LIKE LAZARUS, OR MICHAEL CORLEONE

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

I thought my standup career was pretty well done and dusted BEFORE the Pandemic, but surprise surprise, there are still people asking for me. Not a bevy of them, but just the fact that I have a decent-paying standup gig next Friday in front of a sold out house means, as Al Pacino said in Godfather III, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

In truth, I had been rather flippant about rejoining that circuit, was enjoying my pre-Pandemic state of semi-retirement working as a quiz master and DJ with the odd standup gig happening every couple months. I certainly was not keen on the idea of traveling for several hours either by train or by car to do a 20-30 minute set, then either get back in the car or hope that I haven’t missed the last train back to London. I did that for much of the first decade I was in UK. My last marriage may have only lasted as long as it did because I was hardly ever home, especially on weekends, so we didn’t have time to determine whether or not we were in synch.

So here I am writing these thoughts down as I’m listening to BBC Radio 1 Chart Show, hoping to get inspiration about what current music annoys me. It might be odd for this 71-year-old to try to get down with the peeps. (That’s probably a really dated phrase in itself!) I remember one comic from my Comedy Store days that was clearly in mid-life crisis, bitching on stage about what the kids are listening to, and one of the other comics saying to me “It’s kinda like your science teacher trying to convince you he’s hip!” Maybe I’ll come off that way too, but admittedly my forte will be the tried and true, which is based on the music that I grew up with. I consider myself fortunate that I was around when what I consider the greatest pop music of all time was being played as new. It’s no surprise that my favourite music would have been from the 1960s just as someone born in the 70s would possibly think the 80s was the greatest decade.

I’ll be playing to people mostly born in the 90s, and a few of the regulars from my Tuesday quiz are planning on coming. Fortunately, the way I do my quizzes has reminded me that I can still amuse, even on nights where I’m reading someone else’s questions. There is the performer in me that has over 50 years of experience in front of crowds, and it doesn’t take much for me to veer into the standup realm, even when asking a simple question like the difference in fluid ounces between a US pint and UK pint. (Answer is 4, in case you didn’t know) Plus since my act, whether it was Rick and Ruby or Rick Right, involved singing, I of course look for those opportunities to sing in my quizzes. I have a music segment in my Tuesday quiz where I sing first line/first verse of four songs by one act, last week doing four by TLC, and in recent days doing acts such as Lady Gaga, Blur, and Ed Sheeran. It must look a bit absurd but the punters like it, and there are some that often ask me to sing the songs as if done by Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash.

Gawd, on the Chart Show, I have heard another song by an English rapper with a thick accent and about a three note vocal range, but every third word is bleeped out, so the message is a bit blurred. And to follow that, they’re now playing a whiny female basically saying “My boyfriend dumped me, I’m miserable, he’s happy with someone else, and just to emphatically drive the point home, I’ll sing the whole thing an octave higher.” That is now followed by another female also whining, but sounding like she’s about 7, yet coupling that pre pubescent jail bait voice with breathy sexuality. Plenty of material to work with!

In a way, the Pandemic to me sort of evened the playing field a bit, as the only comics who worked regularly during lockdowns seemed to be the ones that were already established and/or the ones who managed to figure out how to market themselves online. It was good for me that I’ve been doing a weekly podcast every Wednesday with my LA colleague Steven Alan Green, where we just have a freeform chat for 60-90 minutes with a different guest each week. There have been a couple of missteps along the way, but what has worked is avoiding it sounding or feeling like an interview. We’ve been airing on Facebook and YouTube for the past 15 months, and have only missed a handful of weeks, even over holiday seasons.

It’s also not like I was completely absent from comedy over the past two years. I had a set at The King’s Head in Crouch End London the weekend before lockdown happened in March 2020. In May of 2021, I got a Zoom gig through the auspices of some liquor distributor who presented me doing my act in five 5-minute segments, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how much material I still had that was funny and to some degree relevant. It was a bit unnerving that my only audience was the two people producing the segments, but they were laughing thank god!

I think what I’m saying through all this is, dammit, I’ll be fine next week. Our guest on the podcast this past Wednesday was the guy producing and emceeing next Friday’s show, and he was someone I had worked with several times in my heyday. I will assume the role of the aforementioned Al Pacino/Michael Corleone, or maybe the biblical character of Lazarus, and rise this comedy act from the dead. Or maybe just dust off the cobwebs, or some equally metaphorical imagery.

April 29th, 2022



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