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I've done some unusual gigs in strange places to weird audiences, but today might just take the biscuit (that I have been saving up for 25 years to give to my weirdest audience to be shared amongst them - to be honest it's a bit rotten now and it is very small anyway, so I think the weirdest audience will probably be insulted to be given a crumb of inedible and germ ridden biscuit, but it's really a compliment). It was a lunchtime gig in a back room of a pub in Chiswick to 40 parents (nearly all mums) and 40 babies.
It was part of the excellent initiative Screaming with Laughter which puts on monthly lunchtime gigs, allowing new parents to get a chance to go out, see some comedy, have some food and maybe a cheeky lunchtime drink and socialise and pretend for a few seconds that they didn't make the mistake of producing a life-changing, nightlife ruining piece of sexcrement and were normal, happy people again.
So that's a strange audience for lots of reasons. Firstly, the adult segment was predominantly female (so the first time in a long time where there was a queue for the ladies and not for the gents) and also half the audience were too young to understand English, comedy or what was going on. Some of them were crying, some of them were sleeping, some of them were pooing themselves….. and that was just the babies. Obviously. I am surprised you needed me to clarify that.
Weirdly, for the first minute of my set, the babies all shut up at the same time, perhaps recognising their intellectual equal and keen to see what I'd come up with. The organiser of the gig suggested that this happens quite a bit with male performers and a non-female voice makes babies sit up and take notice for a while, which possibly speaks badly of dads and the amount they're talking to their kids. Or maybe something is hard wired into us to take men more seriously from the start. Or just shut up in case they hit you possibly. I don't think men come out of this well any way you look at it.
My wife had gone on in the first half, performing her first gig in ten months (the last time she performed was 10 months ago when she was 8 months pregnant). I find it hard to get back into stand up after a month away so she did remarkably well against the chorus of baby voices (her weak female voice providing no authority) and got big laughs from the mums. Her own daughter was her most vociferous heckler, which was enjoyable. Phoebe was due a nap but was too excited to sleep, perhaps sensing that her own destiny was in dingy back rooms like this.
Really the comedy was a sideshow and this was a social event for the mums, a chance to make friends and feel normal. I personally found it hard to pitch. I didn't want to try out my material about my fears of my daughter's head coming off in a room full of babies (including my own daughter), but my decision to reward these parents with the set that I would do at a night time club was perhaps wrong too. Without knowing me, my opening gags maybe seemed a bit laddy to this room of Chiswick mums, but I have enough material at my fingertips to change direction.
I didn't find it easy, but I think the adults liked it and even if they didn't the concept and the gift of an afternoon night out is what the audience were after. I had a pub lunch and a pint too, which pretty much knocked me out, as I am still ill and tired. But it was a fun day out with my family and Phoebe got to see what her mum and dad do for a living, even if she didn't quite understand what it was.
Weirdly the pub has been done up since I last played the room and the usual entrance led to a kitchen, so I was briefly left thinking that I was in the wrong place or that I had dreamed that this pub had a room at the back. But then we found the new entrance. But for a few moments I was a bit freaked out.
