I wrote this in response to a fairly sensationalist news article I read on the BBC website yesterday. It's not funny, nor trying to be light-hearted. I'm genuinely interested in the sociological impact of what we do.

Comedy and Social Responsibility

This weekend a comic was booed off stage for making jokes in Liverpool about Madeline Mcann and Rhys Jones. It’s quickly become a much-read national news story with good reason; it’s about a comedian getting it wrong in a profoundly ham-fisted manner as well as concerning a current and ongoing emotive news story.
On the face of it, it’s ethically unequivocal. You would have to have a fairly skewed moral compass to think that telling those jokes in those circumstances was appropriate or right.
The issue of what is or isn’t appropriate for a stand-up comedian to say is raised with numbing regularity: sadly, large-scale tragedies occur on an almost monthly basis and wherever there is tragedy, there will be a queue of people writing jokes about it. Bad taste jokes do the rounds by email and text message, and some comics choose to talk about them on stage. The question that is always asked is ‘are there any subjects are inappropriate for comedy?’ But this is the wrong question to ask.
In private or among friends, you judge the jokes you make by the company you keep. If you’re down the pub and one of your friends is in tears about a family death, I think it’s easy to agree that to crack a joke about that subject would be morally wrong. Having said that, it’s commonplace for groups of friends to make wildly offensive jokes to each other in the knowledge that everyone will understand your true views on the matter and that what you are saying is heavily laced with irony.
This is very different, however, from being a stand-up comedian. As a club comic you don’t know anybody in your audience, and in most cases they don’t know you either. All stand-up comedians before they go on stage will make certain judgements about an audience, but ultimately this speculation is spurious: on any given evening you have no idea who is in your audience and what their particular opinions and tastes might be.
When a comic sits down to prepare for a gig (sorry to spoil the illusion, but we don’t just make it all up on the spot), the starting point is a blank page, and the subjects on which you can write comedy are infinite: your only remit is that the output is, by and large, funny. The boundaries regarding taste and decency are arbitrary, subjective and self-imposed.
I am firmly of the belief that no topics should be off limits for comedy, but what is important is the way in which you deal with the subject matter. Just because a topic is tragic, either personally or globally, it should not be taboo. World War Two was among the greatest tragedies of the civilised world and there was an abundance of jokes belittling Hitler and the Nazis. Some people deal with personal tragedy with humour, and it actually helps them to process an emotionally difficult experience. Crucially though, that is their choice.
The death or abduction of children should not be off limits for comedy per se. To give an example, I can’t imagine any comedy audience feeling morally outraged at a piece of material regarding the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It all comes down to a question of judgement. If you make a crass or offensive joke with the intention of actually causing offence, then you don’t deserve the valuable public platform that stand-up comedy provides: people have come out to a comedy club with the purpose of laughing, not to be offended. Besides, if you persist in deliberately trying to say things that people genuinely don’t want to hear your career in comedy will be short-lived. Case in point: I can’t imagine many comedy clubs will be on the phone today trying to book the act who blundered at the weekend in Liverpool.
I believe in the case of the gig in Liverpool last weekend it was genuinely a case of misjudgement rather than malice: a terrible idea, badly executed and punished by the audience.
Yet for all the offence caused, it actually displays one of the finest points of stand-up comedy: the right of the audience to interact with the performer and express immediate and forceful disapproval. It is emphatically and instantly democratic. It’s a chance for people who care to actively express their empathy for the people affected by the tragedies, and that can’t be all bad.
No topics should be off limits to a comedian; that live comedy isn’t censored is a sign of a healthy and civilised society. But as a comic should you choose to talk about real life tragedy, you have an obligation to display a degree of social responsibility. Ultimately it’s worth remembering that you’re in a comedy club. It’s meant to be fun.

