Stand-up & Be Recounted: Paul Kerensa

What I wanted to say to a punter

Tough ol' gig tonight. A private gig for about 40 teachers, who'd been drinking for about 5 hours, and were supporting 3 of their own who'd done a stand-up comedy course. Then they have a meal and some more wine, and then I come on for half an hour. As the compere got up to introduce me, saying they've got one more act to come, someone heckled, "But we've peaked." Never was a truer heckle spoken. So I ploughed through. After, the man holding the cheque, before he handed it over, engaged me in conversation. I had to humour him until he'd pay me, so alas our conversation went like this:

Punter: "You're very fast. I missed some of your punchlines because I was chatting to my friend. You should have paused more to let us do that. Some of your jokes were too clever, really. So I missed lots of those. That's why people were chatting."

Me: "Oh, well, you do what you can... A lot of people were enjoying it... You win some, lose some... Well, a lot of wine was drunk..." and other cliches.

What was racing through my head - what I wanted to say - was:

Me in my head: "Oh I'm sorry, I was too clever for you. You couldn't keep up. You want me to dumb down, I see. Aim more at your level. Well unfortunately they didn't give me a survey of IQs on the way in. If I'd known I'd have dropped the multi-syllabic words and just alluded to genitalia - sorry - "got my cock out" - understand that? Yeah, next time I must stoop to your intellectual level. Next time, if you see me at a gig, let me know you're in the audience, and I'll lower the comedy a little just for you, and praps lose the jokes that need your attention for more than 2 seconds, and instead just show you a big picture of a horsey, doing a poo. Now give me the cheque."

Free Beer Day

So much for a day of rest...

Sunday 16th December:

6:55am - Alarm goes off. On a Sunday. Because...
7:20am - arrive at the studios of BBC Southern Counties, where I'm 'Guest of the Day' on their religious show. This means I chat for 10min at 7:30am about comedy things, plug my new Guildford gig with Tim Vine, then talk about selected articles after 8am chosen from local parish magazines. Am tempted to read out the flower rota, but instead make up some other another story about stamps. Feels amazingly early. Didn't bode well that when the newsreader let me in, she had coat and scarf on. Freezing cold morning. I reckon snow tomorrow, though like a Jongleurs Xmas audience, it probably won't settle and will just get annoying.
9am - bacon sarnies with Zoe. Yum! And yum.
11am - bit of work on the train to London, gagging up a forthcoming comedy drama for the Beeb set among news crews in Africa. I've seen the pilot and read the whole series now, and it's going to be great. Look out for it.
12noon - do a seminar at the Arts Theatre off Leicester Square about taking a show to the Edinburgh Festival. Populated by newish comedians. Toy with putting them off, to limit the competition next August (Edinburgh's busy enough as it is...), but decide to be nice and try and be helpful. I think it paid off, as one lass works for Radio 3, and since my 2008 show will in part involve classical music, she's a good contact to have. And I'm bought my first FREE BEER!!! of the day. But thanks to only 4 hours sleep due to the radio show.
3pm - Bit of Christmas shopping. Foyles bookshop, a gadget shop, and Virgin Megastore which for some reason is now called Zavvi. My kind of Christmas shopping, that is.
4pm - The Golden Compass at Cineworld, West India Quay. Hated it. It was like a bad spoof of Harry Potter meets Narnia meets Lord of the Rings, only spoofs normally have jokes in them, and this was just boring. If you're going to set up a fantasy world, make it make sense. Frodo has to get rid of a ring? Oh yeah, cos it's bad. I get that. In The Golden Compass there's this thing called Dust, which is like dust, only it's bad, or good, or something, and the people in it are interested in it, for some reason, and it flows into or out of human lives, and everyone has a pet that follows them round for some reason, cos it's their soul or something. I. Don't. Care. And don't give me that, "But it makes sense in the books" nonsense. I haven't read the books, and don't plan to. The film is made for filmgoers, not people who've already experienced the story in a different format. It should makes sense and be fun for me, over 2 hours. The bear fight was good, but apart from that, no. I won't be watching the sequels.
6pm - Christmas drinks with the cast and crew of a musical I'm working on, called Rubbish! Good folks, good food, could only stay for 20min. But still long enough to get my second FREE BEER!!! of the day. Sleepy again.
8pm - Arrive in Brixton for a gig. But the audience don't arrive, so we pull the gig. Am paid anyway, which is nice. (I still know some people who wouldn't go to Brixton for eight quid just to collect the cash, but there you go.) Anyway, it paid for shopping for the day and more besides, and was bought my third FREE BEER!!! of the day, as a sympathy pint. So by now I'm really ready to snooze.
9:30pm - On the train on the way home from the non-gig, though I forget that I haven't done a gig, and chastise myself for not trying out the new jokes I wanted to. Then I remember that I didn't do a gig in the first place, so the opportunity for trying new jokes didn't really arise, unless I just confront random passers-by in Brixton with the material, which, I'm guessing, isn't advisable. Goes to show, am very very sleepy.
12:15am - Now. Very very very very sleepy. Should go to bed really and stop writing this...

