DOING COMEDY WHEN LIFE ISN’T FUNNY

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

Today we go back in our time machine to 15 years ago this month. I wrote earlier this year about working in South Africa and the nightmare of my return, how I was unceremoniously tossed out of my house by my wife, who declared she was in love with someone else. That turned out to be a blessing, as I had spent much of the previous year wondering how long this charade of a marriage was going to go on. But still the onus of having to uproot oneself from the comforts of home and find another place to live ran full tilt into trying to make a group of strangers laugh while you’re feeling a bit lost.

That feeling manifested itself in my first gig after the shit hit the fan. It was a gig I had done numerous times before in the town of Bracknell, southwest of London. I was driving from my soon-to-be former home in Dagenham, Essex, and promptly missed a crucial turn onto a motorway. To correct this faux pas would add an extra ten minutes to my journey, but clearly my mind was elsewhere. Still I got to the gig about 45 minutes later with no further glitches.

When I got there, the lovely man behind the bar immediately greeted me and asked would I like a beer. The answer to THAT question was easy! Then just before it was time to bring me onstage, the emcee asked if there was anything special to say in my intro. I said “Sure, tell the crowd to be nice to me, as my wife and I just separated.” He did that, and I got the sympathy applause I was hoping for. With this being my first gig in almost two weeks, plus that “other” distraction, I walked onstage trying to remember what it was I did for a living! I started to babble, then suddenly remembered my opening line. I said it, it got a laugh, and everything fell into place after that, thank god.

That gig went well, and fortunately I didn’t have to go back to Dagenham that night as a man who had offered to hire me for a theatre show he was producing was at this gig, and invited me to stay at his place nearby. This was handy because we could talk about the prospective gig (which didn’t happen!), and I’d have a head start on the next night’s gig, which was in the mountain village of Matlock, about 250 miles away.

That gig was even better, as I had lodging adjacent to the venue, and there was now a newly refreshed and much more confident me on stage. I stormed it, and it felt like everyone wanted to buy me a drink or at least hang out with me. I even made a date with one of the locals for brunch the next morning. Nothing else to say about that, it was just someone being nice, and we went for a lovely hike in the mountains after brunch, after which I had to drive back to Dagenham.

A few days later, I would go to San Francisco for a couple of weeks just to get away from all the nonsense. I would have great times with my friends and family, though there was a bit of a constant in everyone voicing how they really felt about my ex, which really didn’t make me feel better. I chose to marry this person perhaps for selfish purposes, i.e. I wanted to stay in England anyway, so marrying an English citizen seemed the easiest way to sort that one out. As I’ve mentioned before, working on work permits, which I’d been doing since November of 2000, was a safer bet for staying in UK than being married to a Brit. I got my indefinite stay verified in October of 2008, only 4 months before the marriage fell apart.

When I got back to UK from SF, I only had one night to deal with before I was on the road again to Bristol, where I would be playing three nights at a long running club called Jester’s. The shows all went really well, but I always did well in that venue, despite the fact that the owner wasn’t a fan of my act, yet he couldn’t deny that the audiences liked me, so he continued to book me. I also had to deal with a strange lodging situation, in that rather than put the comics up at a cheap hotel, they had an apartment across the street from the club that they were also renting out to college students. How odd a pairing that was, as here I was 58 years old and being housemates with people barely over 18. I got along fine with the people there, but on the Friday and Saturday, I met some people who offered me their spare bedroom, and once they heard about my domestic situation, offered me plenty of booze.

The day after I got back from Bristol was also moving day, and I would move to Walthamstow, in North London on March 15, followed by a trip the following week to Newcastle, where I did the last of my cruise ship gigs, one that sailed from Newcastle (actually South Shields) to Amsterdam. For most of the passengers, this was a continuous 72-hour party, and I along with three other comics performed on the way out and way back. In between, we all had to leave the boat once we docked in Amsterdam, and we hung with a former UK comic who had moved to Amsterdam and who showed us around to all the hemp bars. Also interesting for me that on the way out, my performance gained me an encore, yet on the way back, some drunken girls booed me! If that had happened a few weeks earlier, I might have taken it personally!

March 17th, 2024



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