It's a long way to St Andrews. It's especially arduous when a bridge has collapsed across the train tracks (how could they not see it coming? It's a fucking bridge!).
I would, however, implore anyone who has the chance to avail themselves of the wanton kindness of the St Andrews Students Union.
Firstly, a wonderful hotel; luxurious yet still small enough to be personal. Apples and shortbread on arrival and someone employed to go into your room at about 6pm to close your curtains for you. I'm never closing my own curtains again. Bathrobes of just the perfect size and fluffiness (you'll notice the plural - that's right - a morning and evening bathrobe). I paraded around the room feeling like Tony Soprano for a good couple of hours.
The sandwiches provided pre-gig were modest, as was the plate of mango and blueberries. We mentioned this in passing, so a gentleman (in the truest sense of the word) was sent out to fetch us a selection of eleven separate takeaway menus. We plumped for Thai, and I decided in a moment of sheer decadence to have the scallops.
The Thai Restaurant turned out to be closed, and so our food caddy, using his initiative, went to a nearby Indian restaurant and ordered the closest possible equivalent foodstuffs.
On his return, we were confronted with a box of assorted curries that was so large it was a struggle to lift. With no exaggeration it felt like an all you can eat buffet.
This was followed up with a steady stream of beer, and all neatly topped off the next day by a lift to the station.
The standard has well and truly been set.

Over the years you accumulate a portfolio of the more peculiar gigs, and last night was a certain addition.
First off it was a wedding gig, something I've never done before with good reason.
It goes like this: A couple were getting married, and the bride booked me to perform as a surprise for the groom. The back story is that they'd seen me on telly and he remembered that we'd been at primary school together between 1985-87 and apparently was going on about it in the pub, so she thought it would be exciting to have me perform at the wedding.

I turned up to a mid-sized country house in Sussex, and had to hide in the car park to wait for my contact. With hindsight maybe that's slightly undignified behaviour, but at the time it seemed terribly exciting and covert. I felt like Jack Bauer waiting for schematics to download to his PDA.

After some time my contact came to meet me, then went into the wedding (which was by now in full swing) and announced that there was a bit of a surprise.
My cue.

It's never nice to have to introduce yourself when you're doing a comedy night. It's even less welcome when you have to explain who you are, what you're doing there and somehow allude to the fact that you aren't just a dickhead, but actually a comic.
Textbook adverse circumstances.

Given that, there was a great deal of goodwill in the room especially as in one stupendous foot-in-mouth move I managed to say that I didn't really know the groom at all and wondered what I was doing there. The swearing didn't go down too well, and there were some incredibly ham-fisted attempts to shoe-horn my material into being relevant to the wedding.

In the end it wasn't that bad at all, and sometimes it's healthy to operate outside what you know you can do.

Life beyond Edinburgh does exist. I took the train home at 11am from Edinburgh to London on the Tuesday, like many, many other comics. I made the reasonable observation that should that train crash it could potentiallly bring the UK comedy circuit to its knees. Pulling into Kings Cross was an oddly anticlimactic experience. Al's wife Anita was there to meet Al, and was applauding the comics off the train, which was just lovely.

I then took a break of ten days in a tent in Cornwall, with the intention of leaving Comedy aside for a little while. It's impossible, of course. That's one of the main paradoxes of being a Comic; your time off is supposed to be relaxing, but it's only when you relax that ideas come through more easily. I think the ideal holiday for a Comedian would actually be a stint of hard labour in a mine.

For the duration of the holiday, I left my fish (Michael Palin) without food to try to kill him. To the innocent bystander this could be construed as cruel but nothing could be further from the truth. He's lived far, far too long for a fish. If he were to mysteriously die then I could get pretty tropical fish to replace one fat boring goldfish. He survived ten days without food, and now I'm beginning to suspect I own an immortal goldfish. How shit is that? Were immortality to be bestowed upon any beast, I think a sodding goldfish would be in the bottom ten on the list. Why couldn't I have an immortal puppy?

I'm now a few gigs into the new season, and it's both enjoyable and frustrating. The benefits of Edinburgh are reaped immediately in terms of stagecraft and performace. This is tempered by doing the same bloody material that you've been doing for a relentless month, not having had time to produce new work yet.

I plan for this account to chart the year between Edinburghs I suppose; I'm definitely going back up next year and I've already got a few ideas rattling around, so work starts now. I've learnt a lot, and there's no substitute for hard work. There will be the usual gigs, and hopefully some new and interesting projects: already a few things are coming through on the back of a relatively successful first year at the festival, some of them fascinating. If nothing else, it should provide a more readable blog than me relating my various successes at Pro-Evo and Age of Empires.