Dank u well, Nederlands

Just returned from my first ever December holiday. It wasn't a traditional winter holiday - at the bank, and at the airport, and at airport security, everyone asks where you're going, hoping to say, "Ooh, nice!" But I say Holland, and they just go, "Oh." No one knows how to react to going to Holland in December.

It was a lovely few days, though bloody freezing. My other half Zoe grew up over there, so it was a chance to see her old house and school (two separate places), her best friend from them years, and most importantly I now realise, to pick up Dutch sweets. Liquorice, pancakes, mini-pancakes, doughnut balls, syrup sauce, chocolate sprinkles... the Dutch diet seems hell-bent on avoiding fruit and veg at all costs.

The one thing I wanted to get my teeth around was a Turkish pizza - for some reason absent from UK takeaway shops, but all over European ones, and they're lovely. Never found one at the right time alas, though I did find a kebab shop and ordered a takeaway kebab to munch on a bike that we'd hired, only to be given a massive takeaway platter with two kebabs, chips, salad, sauces and cutlery. How I was supposed to eat that while cycling through the streets of Haarlem, I've no idea. A translation problem I guess.

The highlight for me I guess was Saturday night, when we were welcomed into a proper Dutch family home. We did know them - it was Zoe's friend Noortje's family, and very generously the father of the family even gave us both Sinta Klaus presents.

(Sinta Klaus is the Dutch version of Santa, which they cleverly do at the start of December, leaving Dec 25th for the baby Jesus. Sinta Klaus is meant to be a benevolent bearded bishop who arrives from Spain on a white horse via steamboat, assisted by a black fellow called Zwarte Piet (a picture of him and Sinta is attached). People actually black up this time of year to represent him. It wouldn't last long over here...)

The meal was full of convivial laughter and they all subconsciously checked which strand of a conversation I was listening to, and kindly switched to English. The only time the laughter stopped was when I tried to explain the Two Ronnies' Four Candles sketch. It really doesn't translate well.

Back from the Comedy Awards do

Back from the British Comedy Awards, and wondering if a tree falls in a forest (the British Comedy Awards happens) and no one's around (it's not broadcast), can anyone hear it (erm, well will anyone see it?)? Well they said on the night that actually they might screen it at some point, but I reckon it's probably going to gather dust somewhere before eventually being taped over with an episode of Deal or No Deal (is it right to call that an episode? there's a sort of plot, so I suppose it is...)

Anyway, the winners list is available at www.chortle.co.uk, so I won't go into that lot here. Suffice to say Not Going Out didn't win either award we were up for, but that was to be expected. We were pipped to the post by Gavin & Stacey for Best New Sitcom, and Lee lost out on Best Male Actor to David Mitchell from Peep Show. I don't think any of the wins on the night were that contestable - it was all in all a fair awards do, with little upset or incident. Which is a slight shame, as this the ceremony where Caroline Aherne heckled Nigel Hawthorne, and where Julian Clary did a fisting gag about Norman Lamont, and where Michael Barrymore unplugged an autocue, and where Spike Milligan called the heir to the throne "a grovelling little bastard". You expect a *few* tears and tantrums, surely. Well not tonight. Perhaps the fact that it wasn't being broadcast live took a bit of the edge off it. Who knows.

