05/03/07
Triumphant Return -
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I was driving home from one of my great gigs (or 'happenings' as they are feeling more like these days) having a ponder as I tend to do when the monotony of the passing glare of the motorway lights starts to bore me.
My ponder of choice the other evening was whether there was any other job in the world whose success relies quite so much on the protaganists self-belief and confidence being adequately topped up as stand up comedy. I came up with "sportsman", and after that I was stumped. You can genuinely stand or fall as a result of where your head is at. The amount of times I've seen a rugby player drop a ball at the beginning of a match and then go on to make mistake after mistake as their bottle further disintegrates.
This was the situation I found myself in at the beginning of this week, after dropping the ball in most dramatic fashion at the Krater last Saturday. It was a battle of the will to prevent myself from thinking about it all the time - a battle I wasn't entirely winning as the time came on Tuesday night in Lincoln for me to get back on the horse and do another gig.
In truth my confidence was shot. Not just shot - it looked like Peter Weller in the opening scenes of Robocop, pinned to the floor and blasted away beyond all recognition, bleeding profusely as the life ebbed painfully away.
Okay, that may be overly dramatic.
Sometimes I work well under extreme pressure, other times I fall to bits. In Edinburgh last year, as the weeks went by I began to defeat myself before even setting foot on the stage for my nightly show. I was overtired, unrelaxed, and had started to allow things that should just be a minor niggle to elevate into far, far more. My iron resolve dissolved and that was me fucked. Ironically, my compering at the Free Beer Show that I was resident compere of went from strength to strength, as it was just a relief to not feel quite so alone.
So, I was aware at the beginning of this week that I was potentially on the ropes, my knees beginning to go after a battering from, not only the audiences last weekend but also, perversely, potentially myself.
Oddly, the restoration of my confidence came from the most unlikely of places. I got a comment on this blog from somebody who had been present at the late show in Brighton. Don't bother going looking for it as I didn't put it up on the site, not out of any degree of shame (I'd already been open about my inadequate performance on the blog itself), but because I decided unusually to reply to it in a personal email rather than in the comments section.
So this message I received basically tore apart what had happened onstage last week, giving opinion and a couple of pointers for the future, all of which - as you may expect - I unceremoniously dismissed. However, I did spend a couple of hours replying to it, section by section, giving my side of the 'story' and justifying - as best I could - why what happened actually happened. The message I received, whilst ocassionally damning of my ability was written with a degree of sympathy and meant from a good place. I was pretty frank in my reply, and argued my case well, albeit with moments of perhaps being overly dogmatic - it was, let's not forget, a very 'personal' assessment that I was defending.
Anyway, point is, it was an overwhelmingly cathartic process breaking it down properly, something I would normally do on this here blog but just couldn't be fucked going over it all again in a public forum last week. So I approached my gig at Lincoln University with partially renewed belief in myself after all that, and when the compere Dan Nightingale told me that he had an almost identical experience at the Krater last year I was feeling almost fully cured of my comedy leprosy.
An hour later when I came off the stage I was back on track. It was an easy, casually-paced and laid-back performance to an appreciative audience, and the perfect tonic to what had preceeded it.
I decided after that show that for my next few gigs I would quite like a bit of challenge from my audiences, so I could regain confidence in my ability to work off-the-cuff. As if by magic, this is exactly what happened at both Oxfordshire on Thursday and Preston on Friday. Thursday I was compering, so had the luxury of pacing the 'battle' over the whole evening, and Friday I was doing a normal set so had the discipline of making 'fucking about' into an 'act'. Both came off perfectly well, and I now stand before you a phoenix from the flames with my comedic ability back on track and proven.
Backstage at the Krater I was teased by one of the other acts who said "You're only as good as your last gig - so you're shit". I can report that, as of today, my last gig was fucking ace, so that's what I am again.
Travelling up to the Preston gig I stopped in to visit my mum and dad in the North-West. It was a very fleeting visit as I was running late, but as I had managed to forget their Ruby Wedding anniversay last weekend despite the fact that my mum had been promoting it like Max Clifford for a month or so, the least I could do was drop off a card and stuff. Once the champagne and flowers had been dispatched (and they weren't cheap them by the way, don't be thinking I cut corners on them, I was feeling sufficiently guilty to open my wallet a little wider than I perhaps would have done if I'd remembered the anniversary in the first fucking place), the subject quickly got around to the dent in the back of my car.
I should say at this point that my dad, like most dads, has been known to talk an incredible amount of bollocks from time to time. He regularly phones me with nonsense rumours about the rugby league, and throws about opinions that he has overheard at work or seen on some obscure digital channel as absolute fact with alarming abundance.
On Friday he informed me that if I hit my car boot the dent would pop out. He was sitting on the sofa at the time, this was before he had even seen the dent itself. I told him that this was ridiculous, and as he was getting to his feet I told him in no uncertain terms that he was not going outside to punch my car. I reasoned that it could potentially make it worse, and as the dent has been causing me sleepless nights at my frustration with myself for not attempting to apprehend the vandals at the time, I did not want it to be any worse than it already was.
When I got home on Saturday, I was still thinking about the fucking dent and feeling my emotions slide towards the wrong side of depression. Every time I have gone to my boot in the last week I have winced on seeing the dent, a constant reminder of how fucking unfair life can be at times. As I went to my boot on Saturday to get my lightsaber out, I gave it a little tap with my fist. Nothing.
Of course it was bollocks.
But that seemed unfair as well.
I hit it much harder.
There was a big bang, so much so that I actually turned away to shield myself.
When I looked back, half of the dent had popped out.
I hit it again, harder. Another bang. The whole thing popped out.
My boot was back to normal. Literally, in a fucking second, the cause of many a dark mood over the last seven days was gone as quick as it had been bestowed on me.
Things are tentatively looking brighter.
Comments:
· http://myspace.com/anthologypage As you well know, the audience is not always right -- they are frequently wrong.
It's one of the reasons more interesting acts sometimes seem to fail until they get larger media exposure and are found by "their audience" (as opposed to the combative drunks they've been forced to endure in clubs).
One of the most helpful things in stand-up, I think, is to free yourself from the tyranny of the crowd. They're not your god and they should not have the power to define you. (Funny thing is, they tend to like you better when you don't leave it up to them to decide.)
So, go get 'em.
Your blog-brother,
"Encouraging Andrew"
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05/03/07 @ 16:01 
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