Tickling the English Page 2

They don’t know this yet, but in a few weeks’ time they’ll only just be recovering from an unexpected visit by Lenny Henry, when who should drop in but Robin Williams. The Fighting Cocks gets a lot of senior comics trying out stuff.

  I’m not sure why this room gets such attention. It may be the friendly crowd, but equally it might be that the griminess of the venue (it’s a serious heavy-metal bar normally) just makes the older comic feel in touch with his edgy youth. There’s no showbiz polish here. The comics stand in a corridor waiting to get on. The room is only big enough to hold sixty, and you have to clamber over the first three rows to reach the stage. The lighting is rudimentary and the entire place is tropically hot. The walls are covered in self-promotional graffiti for bands with names like Tethered Fuck! and the Luger Ballerinas.

  On one of the cubicles in the gents somebody has written a message in permanent marker that is both harsh and unbelievably poignant. It just says, ‘Fuck you, Sophia M. You’ll never find a better match.’

  Oh Sophia, what were you doing? He was clearly ready to commit.

  Although, he doesn’t think that highly of you, if he expects you to be standing in a cubicle in the gents facing the cistern at some stage. What can you possibly be doing in that position? Still, I don’t blame you. The lead singer of the Luger Ballerinas is worth the ride.

  In this room, and others like it, across London, I try out my new routines for the first time.

  So, what was written on those sheets of A4? Very few stand-alone jokes, for a start. My stand-up shows are usually a mixture of long stories and some audience reaction. There’s only the odd one-liner. In fact, for this first preview gig, I only had one ‘proper’ joke: ‘What happens if you pour Dettol into a Yakult?’

  By the end of the writing process, that joke had become the centrepiece of a rant about scare tactics in advertising. By the end of the tour, it led to a long routine about the perils of alternative therapies and psychics. It went on quite a journey, that little Yakult gag. None of which was obvious when I read it out that first night in Kingston.

  Other ideas in these first preview shows included a story about meeting a naked man in a hotel in Newcastle that needed a crisper ending than real life had provided; an observation about video-game characters which I tried a couple of times before ditching as a bad job; and a story about Tayto crisps.

  The Tayto crisps story was one that always did brilliantly in Ireland, but I was worried that, to an English crowd, it might take too much explaining. Nevertheless, it had always worked at home, and funny is funny, so the Tayto story was in.

  The rest of that first preview consisted of trying to get my audience-participation skills honed again. In between tours, that quickness off the cuff is the first thing to get rusty and I, more than most comedians, need to get ‘match fit’ before a tour.

  I’m quite an improvisational comic. A lot of comics like just to perform their routines, but I see the audience as a massive untapped source of great comedy ideas. Otherwise the show is just me onstage reciting words in the same order each night and, with respect to the actors of the world, how dull would that get? If you really use an audience you can create a unique evening’s entertainment which they know won’t be replicated on any other night of the tour. I even toyed with the idea of calling the entire tour ‘You had to be there’, in honour of those moments that an audience simply wouldn’t be able to explain afterwards.

  Besides, with the right questions, an audience can supply you with stuff you could never have dreamed of yourself. For example, a few years ago, I had a joke about how you could use koala bears as a bicycle lock. They would naturally latch around the wheel, frame and a nearby lamppost, fall asleep, and stay there for up to twenty-three hours. It worked perfectly well as a gag, and then I decided to hold back the punchline and instead let people guess what it was. So I’d ask, ‘What jobs do koalas commonly do?’ There then followed an insane guessing game during which the audience had koalas running brothels (valued for their discretion), hanging coats, and attaching themselves as ankle bracelets on high-risk prisoners.

  The greatest of all was an Irish student who shouted out, ‘Guides for the Blind.’

  ‘Surely dogs can do that?’ I said.

  She shook her head slowly. ‘Not for walking,’ she explained. ‘For climbing…’

  Presumably, the dog walks the blind person to the foot of the tree, where control is handed over to the koala, who guides the blind person to the top of the tree, past clumps of branches and whatnot, until they get to the top, whereupon the koala describes the view.

  I would never have thought of that myself.

  For this new show, there were various points where I could step away from the script and see what the crowd had to offer. In a section about viewing a house, for example, I could get them to offer their own answers to the question ‘What do you NOT want to have happened in a house before you move in?’ That always led to a barrage of suggestions about the plague, Indian graveyards and, for the two weeks that he was topical, Josef Fritzl.

  Similarly, I had some stories about crime that I wanted to tell, so I gambled on opening that to the floor in the hope that I could get a funny story out of some have-a-go hero in the audience. If I threw out the question ‘Has anyone here ever interrupted a crime?’ it might lead to gold. Time would tell.

  As I tried these out, I was reminded of an older audience-reaction routine I used to do. It was a routine that, given the nature of my current mission, shed a very interesting light on the English. I intended to use these months on the tour to examine England’s national identity. But I had no jokes about England’s national identity. There was a time in my career, particularly when I was working the clubs, when I had jokes about Irish national identity, or Australian, or American, or most whatever nationality I would find sitting in front of me. They are a useful tool when you emcee a difficult, drunken Friday night, say, and if you’re stuck you can just bang out a gag about the German guy in the room.