So, what can I report that the Chortle news story can't? Well, I can report that the goody-bag contained an Al Murray dvd that I was thinking of buying, so that saved me a tenner. I had a nice little chat with a woman called JK Rowling, who has apparently written some books. Jonathan Ross got her to sign a book, which turned out to be The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman. Ha. I met the producer whose book it now is, and took a photo on my phone of what she wrote - if I can work out how to upload a photo from my phone, I'll post it here... anyway, you won't hear on telly what she actually wrote, so I can exclusively reveal that instead of an autograph, she wrote, "I wish I'd written this." Yeah, and I bet he'd written Harry Potter too.

Stephen Fry gave a great non-funny acceptance speech, and Liz Smith got a standing ovulation. One leading comedy personality who lost out an award was heard to tell his writers that it was their fcking fault, but I think that was a joke. And I saw Stephen Mangan and Graham Norton kiss on the lips, but only briefly. I'm really struggling for gossip, you can tell.

Alright I'll tell you one thing I heard - which is that this phone-rigging malarkey is nothing new. I was told that years ago, when phone voting just began, a certain entertainment show was up for People's Choice award, so viewers had a good month or so to phone in to support their favourite show. So whenever this show had a on-air competition, as they did often, they would put up their voting phone number instead of the compeition line, for about five minutes, then say "Sorry - that's the wrong number - whoopsy." They did this for a good 3 weeks, and quelle surprise, on the night they had three times more votes than anyone else and took away the award. Never questioned, never caught, never found out. Simpler times, I'm sure.

I am now off to Holland for the best part of a week. Blogging, Scrabble and facebook status updates shall cease till then...

Awards in Store

A fine week, job-wise. On Monday I headlined the Comedy Store - a first. Alright it was a charity benefit gig who had hired the night from the Store, but still, it was the Store, it was full, it was laughter-filled, and it was great fun. It was for bowel cancer (an odd way to get paid - be-dum-ching). I found that by adapting my medical jokes to mention the word 'bowel' occasionally, I got impromptu rounds of applause which was nice. Must bear that in mind for future benefit gigs...

And tonight - Wednesday - I go to the British Comedy Awards to cheer on Not Going Out for Best New Sitcom. As you'll know, it's not being screened this year due to idiocy, but it was being filmed, so it might be shown at a later date (though most likely the tape will be stored in a cupboard or used as a doorstop). I've just fetched my tux from my parents' house, and bless my mum and her patience, resewing buttons at midnight because I've fatted up a bit since I last wore it.

So it promises to be quite a day of schmoozing. It kicks off at 1pm with the BBC Radio Entertainment Christmas Party, then drinks at the Oxo Tower at 6:30pm with the nominated Avalon shows (Not Going Out, Harry Hill's TV Burp, Al Murray), then off to the comedy awards at 9ish, then mingling till the early hours. Not too late for me, as I'm off on my hols at 7am Thursday morning, so my patient girlfriend is hoping/praying that I'm not going to come in too pissed. I hate to disappoint.

Anyways, wish us luck. In theory I'll post any gossip and happenings here when I'm back from the awards, but in practice I'm looking at about 4 hours sleep that night maximum, so that may have to wait till I return from my travels to Holland. By which time you'll have heard who won anyway. My prediction is Gavin & Stacey winning lots of things.

Jongleurs at Christmas

"It's Christmastime - there's no need to be afraid..." Bob Geldof and Midge Ure had clearly never played Jongleurs at Christmas.

I jest. For a start I would never slag off my employer (see news article about the voice of London Underground who got sacked...). Jongleurs do fine Christmas gigs (for the punter) in that they offer a full night of entertainment, a decent dinner, disco afterwards, etc etc. And they get punters into a comedy club who would never ever come to comedy, so in that sense it's bringing stand-up to the masses. They're tough on the comedian though. Bristol this weekend - normally one of the nicer Jongleurs - was full of work dos (80 electricians was the biggest party), and the danger of work dos is that one person wants to be there. The other 79 wanted to go bowling or to paintball. So they sit there, arms folded, staring. You work hard for every laugh.

But the club rewards you, with nice pay, the most professional and attentive staff of any club, and a lovely hotel with sauna, pool and jacuzzi. So for those reasons it's been a lovely weekend. But dodging a guy vomiting as I walk on stage (at 9pm - so not late) certainly doesn't make for the easiest of gigs.

