this is an article from 2014Week 3: It’s Like Porn Burnout
So, Week Three.
In Week Three, in a small room, you realise – or is it remember? – that people are horrible.
Goethe once said: “Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.” But the truth is that any other involuntary reaction will show a man’s character just as well: You may judge him by what gives him a hard-on; by what makes him afraid; by what makes him suddenly angry. This, beneath the veneer of civilisation, is what makes the human. We cannot choose what amuses us nor what turns us on or scares us. We’re all just a collection of responses, triggers, prejudices, needs, lusts, and the need to either fight or flee. Of course, all of this is covered in a veneer of culture and etiquette and reading Ben Goldacre and listening to Radio 4.
The veneer is laid so thick upon us modernist urban liberals that we may even fool ourselves. But don’t be fooled as a comedian: that group of people sitting out there; they’re not Your People. They’re just machines that want to kill and fuck and eat: the women as much as the men.
I’m talking about Week Three here. You will see the truth of this in Week Three. When everyone has seen what they really wanted to see. When everyone is getting a bit low on funds and has started to visit shows because they’re there, or they’re free, or they might as well. Or it’s raining again. That’s when you realise, as a performer in a small or mid-sized venue, that the laughs aren’t coming like they used to. Sometimes those late-run performances can get like pulling teeth. You could swear you’re doing it better than ever now; hitting the punchlines and timing the beats. Finally it’s a proper show, but the people haven’t turned up for it. At least, it seems that they’re only present in body.
Well it’s not you, it’s them. People are simple, primal – horrible – creatures and they are suffering the comedy equivalent of porn burnout.
Yes. We think of watching pornography as a very basic thing. Visual stimulation plus manual friction equals pleasure. In fact we maintain a complex relationship with out chosen stimulus as we bang away at ourselves.
We must feel the impulse of our need to procreate, but subsume it in the fantasy of other people following their own procreational urge. We must enjoy the act before us as pure spectacle yet halfway invest ourselves into one of the characters – usually either active or passive. We must entertain a delight in aggression, humiliation, victimhood; things that are not open to us in real life and that we would not in fact allow. We must empathise deeply with the situation depicted and yet be able to disassociate from it immediately if it concludes before we do, fumbling thence for another website, mp3, DVD or whatever. But until we’re finished, we hold the visions before us in a sort of idealised limbo: it is the us-that-is-not-us; a world that is both tantalisingly close and yet a million miles away.
The sexual satisfaction promised is the Shangri La, the possible impossible, the thing referred to by Jacques Lacan as the objet petit a. The mechanics are so basic, the ecstasy so tangible, it seems for a second like the world next door. But then it vanishes, like a bubble, and all that is left is shame. Or, at least, some cleaning up. And this is why it’s addictive.
And so it is with comedy: A scene before you unfolds its ideas gradually, tantalisingly; gradually stripping away your reticence and cynicism. Soon your body is heaving involuntarily with happy spasms, and it feels good. This person relates to your world; talks of thing with which you are familiar, and yet has shown them to you as if through a kaleidoscope. YOU have thought this thing, but didn’t pause to notice. YOU have noticed that thing, but never paid it thought. You could be this glorious person on stage, who is, after all, only noticing all the things you have noticed and thought. You enjoy the spectacle of the comedian, and also invest yourself in them. You glimpse the you-that-is-not-you.
But imagine if, after you had shot your bolt, polished your bean or otherwise satisfied the impulse and flooded your tired brain with dopamine, you just couldn’t move and the porn wouldn’t stop. Imagine the porn continuing, relentlessly; its images flooding your eyes and mind until its meaning fell apart. Until it lost all sense of fantasy, or possibility, or pleasure and it became nothing but the sum of its parts. You’ve probably been there. When it’s just the sum of its hot, sweaty, fleshy, pumping parts.
This is what happens in Week Three. Suddenly you are not a conjurer filling the room with dreams. You realise how much work the audience needs to do – is OBLIGED to do, damn it – in the contract of audience and act. You say things while they paint mind pictures and allow electrons to flit about their synapses so that performance and situation and meaning unite in a three-dimensional whole. In Week Three, when you’re on at 10pm and they’ve seen seven shows already that day, they do nothing. They are turned off. You are just a person, on a nailed-together stage, saying words into a microphone made of atoms. Everything is just stuff, and dust on stuff. Nothing except physical matter exists, and you and your words are just meat. It’s all just meat slamming remorselessly into other meat. You’re squirting dust into the air.
Would that the public could soak up the 1000-plus comedy shows that flooded the Fringe this year. But I think they cannot. Just as we primal, rutting, wanking humans only have so much lead in our pencils, Johnny public only has two balls full of chuckles.
And that’s often the problem with Week Three: Nobody comes.
Oliver Bearoclough