Christmas gigs are tough but I can't help but think I made last night's gig tough on myself. Brendan Riley compered and pointed out all the homosexuals in the room (turns out every single man in the room was gay last night. And the night before) and John Maloney opened the show. The room was rowdy and John was greeted by a shout of "You are gay", not from the compere this time but from a very drunk member of the audience. The audience weren't great but John is and that made the audience gravitate towards him within the first minute. He absolutely had them. He turned the gig around. This is going to be a fun gig and I should just go on and ride the wave that John created.
OR.....
I could go on and ask the audience loads of questions until they're bored stupid.
I went with the second option, for some insane reason. Why I didn't just go on, do material, keep it tight and, most importantly, get the fuck off is beyond me. Rich, the sound and lights man, was giving me the light to get off stage. I'd done my time and I'd best get off before they started booing. Again, I went for the wrong option. You know, the stay-on-until-they-start-booing option. Don't get me wrong, the audience all gave me plenty of time to say feedlines but ran out of patience just before I got to the punchlines. In other words, my last five minutes on stage last night was spent saying random things that went nowhere. I got off.
I couldn't be upset by the gig because it was my own fault really. Bizarrely, a lot of people came up to me and said how much they liked my performance. The sarcastic cunts.
Greg Davies went on next and upset me greatly by doing a very good job and getting the audience to like him. I fucking hate Greg Davies and so do you.
The thing is, I should have been better prepared for this gig. It's Christmas and I'm following John Maloney, that should be enough to make me nervous and when I'm nervous I just think a lot clearer and focus on what I'm doing more but last night's gig just couldn't scare me at all. I've already been through the scariest gig ever this week so I just couldn't put my head and body through that again. I always turn down gigs in Northern Ireland because I'm too self-concious about my accent being the most un-Northern Irish accent ever. I might as well be from the Home Counties as far as Northern Ireland is concerned. The Northern Irish comedian Michael Smiley once called me "BBC Radio Ulster" and I know exactly what he means. The other thing, besides doing gigs in NI, is having any member of my family in the audience. So far, none of my family have ever seen me do stand-up comedy. That's the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it.
Imagine the state of my pants on Tuesday night when I did a gig in Belfast in front of my brother. Ah, crap.
Luckily, the gig went fine. I was a nervous wreck before going on especially as the compere's Northern Irish accent was so thick that I could barely understand a word he was saying. My coo-eee accent was just going to confuse them all and a big terrorist will kill me. That was DEFINITELY going to happen.
I forgot that most people don't think about me as much as I do. It was as if they didn't give a flying fuck what accent I had. Weird, eh?
My brother was still in the venue when I got off stage so I must have done alright, I suppose. He definitely would have left last night.
I did learn one great thing from last night though. I learned that friendship is not what it used to be. We no longer need to rely on honesty from our friends because hard evidence is now so readily available when we need it. At one point I left my pint at the DJ booth when I went to make tinkle and when I returned, Rich, the sound and lights man, reassured me that he had not spiked my drink. I didn't think he would have spiked my drink but it was nice to have that reassurance. And it was a reassurance that I could clearly see because Rich had a Drink Detective with him. It lets you take a pipettes worth of your drink and, when you place it on the correct pieces of paper, you can see clearly whether or not you have scary drugs in your drink. As you can see from the picture, cheeky Rich only put a little bit of ketamine in my pint. What's he like, eh?
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