Kudos to the other acts for their part in a fine weekend. MC Andy White was genial and always a nice fella offstage (even though he beat me on The Weakest Link 4 years ago - AND I was the strongest link in the first round...), Gina Yashere wowed us with tales of the comedy circuit in LA (she's cracking America as we speak), and Jason John Whitehead was most kind in his helpful reminders to me that at this time of year, we ain't comedians - we're cheerleaders. So forget the clever jokes - get 'em cheering and keep on smiling...

Wicked Wispas

Nice meal last night to celebrate the end of a series of a sitcom that - huzzah - is coming back for series 3. I'm not sure if it's public knowledge yet, so I'm not saying what sitcom it is, but regular readers will probably guess. There were various titbits of info and the like, so I thought it best to report it in the style of those Wicked Whispers things you get in tabloids...

- Got one of my favourite big-name comedians keen on coming to the new gig I'm running at my local in Guildford. Yay. So hopefully that'll be for the first night, which will hopefully be in January. He's a fine, vine, fine comedian.
- A leading music journo and radio broadcaster thinks my Edinburgh idea for next year is a winner. Nice to know. Just need to write it now.
- Sat next to the MD of the production company and heard all about a new hidden camera show starring one of their acts. Sounds very funny indeed, pumping much-needed life and originality into a comedy genre that's been done quite shoddily since Beadle retired. Coming soon to Saturday nights. Highlights include estate agents, satnavs and dog poo.
- My agent, it turns out, is very nice to deal with according to the business affairs person. Firm but fair. Unlike my previous agent, who by all accounts was an unt with a capital c.
- In other news, some sketches I gagged-up and script-edited have been read and approved by a leading comedy guru - let's call him Ian Ucci. Anyway, Ian likes them, which is nice, cos our paths haven't crossed before in the world of work, and he's a man I'd like to impress.
- The only downer on events was that I found out I CAN get a space on the table for the British Comedy Awards BUT I copied down the date wrong a few weeks ago so I've booked myself a holiday starting that very day, thinking the awards were the previous night. Bollocks. I may try and change the flight. Or I won't, and will just have to work doubly hard next series to make sure we get nominated again next year...

Your freezer could be a potential deathtrap

10/10 if you got the reference in the title. When defrosting a freezer (my new fridge-freezer arrives tomorrow - the first one I've ever bought from a shop - I feel all growed-up), particularly a severely frozen-over freezer, it's lots of fun to stab at the ice, making it break off like mini-polar icecaps. Don't get carried away though, like I did, and stab so hard at the back that you burst the compacted gas contained therein. It's dangerous. It contains ammonia, which is very painful when you get it in your eyes* - oh it burns and burns and burns. It can cause blindness. It's really bad. A sharp burst of this pent-up gas, in the face and possibly lungs, all because the Zanussi's being replaced by a Prestige 325. Hardly seems worth the risk to human life just to have cold beers.

*Luckily I had my glasses on. It pays to be a nerd.

You Must Be Stoking

So Friday night was our inaugural You Must Be Stoking (name copyright Paul Kerensa 2007 - the 3rd comedy club I've named, with increasing punniness...) comedy night at my local - The Stoke pub in Guildford. And I think we did a grand job. Stephen Anderson organised excellently and has spent weeks nay months planning it and most importantly flogging tickets, so we had a good 140 people in. And on the night we had meself, Andy King and Tony Vino, plus a non-comedian guest, yoyoist and juggler Arron Sparks, who was fab - and if any comedy promoter is reading this, he's a great act to book if you want something a bit different and non-comedy at your gig...

Crucially, Tim the bar manager loved it (I think he loved the bums on seats more than the show itself, but that's fine. And when I say bums on seats, I don't mean we dragged in homeless people). So we're going to be regular - probably monthly - from after January. I shall purvery the British comedy circuit for the finest acts and persuade them to toddle down the A3 to Guildford. Already got a few great acts interested. And I'm open to ideas on this, so please do blog-comment with suggestions - but the way I thought we'd do it is thus:

I compere (this is not open to negotiation, so don't blog-comment saying someone else should do it. Be loyal.)
Opening act - a warm and friendly affable act from the world of stand-up
Middle act - someone a bit different, not a straight stand-up but potentially a magician, poet, music act or drag queen. Alright, I may draw the line at drag queen. Cos, again, I can do that.
Closing act - a world-class reliable Comedy Store type headliner

I think that should work.

