Last night’s gig was horrendous. Twenty-four hours previous to that, I was brilliant (allow me this because I’m also telling you that last night I was ‘shit’). But LAST NIGHT, oh man. You don’t know what awaits you from one night to the next with stand-up. It’s exciting but it’s also frustrating. A century from now, the AFTERLIFE will be full of comics scarred by horrendous nights such as last night’s in Bermondsey.
Some gigs are bad because you’re bad. So the gigs might’ve been good nights, but you yourself have just not been on your game, or your luck’s not in and your stuff’s not landing with that particular audience. These happen to most comics at this level, maybe all levels, I think, and I’m learning to brush it off. It happens. I make sure I stay grounded when I have a brilliant gig as I had two nights ago (did I mention that already?), and when the night is truly appalling, again, I try not to let myself get carried away with the negativity. Ten years ago I struggled to do that when I was on the circuit. So there’s an improvement there.
However, some gigs are bad no matter what you do, because the venue, the night, everything about it is just wrong. Those nights I find maddening because they’re just a complete waste of a comic’s time and you go home having learned nothing. If I bomb, as long as I’m wiser for it, I can live with that.
I’m becoming better at identifying which nights need to be avoided, and I had more than a feeling that last night’s gig would have that ‘workshop’ type vibe about it which I hate about comedy nights. This usually means you’re performing in front of just comics.
One of the best decisions I made early on in my return, after assessing the new stand-up landscape, was to realise I didn’t need to do the bringer gigs, especially the longer ones. Don’t get me wrong. Some bringer nights, where you need a Plus One, are good nights, well promoted, but for me, with a small social circle, they were a real problem. I was losing out on too many gigs, having to cancel, and if I’d carried on, I’d have developed a reputation with promoters for being unreliable which I’m not in any other area of my life.
But also, not being a youngster anymore, I was able to see that there are certain promoters at this level, zealous gatekeepers, jealously guarding their long-arsed bringer nights who may be failed stand-ups themselves. They prioritise the bar making money over the stand-ups, and while it’s a free entry (I don’t think any gig should be free entry) they then spring the bucket collection on everybody when you’re leaving, and even as an act, I was finding myself chucking a few coins in, technically making it a ‘pay to play’ gig.
Some of these nights and venues were undermining my confidence. One MC told me not to expect to be doing 10 minute spots for the first 100 gigs, and no pro gigs for 200 shows. I’ve not even reached 100 gigs yet and I’m doing both. Imagine if I’d let that catty guy stay in my head. Instead, I trusted one or two very good promoters and also backed my self-belief.
I was seeing comics I’d already seen on these new act nights and they hadn’t improved, yet they were still on the same shows as I was on. Again, that didn’t do my confidence any good. I don’t want to gig with rubbish comics. I want to be up against quality.
I’ll mention it again later, but right now, one problem I’m trying to address is that I can get dragged down all too easily on a bad night. It’s not necessarily apparent, but in my head, I’m no longer present. However, stick me in front of a big audience, as I had on Wednesday night, and I’m on fire. I need that little bit of fear when I’m on-stage. On Wednesday, just before I was being introduced, having stood and made my way nearer to the stage, I felt a little tremble in my left leg and I knew I was ready to go. That’s with the meds. The adrenalin was still breaking through. I need the audience. No audience, and I’m just not good enough right now. I go through the motions. I feel dead inside, like I’m at my aunt’s having to sit through some ITV show again, or worse still, one of the Spanish soaps so beloved of her and my uncle. That inconsistency needs to be tackled.
Every week, there’ll be one brilliant gig and there’ll be one every bit as bad as the other was good. It’s hard to avoid that at the moment. Part of the problem is that this side of the pandemic, live comedy has taken a huge hit. There is little support for grassroots stand-up. As some have said to me, people have gotten used to watching comedy online. They can just skip to their favourite bits. Or they just jump on the bandwagon and pay £20 to see their favourite big-name comedian at some fancy venue whose early career they entirely missed. They’re not interested in supporting and engage with comedians at this level, just starting out in small venues. So some nights that could’ve been good are not so good because there’s no audience and there’s no energy in the room. But some nights are just BAD. Badly put together, badly run and as the night progresses, they get steadily worse. We all want to avoid these nights and of course comics chat among themselves and share the good and the bad experiences via the various messenger services. No one wants to waste a night and if you get on with someone on the circuit, while we’re all competitive (creatively it pushes you on), speaking personally, if I can save another comic the kind of night I had last night, I’ll share the info.
It was the kind of night that puts me off starting my own night. I know it’s very in vogue with comics, often because they might feel they need more stage time, but having produced shows in the past, it’s so much work and why, when so many live comedy shows are struggling for an audience, do I think I would do any better? I’ve just finally ended my unmissed podcast after 400 episodes. Why subject myself to another stressful workload that ultimately will probably lead to nothing? I’ve met many quality comics and decent promoters who are being crushed by empty nights. Most of these guys know what they’re doing. I’d be silly to ignore their experiences.
I wasn’t that surprised when I arrived at the venue to see it was a barely populated night. What surprised me was that I saw this, visually, immediately, soon as I stepped in BECAUSE for some reason, the gig was right by the main entrance to the venue. I’ve never encountered this before. If that was the only suitable spot for the gig (most pubs have function rooms, surely?) then the venue wasn’t fit for a gig.
When the MC (to be fair, they were funny) started talking into his wireless mic (surprisingly good), I genuinely thought he was just testing the mic there as he waited for the comics to sign up. It was a new night, etc, this is just a dry run and then he’s going to walk us through to the actual space. NO. That was it. The show was underway. BY THE ENTRANCE. I was already unmotivated prior to the gig. I’d dropped out of one of this promoter’s gigs for other valid reasons and I knew I had to see this one through, but from the start, it was apparent this was going to be worse than anticipated. And at that point I switched off and it was then I made my mistake.
