Tuesday 16 June 2009

Can Someone Lend Me Some Funny?

It's been a fun last couple of days. Johnny, Dan Mersh and I have been working on King of Everything and have some new ideas that are going to be fun to play around with. Last night we previewed three sketches.

It should have been four but....well, it was shit. We were part of The Fix's sketch comedy night at the Wilmington Arms in Clerkenwell and I still don't really know what went wrong. What I do know is that the very second I set foot on the stage that the gig wasn't right, that it was going to be tougher than I thought. Still, not to worry, our sketches are funny so we'll be fine. The audience did not agree. The cunts.

It sounds shitty but I was actually glad that other people didn't do that well either. It meant (to me, in my head) that it was the audience and not us even though it was very probably both. At one point during the excellent Two Episodes of MASH's set, Joe Wilkinson actually aborted a sketch halfway through. He even sighed as he got off the stage. I know how he felt. In fact so did the audience while we were on. During one sketch we did a purposely bad joke that an audience member though was real and his sickened sigh was the loudest noise anyone in that room had made so far. I wouldn't have minded but he was with my friends. Still, he's got a cunting ponytail so I definitely win.

I wasn't happy after the gig but stayed long enough to watch a double act called Britain's Best Mates. They're utterly fantastic and I can't recommend them highly enough. They're just what I suspect sports fans to be really like anyway. Then Johnny and I left to find ourselves on the greatest train journey of all time...

I wrote a blog recently about a business man getting a little girl caught on his jacket and thought that that might be the best train journey I'd be taking for a long time. I was wrong. This was way better.

Johnny and I got on the tube at Angel and were joined by four older men all in their 60's except one who may even have been in their 80's. Their conversation was priceless. They talked about drinking and shagging and fighting and it didn't take Johnny and I long to figure out that they were all Freemasons. Very indiscreet Freemasons. They started talking about all the other members of the "Chelsea Lodge" such as Joe Pasquali, Bernard Breslaw and seemingly every tedious bollock in British Light Entertainment. They gossiped and bitched about them all. Who could drink the most, who took what drugs, who shagged which Miss Worlds. It made me think that when the Masons say that they do not control businesses and persuade politicians to change their minds while helping the careers of their friends but instead are simply a private social group for men, I think I believe them now. They were just a bunch of chattering old queens who liked a laugh. The best came just before we got off the train when one of them said "Remember the piano player in Chelsea? You know, the one that used to fuck (NAME REMOVED ON ADVICE FROM LEGAL TEAM)".

We then went to the Five Pound Fringe launch party just in time for it to be over. Follow them at twitter.com/fivepoundfringe as, not only are King of Everything performing at one of their venues, but they are doing a really good thing for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival ie Not ripping performers off.

God, I'm unfunny today.

www.twitter.com/michaellegge

No comments: