5 gigs I thought were going to be big and great and help me in comedy but were actually a disaster.
Sherlock Holmes famously said: ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’
This is not the approach I use when predicting how good a gig might be.
I’ll get them in my diary and, for reasons unbeknown to even me, will decide, against all available evidence, that they are definitely going to be absolute game-changers. More paid work. More connections. A genuine turning point.
Often, however, I head out expecting Friday Night at the Comedy Store and come home having paid £30 for a train to die on my arse at Dr Chuckle’s Comedy Fuck Hut: An open mic orgy where ANYTHING goes.
And so, here are 5 gigs I thought would be game changers but were, in fact, not.
Disclaimer: I’ve really tried to hide who runs them, but if you do read it and think it’s you, it is definitely not you and, on an unrelated note, I can’t wait to gig for you again.
Gig 1: A shambles at the seaside
I’ve been booked for a gig in a seaside town I won’t name. I’d heard about gigs this promotor ran; they offered future work, were always packed and often pretty rowdy.
Cut to the gig and the MC is stood in front of 7 elderly women.
All of them are squeezed onto a sofa that backs onto the front window of the heavy metal bar the gig is in. The MC’s rallying against political correctness and explaining how lucky he is they didn’t have camera phones when he was doing comedy (whilst, technically at least, literally doing comedy) or he’d have been arrested for sexual harassment. I consider putting my hand up and saying that’s not how crime works but instead decide to confess to a murder I committed in 1999.
He then (again, in the present day, where smart phones exist) shouts at a member of the bar staff: ‘good luck at work’ as she leaves. The door of her real, actual work shuts and he adds: ‘on a street corner!’
Fed up (‘cos he’d stolen my material — am I right?! lol jks), I take to the stage, tell 3 jokes to complete silence then comment that this feels like performing to a local book club. The women on the sofa find this far more offensive than any of the sex crime stuff.
I then do the grown up thing and slag off the gig then thank the promoter/MC/sex criminal for having me on and leave.
The promoter does actually invite me back for more gigs. But bizarrely, only by texts he sends at 3am like a comedy ‘U still up?’
Gig 2: Performing to a mirror in the big city
It’s a Friday night, my first weekend gig back in the big smoke after 9 months back home in Bristol and I know this is gonna be a good one. I’d seen the line up, some big(ish) names, they’re probably getting paid, I’m not, that’s ok, I’m just climbing up that greasy old ladder they call show business.
In hindsight, the promoter asking me to ‘treat it like the real gig it is’ was a red flag. Like anyone who lets you know they are something (crazy, funny, not racist) the opposite is almost always true.
I arrive early to a bar with no one in it except the barman. I ask if there’s comedy here tonight, ‘cos I’m a comedian’. He says he thinks so, ‘maybe downstairs?’ and charges me £7 for a pint. Showbiz, baby.
The other acts slowly arrive, all blokes 20+ years older than me. There are now two women in the bar who have come for the comedy but decide against it when they find out the regular MC isn’t on. The stand in MC promises to buy them 2 pints each if they come down for the ‘show’. I take a 50p sip of my pint and check my notes.
The gig is taking place in the downstairs bar, which is really just a room with a lot of school desks in it and a big mirror on the back wall so you can literally take a long hard look at yourself while you do your set. There’s no microphone. All the acts are men in their 50s. The gig feels like an AA meeting where you stand up, say your name, admit you’re an alcoholic, then explain how fat your mother in law is.
I do my set. Neither of the audience like it. The guy staring back at me from the mirror likes it even less. I get told off for leaving at the interval. Showbiz. Baby.
Gig 3: The start of a dream
It’s my first ever gig. I’m at an open mic night where you don’t know when you’re on. They just pull your name out of a hat. I’m the penultimate name, 17 of 18. It’s a long night in every sense.
A lot of people approach their first gig as a ‘I’ll try it and see how it goes’ thing. Not this guy. I’m taking to the stage convinced that what I’ve written is solid gold. Pulitzer and Perrier winning stuff. This will probably be 1 of maybe 3 or 4 gigs I’ll do without an agent. I’ve underestimated quite how important jokes are.
