringing through the Soho streets behind me.