Friday's gig differed slightly from the norm in that it was co-sponsored by 3 local churches, so the audience were resultantly half-full of lovely Christians. Which was fine - and I think it says something that although all the acts tailored material to be appropriate and clean and inoffensive, it was still a fab night and the non-Christian audients enjoyed it as much as the theists did. A triumph for the clean joke.

I hear we had one complaint. I won't name, but apparently someone thought it was unchristian to make jokes about 'masticating' while inferring its soundalike meaning. Fair enough - I don't agree, but I can see where this person was coming from, in that it was a slightly bawdy joke if you're expecting 100% blessed you'd-be-comfortable-telling-it-to-Jesus humour. This person also had a problem with a routine about ghosts, cos that's unchristian too - oh now come on, that's hardly off-colour. And thirdly they had a problem with a routine about gambling. But there was no joke about gambling, was there? Well one act talked about Deal Or No Deal, which apparently counts as sinful gambling. Yeah, I can see that evil glint in Edmonds' eye. So no, much as was going to give the complainant the benefit of doubt on the masticating issue, the ghosts/gambling part of the complaint nulls and voids it in my book...

Oh and incidentally, for masturbation mentioned in the Bible see Genesis 38:6-10; for ghosts see Matthew 17:1-8; for gambling see Proverbs 16:33. So ha. If the Bible mentions them, then I reckon we can too...

Satire - then and now

Been exercising my satirical muscle this week (oo er... oh no, that's the innuendo muscle (oo er)) with a coupla days writing for The News Quiz, and shall be again next week. If you're particularly keen to hear it, it's on the Radio 4 website's Listen Again till next Friday. My job was to write about 12 jokes each based around a racist Tory candidate, a Labour peer who's leaving the government to be a racing driver, research that sunbathing makes you live longer, and the decline of hot puddings. Mmm, taste the satire. I'm sticking it to the pudding industry.

They say satire is dead. Well look at what we're given. There's not much to rebel against. Labour are nicking ideas from the Tories, so everyone's in agreement. The modern hey-day of satire was back when Spitting Image was rife, Have I Got News For You was a baby, and the king of impressionists was Rory Bremner and not a voiceover artist most happy doing Tom Baker. Back then comedians would rant at Thatcherism or boring Major. Love or hate Thatcher, she changed the country a great deal, benefitting a lot of people but also pissing off a lot of people. Lots for satirists to get their teeth into.

Then there was a slight revival with the invention of New Labour. Spin. Yeah. Exposed. Telling it like it is. Comedy writers sticking it to the government. Eat my jokes, Tony. And then The War That No One Wanted. Ooh. They shouldn't have done that. No WMDs? Hanx Blix, etc etc. George Bush is invading countries on a whim, and you know what else, he's stupid. No, really stupid. So much so that for years comedians just had to repeat things he'd said or done ("the French have no word for entrepreneur", etc... For the best part of a year you'd get a laugh at a comedy night just by saying, "He choked on a pretzel"). So now Blair's gone and Bush is going, the war jokes are tired (although I think they were probably born tired). So what now?

Well none of us quite know what Brown is yet. I haven't seen anyone nail him yet with a killer joke or impression or angle. Too early days. And yes the War on Terror carries on (does it? the problem with a war on a tangible thing is that you can't tell if/when it has/might ever end - there'll be no "On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, terror has surrended."), but it's all got a bit embarrassing with no real sign of much progress in the Middle East. We can't really have a go at Brown for Blair's mistake (although I'm sure many have anyway). So only the true satirists - Mark Thomas, Rob Newman, John Oliver, etc - are managing to carry on their trade, and that's only because they are walking wikipediae of knowledge on politics and political history. I have to go on Wikipedia to remind myself who's Chancellor of the Exchequer.

So instead, for now, comedians stick to jokes about ex-girlfriends and drugs and insulting nicknames they were called in school (and that was just the teachers!! The teachers!!! Get it?!? Not the kids! The teachers!!!!). Some pretend to be satirists by occasionally doing a joke about a Muslim with a rucksack on a tube train, but normally it's somewhere between racist and lazy. That's not to say I haven't done it myself. Desperate times call for desperate jokes. Otherwise the casual satirist is left with changing the world by mocking the decline of hot puddings (which as I say, you can catch on Radio 4's Listen Again).