I’ve been dumped a couple of months ago and what I perform is essentially a dramatic reading. A one man Edinburgh show (genre: theatre/ tragedy) compressed into 3.5 minutes. I’m meant to have 5 but I’ve planned for around 90 seconds of applause breaks. I walk off to stunned silence. A star is born.
Gig 4: A countryside disaster just outside a prestigious comedy festival
I’m in a Bristol pub on a Friday when I get a text asking if I can drive some acts to a prestigious comedy festival and do a gig while I’m there. I reply that I can’t drive but would love to come if possible. The texter feels it would be too mean to now say no and I’m in.
I’m so excited I go straight home to bed. I wake up at 7am the next day and write and rehearse for 3 hours.
The next morning, with 6 of us squished in car, we turn off just before the festival city and go 15 miles east to a nearby village. It turns out the gig we’re doing is really 2 gigs; 1 in a pub, 1 in a pizzeria. The extra plot twist being that it’s for the same audience, 3 acts at each gig, and following the pub gig, we’ll need to jump back in the car and beat the mini bus full of audience to the pizzeria.
The audience, it transpires, are on a tour of pubs and restaurants in the area and they’ve been promised half a pint and half an hour of comedy in each venue before arriving in the nearby city for some ‘proper comedy’ (the promoter’s words). The 2 gigs we’re doing are the first of 8 awful gigs the audience will have to sit through that day. I still have no idea who did any of the other 6 gigs.
For gig 2, the pizzeria, they only wants clean acts. No swearing whatsoever. So me and 2 other edge-lords take the first one. It’s in a room so small only one act can go in at a time. It’s also soundproof from the corridor outside it, meaning you have to watch through a small window and lip-read your own introduction. An added bonus is as you take to the ‘stage’, you‘re guaranteed to get stuck in the doorway with the MC like 2 awkward guests at a house party.
Once I’m in, this might be dramatic; I feel more alone than I ever have in my life. Obviously, being alone on stage is the norm for stand up. Rarely, if ever, do I take to the stage with a crew of hype men. But, being locked in a small, sound proof room with 20 blokes who know they’ve been ripped off and knowing no other acts can even laugh at how awful this is, was particularly rough.
All 3 of us, in turn, face our time in ‘the room’, and then jump in the car to begin the surreal task of racing the audience we’ve just performed to to a pizzeria. To the clean, family friendly gig where I reckon I heard the quickest ‘cunt’ I’ve ever heard on stage. Approximately 6 seconds in and out of the very mouth that told us no one could swear. The facade was completely broken when someone mildly heckled and an act screamed ‘shut the fuck up’ in her face.
(In in the interest of balance while slagging off gigs that shut comedians in small rooms not suitable for comedy with no microphones or emotional support. Mark Olver’s fantastic Belly Laughs does just this each year in Bristol and the gigs are some of the funnest I’ve ever done. I believe they’re doing some stuff during Lockdown so you should check them out here.)
Gig 5: Literally any London open mic I do for the first time
London open mic gigs are my bread and butter. By that I mean, they have little nutritional value, cause me to gain weight and I feel depressed after too many slices. Slices=gigs in this metaphor.
Basically, I do lots. Almost all complete dog-shit. And yet every time there’s one in my diary I haven’t heard of before, I’m convinced this one will buck the trend.
I’m unsure what strange, neurological alchemy allows me to miss every single piece of evidence, but I do it. Every time. The poster will say something like ‘London’s finest semi professional and professional comedians’, meaning I have to make myself miss the cruellest red flag of all; that I am neither of those things but am still on the bill.
And I ignore all of them right up until I get the promoter’s email, where they’ve forgot to BCC the acts, in doing so revealing that there are 32 of us. 28 more than on a regular comedy bill. All required to arrive by 7.30pm and stay until the end, which they hope will be sometime around the following Wednesday.
Even when I’m at the gig and there’s no one there and I’m watching, say, a white guy say the n-word (twice last year) or the 6th person that night asking if they can now identify as a household appliance (9,000 times last year) or a one handed crack dealer say ‘kitchen sink’ as cockney rhyming slang for a racial slur then just using the slur anyway ‘cos he didn’t know if we’d understood (we had) or a guy telling the true story of having an underage girlfriend he used to meet at the caravan park she lived on with her foster family (yep)….
Even then I’ll find myself going: ‘I really thought this one would be different.’