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Comedy is a funny old business (who says I can't do jokes?). I have performed Happy Now? well over 30 times now and have always used the same first line (once the show gets going, I occasionally dick around a bit first). It is…. (spoiler alert - I give you the first line for free, but you have to pay for the rest). “They told me that the birth of my daughter would be the happiest day of my life, and I believed them.†It doesn't look that funny written down and I never really intended it to be a joke, merely a statement of fact that led on to the story.
But in the last show or two I have delivered it slightly differently than before and got a big laugh. I subtly indicate through my intonation that I was an idiot for believing them. It's barely a change at all. But suddenly a line that got no laugh and where none was intended, gets one. It's crazy how tiny a distinction can make such a change, but also equally crazy that I never noticed there was a joke there in the first place.
And now I've realised it, I will undoubtedly fuck it up from now on, hit the line too hard or whatever and it will cease to be amusing. Comedy is a precise and intricate business and jokes are as fragile as a comedian's concept of self-worth.
I am still having fun dicking around with the show and trying to improve it (it's always part of the tour process), sometimes in subtle ways like dropping volume,varying pace, kicking a consonant (letting the k sounds resonate seems to make things funnier) experimenting with a different facial expression, immersing myself in the acted bits so they are more real and sometimes in huge ways by trying out whole new ideas, changing the script or finding a diversion and seeing it it's a flyover or a cul de sac. Five Little Monkeys in particular has not yet become bolted down and I try different avenues for the monkey doctor to explore each time I do it and forget most of them the next time I try it. But it keeps it fun and I am glad that there's still some wiggle room for invention in this show. I am lightly terrified that the DVD record is less than two weeks away as some bits of the show are still under construction or I might do a duff version of one of the more improvised bits. But that's all part of the fun.
The minutiae is no doubt interesting to me and one or two comedy nerds, but at least comedy keeps surprising me. I hope to keep learning until I die, when all the useless knowledge about how to get a laugh from saying the word “pact†and the power of an almost imperceptible breath or frown will be lost. And you can't write the formula for this stuff down.
We had to take Phoebe into hospital again tonight, again just a precautionary thing, just to check she was all right. We've done this a few times and been seen quite quickly, but tonight it was a Tory cuts nightmare. My wife had already been there a while when I got back from my gig and we were told there were only a few people ahead of us. But others were getting frustrated by the wait and one very angry man who was there with his elderly father was kicking off, haranguing the doctor every time he came out of his room and trying to ring up to find somewhere to complain. The stressed doctor who had done nothing wrong, apart from fail to emigrate to a country where they have enough money to have more staff, kept telling the man that he should complain if he wanted, but to do it at a later time as he was just prolonging things. Which he really was. The man after him also was accompanying his elderly father, who appeared in more discomfort and aside from occasionally swearing and kicking stuff after the wait had got to three hours, he didn't rock the boat. The complaining man finally got in and still seemed to be mainly complaining about the wait, rather than getting his father seen to and then wanted the door to be left open because his dad was hot, even though the doctor said that privacy issues meant it had to be closed. I get it mate, it's annoying to have to wait when someone you love is in pain. So don't then make everyone else wait even longer by continuing to bitch about it when you've finally got into see the doctor. If for no other reason than he's the one who can fucking help you and if you're threatening to get him sacked he might not be so inclined to do anything to help you. Except that luckily the doctor was a better man than you and got on with his job, working in the small hours of a Friday morning, with no noticeable breaks, trying to keep your dad alive.
I was going to say to the doctor that I would happily vouch for him, regardless of whether this man had a valid complaint, because his selfishness was just so all consuming.
They were in the room for at least an hour and we'd been waiting with a tired and restless baby for three hours, with two people still ahead of us and the time approaching 2am when we decided that it probably made more sense to let our daughter sleep (she had perked up a bit) and ring our GP at 7 rather than to keep her up all night. So with some trepidation we ignored the medical advice that we needed to get her seen by a doctor and went home.
I was angry about all of this: the crumbling of our National Health, the stress the staff are placed under as a result and the cock-holed selfishness of a man worrying only about his own father, without being able to understand that everyone in the room was in the same boat, concerned about the person they are with or themselves. What a choice to be left with, to risk your babies health because you fear that waiting to see a doctor will actually do them more damage. But I think we'd have been waiting for at least another hour to be told, in all likelihood that all our daughter needed was a good night of sleep. Which she wasn't going to get because she had to wait to be told this. Phoebe stayed largely calm and happy throughout this protracted ordeal, behaving with a lot more maturity than the idiot who was still in with the doctor when we left. When there's a baby in the room who is acting less babyishly than you then it's time to take a good long look in the mirror.
Phoebe didn't die in the night, so that made our decision to bail a little less painful.
