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[personal profile] peterbirks
To the Comedy Store last night for probably one of my last nights of midweek freedom for some considerable time. Even though I left at 10.30pm and was in bed by midnight, this morning was still a bit of a struggle.

From March 1 it will become more of a struggle, since the new newsletter is going to be launched and I can look forward to Mickey Clarke/Good Morning ITV style wake-up calls (think, still dark, even in summer). I'm quite excited about this; I haven't been involved in a launch for seven years of so, and this is one over which I have much more control than previously. Basically, if anyone can make a go of it, I like to think that I can. And a success will add immeasurably to the Birks kudos in-house.

And the extra money will be nice as well. Oh, and I've negotiated working from home on Fridays and leaving early afternoon (about 1pm). So, I get a nice pay rise for writing 1,000 or so more words a day and shifting my workday forward by a couple of hours, oh, and not being the office so often. I think that I can cope with that.


The Comedy Store was good, although six comics and a compere can, by the end, be a bit like too much cake. Four of the comics were pros, but two were "open mike". One, a Japanese guy in his early 40s, had talent. I guess that a Japanese-American-Englishman is ideal material for entering the comedic world of stand-up, where being "an outsider" is a pre-requisite. The other poor open mike candidate died a death, mainly on the grounds that she wasn't funny, had no sense of timing, and chose just about the dodgiest material possible (predatory paedophilia), although the premise (a person buys a pedometer thinking that it detects the number of paedophiles in the vicinity) shows promise.

But that wasn't the point. My heart went out to her, because she had the courage to try. At the end she just said "this has been really horrible" (simultaneously failing to get the microphone back into its stand) and left. But she had my admiration. Hell, she tried. She won't spend the rest of her life saying "what if?"

The best of the acts was a Canadian, and not just because he did a spin on one of my skits. And, I'm happy to admit, his spin was better. (It basically revolves around whether anyone's life has actually been saved by the lifebelt under the seat in a commercial aeroplane). This guy's line was cleverer. He said that when he was in the plane crash, he followed the advised procedure, hit the water "and then the boat picked me up". (Laughter). "You can laugh, but it drove us to the shore and, well, I was only an hour late for my meeting".

Since the entire audience knew that this story, under which the emergency procedure as prescribed by the airlines all goes perfectly to plan, was complete bollocks, and that the person telling the story knew that it was complete bollocks, it was funny. This is the comic as storyteller drawing his audience into an unspoken conspiracy about the madness of the world. It's difficult to pull off, but brilliant when done well.

August 2023

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