Stephen Grant :: Post details: How to make your average Christmas show feel like a lovely wet dream

19/12/06

How to make your average Christmas show feel like a lovely wet dream - Categories: News - Stephen Grant @ 12:35:03 am

My other half has a comment she uses when something bad happens to me, that she feels is deserved. "God's punishment". I'm not sure if that's actually what it is; but if you think of it as the most righteous sentencing available when convicted under "sod's law", you won't go far wrong.

So before I go into the details of my castigation, let's look at the crime. Over the last two weeks, my blog has made some dismissive and desparaging remarks about Christmas comedy shows, and what a poor cousin they can be of your standard stand-up fayre. Kudos-wise, I may have made them out to be hovering around the bottom rung of the comedy ladder.

Well, there's a new ladder in town, and it's offering a direct flight to Hades. I should have said that Christmas gigs, while tricky, are still better than Corporate gigs (which I have also berated on my blog). But I completely forgot to mention the big one; the bastard offspring of the christmas gig and the corporate gig; the Christmas Corporate gig. (shudder).

It's hard to explain why an experienced, professional comic doing his or her best tried-and-tested material will elicit (at best) 20 mintues of staring, head-shaking and muffled, followed by unabashed, private conversation, but it'll happen. A corporate party is never the best place to tell jokes anyway; but combine that with the christmas party, a social occasion where employees are *contractually obliged* to attend, and suddenly 'doing jokes' is so out of place you feel embarassed to try, and then embarassed to even speak, and finally, just embarassed to breathe. But because, every now and again, one of these gigs DOES go well, you live in a perpetual state of belief that it could, and should, be fine. Which gives you an even greater distance to fall when you quickly realise your presence is, frankly, the last thing their evening wants, and ever wanted.

Now, I've learnt from previous blogging escapades, and I've not named names, or dates, or even confirmed that the experiences described were undergone by me. But let's just assume, that for (possibly) a completely unrelated matter, I sent the following text tonight to 5 of my close comedy friends:

"Ever done a corporate so horrific your *soul* hurts?" (And yes, I did insert asterisks to infer the use of bold text).

I won't go into the details of the replies; but suffice to say, a quick reminder of how much you get paid for these shows went hand-in-hand with similar tales of woe from around the UK. I cheered up a bit then. The best way to deal with suffering is to know that other people have undergone it too - and to remember that the money is always good enough to stop you saying no in the first place.

But I can't wait until January to get these all out of the way, and to go back to being a comedian who plays mainly to people who want to hear comedy. I know; greedy, greedy me.