Pig Pens“When I playfully call them “Dumb fucking cunts” … it comes off a bit nasty”
3RD SHOW: 4TH AUGUST
A full room, a baking room, me trying to direct the audience into the remaining available seats like I’m a fucking traffic warden/air traffic control guy. Them: milling around. Me: I feel I should be in character when interacting with the audience before the show but they don’t teach you that at stand up comedian school. I could pre compere this gig and cheat and they wouldn’t even know!
The sound is tinny and weak. Even during the pre-show music its seems all muffled. The mic has no range and I swap the stage mic for the slightly better, but still bad, off stage mic. It falls apart, a circuit board falls out of it. I shove it back in. It will do.
The number of rewrites and edits proliferates every day. I am now working on the amendments to the amendments to the amendments. I know the show less well now than I did during the first preview 8 months ago. You should have seen it then back in the glory days when I could read off notes. Today I forget the second routine entirely “More friendly than I look” I don’t realise that I have missed it at the time but I am forever plagued with a nagging sense that I am slightly ahead of where I should be. That never leaves me. Perhaps tomorrow I will forget the start? Maybe by the last weekend I will have dropped the entire show in favour of a confused shrug?
Feels like a wasted opportunity today. A boozy full house. Up for it Saturday audience but only intermittently does the show get to the place where I want it to be.
I would say “Life is a Waste” (approx 10 mins in). is where it finally gets into gear and then through into “Gay Town” but then once I hit “Millennials” it falls away again. This routine is all about tone. Hit the tone wrong and it won’t work. So when I playfully call them “Dumb fucking cunts” at the start of the routine, I think it comes off a bit nasty and unnecessary which is a pity because I really mean it with love and a deep seated affection .
The audience are always there for the taking and at points when I hit the rhythm correctly it really picks up- which seems to indicate to me that I am often not hitting the rhythm correctly at all.
“Better than you” is a case in point – I know this better and I know where to hit the rhythm but here I really notice that different pockets of the audience are going at different speeds like the instruments in David Bowie’s “Heroes”, except not in a good way. My job is suppose to unify the audience but by this stage (approx 40mins) I appear to have fragmented them into several pieces. This is the opposite of what you are supposed to do.
The David Attenborough section is a mess again today. It seems more of an incoherent shambles than it ever did before. I could really see the gig sliding away at this point. – After the show somebody tells me that was their favourite section, I really have to restrain myself not to remonstrate with them. “No it wasn’t”. I manage to keep the show on the road at this point but it feels a will of effort rather than skill
I try hard to rally it at the end with “Vegetarians”. It picks up enough for a respectable end. I get a firm but not raucous round of applause. The generosity re cash donations at the end is medium.
In general this year people are being generous or putting nothing in. Either I am dividing people or it is something to do with the economy.