I’ve been writing loads of new material. Easy for me because I’m a writer. But learning it, editing it, seeing what works, what doesn’t, that’s far from easy and takes a lot of time to get right. You accept that once it’s ready, it will continue to be honed live over a number of shows. That’s just the process. You work out what works, what doesn’t. What would benefit from being tweaked. And while I have real faith in a lot of this new material, it was in no way ready to be used on stage. About a week away, at best, from having a tiny fragment of it ready. But unusually for me, I thought, “**** it. I’m going to do some of it.” If I’d gone on earlier, it might’ve done better as I was going through it in my mind and it was lodging in there, but I didn’t go on until much later, by which time my mind was fogging up as I began to wonder if the night would ever end.
I ended up rambling for about the first five minutes. Some of the stuff worked. Some of it didn’t. The stuff that didn’t work was because it wasn’t prepared. The stuff that did get laughs would’ve done better had it been prepared. There’s a lesson there. I let my standards slip because I wasn’t mentally invested in the night. I’d lost my faith in it the moment I saw the entire set up. The first comic, who I’ve seen a few times, did well under the circumstances, showing a calmness that belies his youth and he had the right idea to leave straight away. When I turned up, he was wearing the same haunted look I could feel had established itself on my features. We knew what was waiting for us. I don’t feel these nights are ‘character-building’ by the way. I don’t buy into that.
When the MC started disappearing, chatting to one or two people in the bar, I’d seen it before with other promoters (during a set once, I could hear a promoter on the other side of a thing curtain chatting up a woman at the bar), but you just get on with it. You want the night to end so you can go home but no, the night was going to go on for even longer.
Suddenly a couple of audience members were given spots, “Two minutes’ we were told. One of them, a short squat guy with a little paunch actually ended up doing a longer set than any of the comics. I know it was an open mic gig but that free-for-all doesn't really work for me. I feel, and I’ve seen this once before, that it demeans the comics. If acts have dropped out, end the night sooner and we all go home and put the night before us. Don’t drag it out by inviting anyone on. It makes me feel like a promoter believes anyone can do stand-up, which isn’t the case.
I'm putting hours into this every week rehearsing, travelling everywhere. It's not that kind of thing that everybody can do or you know, wants to do. Or can do. For so long, until this year, I even thought I couldn’t do it. Seeing those punters on stage last night, it reminded me of that ill-thought out 80s ethos that infiltrated schools in the UK of ‘Sport For All’. Suddenly you had obese kids being parachuted into school football teams who were on long unbeaten runs, runs that inevitably soon came to an end once their new chubbier team mates were on the pitch. Not everyone can do everything. There are things that are beyond all of us.
As I watched that punter drag out his ‘set’ for 12 minutes, looking at his expensive-looking work satchel, I thought to myself, “I'm going to go and find out where he works. Maybe he’s running his own business, whatever. Maybe I just ought to turn up at his office and do what he’s doing? If he thinks he can do this, then I’m going to do what he does. ” I just felt it cheapened an already bad night.
Beyond this post, I’ll try and learn the lesson. If I have a bad feeling about a night, pull out. There were signs in the run up it wasn’t going to be well put together. I could’ve stayed at home and rested or dropped in on a better night.
Normally I like to bounce back quickly from bad nights and I’ve already done that by this morning. I’ve got one night next month where I’m doing two well-known London nights on the same evening which is going to involve some very tricky travelling on the night. I’m hoping it’s doable. Likely to be seat of the pants stuff.
I look back at the week. I know my confidence isn't misplaced. I can do stand-up. I'm good at it. I'm making rapid progress but then, just 24 hours after a brilliant gig in Crystal Palace, I almost undermined that with last night’s show.
I wasn’t even sure that the bar staff knew we were there. There were one or two pissed-up bar flies heckling. There was one audience member who’d come to see his friend or girlfriend performing. And he was funny. I mean, I actually thought he (an American) was an act. Neither stayed until the end. Who could blame them?
The girl was from New York. Puerto Rican. Porto Rican. Which is it? Of course, I could DuckDuckGo this (never Google. Why do you want to be tracked?) Brash would be a stereotype but she oozed this wonderful and justified confidence. There was no one there and yet she performed, as I was advised to by one MC last month, like ‘David Bowie doing Wembley’. That is a wonderful quality to have, one that right now, as touched on earlier, I don’t have. My natural diffidence nearly always re-emerges on the small nights. She really was at Wembley Stadium last night. Classy.
She had that New York accent that I could do for fun years ago after my decade and a bit (1980 – 92) starring in the New York-based seminal police procedural (Kid Cop), first, alongside Victoria Principal, then following her acrimonious departure in ’86 in a protracted contract dispute, former page 3 model Sam Fox. A hangover from those years is I still say ‘Noo York’ when saying ‘New York’, though when speaking British English, I enunciate ‘new’ as it should be, otherwise I’d sound like a squeaky-voiced spiv.
The New Yorker did this one funny riff about snorting coke off men’s appendages. I don’t know what it’s like economically over in New York, but over here in the UK, given the cost of living crisis, there’s likely to be many stressed out men out there. Without resorting to blue pills, the necessary, let’s say, ‘engorgement’ required for a line of the powder I’ve never ever tried to be snorted off, is unlikely to be there. Either way, she was the one bright note of a poor night.
The evening was rounded off by a pissed-up elderly punter who’d strayed in late on, responding to one of the last comics doing a riff on a dog having mange by repeatedly calling out ‘minge’ for what remained of the set.
It summed up the night.
Anyway, it’s over.
Done.
Onto the next gig.
Twitter: @1607WestEgg
FB: @DRTcomedy
Instagram: @1607westegg