  Eventually, this began to get really formulaic and dull. The jokes always traded on a sort of received wisdom. They’re a comedy staple, but they always reduce down to clumsy stereotypes. I got so bored of them that I eventually wrote an entire routine where I would get the crowd themselves to shout out national traits for me.

  ‘The French are…’ I’d say.

  ‘Smelly!’ one half of the room would shout. ‘Arrogant!’ the other would shout.

  ‘Americans are…’

  ‘Stupid!’ ‘Loud!’

  More interestingly, sometimes I’d go, ‘The Dutch are…’

  ‘Stoned!’ would come back quickly, and then there would be a pause until, inevitably, somebody would shout out, ‘Tall!’

  Then I would play the national traits game.

  This was a routine where, to enormous satirical effect, I entirely demolished the notion of prejudice, by simply getting audience members to pick two personality traits off the top of their heads, then we attached them to an obscure, far-away country, also chosen at random. Then I acted out the result in a hammy way. And finally we all went home and vowed never to hate again, or something.

  This was how I learned, in Weston-super-Mare (when we could get a word in edgeways past Chris), that the Uzbekistani are Rich and Gormless and the Azerbaijanis are Crazy and Bouncy.

  Other, random, highlights from that particular tour included:

  The Bhutanese are Impatient and Argumentative (Swansea)

  The people of Albania are Well-hung and Romantic (Grimsby)

  The Patagonians are Glamorous and Aloof (Northampton)

  Micronesians are Fractious (Salisbury)

  The Bhutanese are Happy and Unwashed (Birmingham)

  Peruvians are Greasy and Cantankerous (Grimsby)

  The People of Equatorial Guinea are Delightful (Dublin)

  And my personal favourite, from Aberystwyth:

  The people of Fiji are Well-read and Promiscuous Well, sometimes I was making a satirical point. Some
times I was just bouncing round the stage pretending to be an Azerbaijani.

  The quickest way to halt an audience in their tracks completely, though, was to shout, ‘The English are…’ and then wait for an answer. There was never a clear response.

  And the funny thing is, even as a comic in the clubs, I didn’t have an easy gag about the English either. There were entire continents I could narrow down to a lame stereotype (Americans, eh? They’re sooo fat!), but I could never pin down the English.

  Maybe you just don’t have a national identity. Maybe you just don’t want to admit to one. We’ll see.

  After a couple of months, the previews were done, the wine was drunk and all the scribbled sheets of A4 had either made the cut or been binned. I had a set list for a two-hour show. It read:

  Pregnancy test/Yakult

  Science

  Nutrition/Gym

  Interval

  Naked man

  Turn down team

  Community/Buying a house

  Crime

  G-string, Brazilian

  Tayto

  Goodnight and go home

  So let’s get out on the road. Let us take the first step away from the preview nights, and into the gilded world of a proper, grown-up, large-scale tour. Let us go… to Coventry!

  Chapter 3:

  Opening Weekend

  This is a very poor start. I’m supposed to be easing my way into the tour, giving myself plenty of time at each of the first few venues in order to sort out sound and lighting issues for the next few months and to invest all my energy into getting the show right.

  Unfortunately, I missed the train to Coventry and now I’m spending £180 on a taxi with curtains on the windows driven by a nineteen-year-old from Pakistan in a desperate race to get to the Midlands by eight o’clock.

  This was not entirely my fault. I arrived at Euston station in good time, only to find that a derailment of a goods train had shut down the entire Midlands network.

  I am not going to start attacking the English rail system, by the way; it may be a national sport here, but it’s a pleasure denied to me because of how bad the Irish rail system is by comparison.

  For example, if you want to travel between Manchester and Birmingham, the country’s second and third largest cities, there are three trains an hour, two of them direct. If you want to make the same journey between Cork and Galway, cities of the same relative status in Ireland, you take a bus for four hours. The only way to do this by train is to make a giant ‘V’; you take the train to Dublin, on the other side of the country, get off in the capital and take a train back to the other coast again.

  You actually have a superb train system here, with regular connections between practically all points on the map. I should know, having spent years carting my sorry arse from one end of the network to the other. Unfortunately, the myth of how terrible the trains are here has become so endemic, and so pleasing, that even as I write these last few paragraphs, I can see you all putting your fingers in your ears and going, ‘La la la la, I’m not listening, I’m not listening.’

  Obviously, this is because of the magical trains they have in continental Europe, which glide silently and punctually from town to town while, at the front of the Virgin Pendolino service to Stockport, a dray-horse wheezes and heaves.

