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It’s great to have five gigs in a row without having to stay over in a hotel. It means I can be home for the morning and early afternoon at least. But it also means a lot of time in the car, exacerbated by the huge amounts of roadworks at the moment. And had I not got family commitments, maybe I would have found somewhere nice to stay along the south coast and had a little holiday for the first 3 nights.
Worthing tonight and there’s always something reassuring and calming about seeing the sea at sunset. Living inland you can forget you’re on an island, but the slate grey waters of the Whatever That Bit of Water is Called (the Channel?) and the waves, persistently crashing against the shore marking out the minutes of our lives, counting down the seconds to our deaths… it’s magical and makes me happy, even though this force of nature, continuing its unstoppable ebb and flow, makes it apparent how short and insignificant our time is in the grand scheme of things. The waves have crashed against Worthing beach form long before anyone knew what Worthing is and will still be doing so when Worthing is forgotten. Or so it thinks. Bad luck sea. My plan to destroy the moon is going to put paid to your massive water pendulum. So I win.
The Connaught theatre seemed very familiar from the outside, as did the dressing rooms and the horrible backstage toilet. But the grand theatre itself didn’t ring any bells. Had I been here before. The noise of people arguing in the streets coming through my dressing room door seemed very familiar and I fancied for a second that this was the place that had found me all the details of local doctors and dentists (as per my rider), but then I convinced myself that that was somewhere else entirely. Touring is a confusing and dream-like state - every day the same but slightly different, like a Groundhog Day that beams you to another location, but where you still end up doing the same thing.
Strange that I vaguely remembered all the backstage stuff and not the rather impressive theatre space.
But as with last time there were a fair few people in (over 250 this time, so that’s progress), though not enough to fill the large auditorium. I had fun though and it was great to be on a big stage again and I decided to play around with pace and volume, be less shouty (and then in one place a lot more shouty). Annoyingly the audience were quite spaced out, which made it harder to ride the laughs, but I gave it a bit more of a go.
With all my shows I have so much to fit in and I don’t really like to hang around too much or play with pauses. To some extent I find using the pauses to get laughs can be a bit hack, though it’s never seen as the same as a comic saying “28 years old” or whatever. If you wait then it both gives an audience a chance to catch up with the joke, but it also creates an awkwardness that often elicits a laugh in itself. Which is fine. But a part of me (and I think probably somewhat wrongly) thinks that if you have to wait for the audience to think about and get the gag then you are patronising them a bit and I have made a deliberate (and again probably wrong) choice to keep the pace up. If it works though it means that you can overwhelm your audience in a nice way - they’re still laughing at something, you hit them with something else - they’re still processing something and you add to their load. Even when a big laugh means that there has to be a pause, I like to come in with the next line a bit quicker than most of my hack colleagues, who like to luxuriate in the laughter.
Today I took the routines a bit slower and calmer and maybe that is for the best. There’s a lot of intricate language and nice turns of phrase in these well-practised routines and it was enjoyable to let it shine a bit. And yet in another way I feel that the high speed precision of getting that stuff out crisply and quickly is equally entertaining and impressive.
Typically though I got a tweet afterwards saying that the person had enjoyed the show, but some of the routines felt like I was “going through the notions”. Firstly, I enjoyed the typo, as it actually more accurately described what I was attempting to do (and might make a good show title) and secondly I had really worked hard tonight to give every word the weight or lack of weight that it deserved. Speed should not be mistaken for going through the motions. There has been the occasional bit of the occasional gig in the last month, where I’ve been tired and ill and think I probably have just been reeling off the words a bit. But tonight I was not. At least I was not intending to.
The speed I go at also means that there is a lot more content in my shows than you’ll get from most comedians. I mean, I think I am quite expert at getting this tricky balance right and of communicating ideas at speed. But different folks/different strokes. I wasn’t upset by the criticism (and as I say, it came in a tweet that was complimentary, with mild and polite criticism, which I welcome).
The speed is a deliberate choice though. Just funny that I was picked up on it on a night that I felt I had been positively languorous.
Getting laughs is the most important thing for me at the moment and the entire focus of this show. The way you deal with those laughs and how long you choose to let them live is a slightly different matter. But the tension that can be effected by pauses can also be created by keeping the laughter time short. This technical shit is fascinating to me - the only danger is that with any criticism, right or wrong, it’s hard to stop your internal voice going on and on about it as you perform. Stand up is ultimately about confidence and yet its solitary nature means that it is very easy to undermine your self-belief by hanging on to a negative thought - even if it is totally at odds with the reaction of the vast majority of people in front of you. Again, I am not really talking about this tweet (though surely tomorrow, the pacing issue will now be at the front of my internal saboteur’s mind), but annoying (and usually wrong) things picked up from the foolish reading of a negative review or whatever. If it shakes your resolve even a little bit, then it can doom you.
I have enough negative thoughts of my own, courtesy of my internal monologue and don’t really require any help.
And if I start to worry that riding laughs and using pauses to get more unwarranted laughs is hack then I am going in quite deep. But I think to be good you have to go in deep. Even if there is a danger that over thinking will destroy you.
Laughter is the ultimate aim. But the laughter is more satisfying if you deserve it.
It's a good job I speak quickly because I clearly have a lot of stuff to get out of my head just at the moment.