  I have sat on the Eurostar when they make the announcement in Kent that the train is now travelling at 186 mph; and the English people roll their eyes as if to say, ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’

  Anyway, I hold no grudge against Virgin trains for my delay that day. It was really my fault for letting Damon drive on without me. Damon will be my constant companion for the year. He’s my tour manager, a job description that includes everything from driver to theatre liaison to nanny, there to protect me from making stupid decisions. Like today, for example, when I should have been driven to Coventry in good time rather than attending an Arsenal– Everton match. Not a particularly great Arsenal–Everton match either, and I didn’t even see the last-minute equalizer because the remaining vestiges of my professionalism made me leave early, so as not to risk missing the train. I mulled over the irony of this for three hours in the back of the generously upholstered taxi en route to Coventry.

  Some things to bear in mind the next time you make a £180 taxi trip:

  A: Carry cash. They like the money upfront.

  B: Don’t use up all your small talk early. Particularly if you don’t have much in common with the driver.

  ‘Have you ever done a trip as long as this one?’

  ‘Once, to Manchester.’

  ‘Did you come straight back?’

  ‘No, actually. I spent the night with my family.’

  ‘Nice! Will you do the same tonight?’

  ‘I don’t have any family in Coventry.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Everyone should know someone in Coventry. After all, it invented the concept of ‘twinned cities’, establishing the first such link with Stalingrad in 1944 as a mark of mutual respect between two cities that had suffered particularly badly during the war.

  Similarly, they twinned later with Dresden, unified by the horrendous bombing which both cities endured. Then they twinned with Cork, because of the high number of Irish immigrants, then they twinned with Kingston in Jamaica for a similar reason. Currently, Coventry is twinned with twenty-six separate cities worldwide although, according to Coventry City Council, ‘For some years, the City Council has had a policy of not adding to the number of the city’s twin towns.’ Oh really? Too late now, you sluts.

  Coventry is also the location of the worst afternoon I ever spent on the British comedy circuit. It was about a decade ago, it was a Sunday afternoon and, on a Sunday afternoon, Coventry is closed. Myself and another comic, Barry Castognola, had arrived over from Stoke, or Manchester, or wherever we had been gigging the night before, hoping to kill the afternoon in the town centre before the gig that night. I cannot tell you how resistant Coventry was to that idea. For a start, it seemed that the entire city centre was contained within the world’s tiniest ring road. And that city was just a small oasis of concrete and closed businesses. We parked, looked in vain for anything to do, returned to the ring road, tried the next exit, failed again. It got so dull we just drove round and round the ring road picking exits at random and seeing if there was any life there. All the time, in my head, the Specials were singing ‘Ghost Town’.

  To anyone looking to have a career in showbiz, these are the afternoons that will test you. How much do you want it? Really? Go round the Coventry internal ring road one more time and then tell me you want it.

  Tour gigs don’t take place in the city centre, though. They take place on the leafy and peaceful campus of the University of Warwick, which was enjoying the spring sunshine of a mild March evening when I arrived at 7.50 p.m., racing from the plush, velveteen confines of my taxi to the backstage area and threw on my suit for the show. Ten minutes later the tour was underway.

  Warwick Arts Centre

  1 CNC setter

  1 electronic engineer

  1 quantity surveyor

  There were crisps on the stage, random packets of Cheese and Onion, that had been left there by audience members as a nod to my last visit here. That time, there had been a Walkers sales rep in the crowd and I had spent the first half insisting he source some of his goodies during the interval. By the time I had come back after the break there were a half-dozen packs already there, and more arrived as I continued the show. It seemed that, by the end of the gig, like a snack-food version of the loaves and the fishes, the entire front row was gorging on salty treats. I love an audience that remembers a one-off joke, but it always makes me worry what they’ll remember the next time.

  It won’t be the CNC setter, that’s for sure. It was only thanks to further questioning that I found out this stood for ‘Computer Numerical Control’. Big pause from me. ‘Y’know… for car parts,’ the guy explained. ‘You work in a car park?’ I
asked.

  Of course, Coventry was, historically, one of the great car-producing areas, so I should have boned up on my manufacturing-process terminology before gigging there. ‘CNC’ was just the tip of a very technical iceberg, though. Every time I reached into the crowd, it was another grey job that left me scratching my head. What with my own rustiness and a new show that wasn’t quite clicking yet, this was fast becoming an underwhelming start to the tour. Still to come, though, was the crime section and a first direct plea to the audience:

  ‘Has anyone here ever interrupted a crime?’

  Some shuffling of feet. One hand goes up in row two.

  ‘Hello, sir. What was the crime?’

  ‘A man was stealing my wife’s car.’

  ‘My God. Where were you when this happened?’

  ‘I was coming home when I saw him in the drive trying to steal the car.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’

  ‘I started roaring and shouting. And the thief climbed into the car and locked the doors.’

  We all mulled over the possibilities of this bizarre stand-off for a while: him outside, bellowing; the thief inside, pondering his options.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Well, I punched in the window of the car, pulled him out, dragged him into the house and tied him to a chair.’

  None of us was expecting that. I’ll bet the thief wasn’t either. We’d gone from a funny stand-off to a Reservoir Dogs-type hostage situation. Sensing that this might get a little visceral for some people’s tastes, I leaned into the man.

  ‘Y’know, this is a comedy show. So, if you could, like, keep it light, that would be great. Did anything… funny… happen during this time?’