Sunday, August 12, 2007
Tomorrow night I start a two-week run at the Pleasance Cabaret Bar. Apart from
the odd corporate gig and a cluster of hit-and-miss warm-up shows this year,
it's the first time I've done stand-up anywhere for a decade.
It's fitting that my official return to this job should be at the Edinburgh
Festival, where, one night in 1988, I first found my comedy voice. Now I'm
back. And I really don't know if I'm good enough, if I can do it any more,
if I've lost it.
Earlier this year I did a corporate gig for Birmingham City Council. For some
reason it was in Cannes, in the South of France. Six weeks before the gig,
and many miles from Cannes, as I sat in my usual seat at The Hawthorns, home
of West Bromwich Albion Football Club, a nearby Albion fan leant across and
said, “I read in The Birmingham Post you're doing a show in
Cannes. They described you as ‘the ghastly Frank Skinner'.” It was, I felt,
about time we revised the accepted wisdom on shootings and messengers.
The gig wasn't open to the public. It wasn't even in the United Kingdom.
What's more, I hadn't actually done it yet. There could be no review, only
an unpleasant aside, but duly noted and passed on. Still, it only nagged at
me for a week or so. I must be getting more resilient.
Monday, August 13
My Perrier Award-winning show was in the Pleasance Cabaret Bar. It has changed
a lot since then, but it's still pretty cosy and smells, inevitably, of
stale beer. When it's sold out, which it is for these coming two weeks, the
doors at the back of the room are slammed shut and the air gets hot and
syrupy.
“If it gets too hot,” says Aaron, the chunky, black-bearded venue manager,
“you can switch that fan on.” He gestures towards a small electric fan at
the rear of the stage. I make a mental note to incorporate this into
tonight's performance.
Sooner than seems right, show-time looms. I look at my watch. How apt, I
think. It's 18.15 and I'm heading to my Waterloo.
I can hear the buzz of the audience, from the other side of the curtain. What
are they thinking? Ten years is a long time. I push the curtain and I'm out
there. Big cheer. Music fades.
“Thank you very much. It's great to be back in Edinburgh.”
Another big cheer. “Oh, have we got some Edinburgh people in?”
Even bigger cheer. “I wasn't expecting that. I usually speak to more Scottish
people in London than I do in Edinburgh. Sadly, I don't always have
spare...”
Way too f*****g early but they laughed anyway. I got brave. “It's hot in here,
isn't it? I did a gig at a big music festival in the summer. It was so hot I
saw a dog loosening its neckerchief...”
Small laugh. This is a gag I've now tried about six times and it has never
really worked. I don't normally give a gag that many chances, but I seem to
have a misplaced affection for this one. Anyway, now that the second gag of
the night has died, or at least sustained a life-threatening injury, I need
to hit them with a sure-fire winner.
“. . . he said, ‘if it gets too hot you can put that electric fan on!' I used
to be quite big, you know. Now I'm doing my own ventilation. Then I thought,
maybe I could do a prop-joke. And I was gonna put a little plate of chopped
raw liver behind the fan, and when I switched it on, with my back to you, I
was gonna put my hand near the fan, scream and make a grating noise, and
throw the chopped liver over my shoulder, all over the front three rows. And
you'd have thought . . . (I trail off into a faraway look and a sigh.) But I
decided against it. I just didn't want a headline in tomorrow's paper that
said, ‘Frank Skinner puts three fingers in a fan' (big laugh). It's an image
I'm trying to shrug off.”
That last sentence, added post-punchline, delivered as a throwaway line,
barely discernible above the laugh, is a technique I rarely employ. It's a
thing that Jay Leno, the American stand-up and chat show host, uses a lot. I
think Leno's trying to suggest that his punchline wasn't actually a
punchline. It's a sort of anti-vaudeville approach, like he's saying, “Hey,
I'm just chewing the fat here. If you happen to find something funny, that's
OK, but there's no joke-pause-joke-pause thing going on. I'm just talking.”
Is that why I used this technique tonight? Was it a safety net in case the
laugh didn't come? I'm not sure. Stand-up comedy, like all human discourse,
is part deliberate and part mystery.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
I'm back at the flat, working out changes for tonight's show. Whereas my
patriotic songs bit has been storming, the section on misplaced patriotism
has been going less well. It's always sad to say goodbye to a routine, and
this routine is special to me because it was created on stage, spontaneous
and freeform.
I was doing a try-out gig at the Comedy Café in East London, a garish, glitzy
spot like Jessica Rabbit might have played. The comic on before me was
Canadian and funny. He did a bit about Harold Shipman. Said his chosen modus
operandi, killing by injection, must make him the most boring serial killer
of all time. He was good but, standing at the back of the room, lost in
shadow, I was noticing something about my own reaction to the routine -
something I decided to run by the audience when I got on stage.
When I walked on, the Shipman routine was still fresh in the air, swirling
amid the smell of ketchup and fried onions. I swan-dived right into it: “Can
you believe it...f***ing foreign comedians, coming over here and having a go
at our serial killers? Never mind the methods, Harold Shipman killed 215
people. They're like goals; they all count.
“When it comes to serial killers it's not quality, it's quantity. He's the
second most prolific serial killer of all time. The most prolific, you
probably know, is a Peruvian bloke called Pedro ‘Monster of the Andes'
Lopez. He killed 300 people. Exactly 300 people. What kind of person kills
exactly 300 people? He must have been some kind of weirdo ... anyway, you
can bet he killed more than 215, Harold. He committed suicide for a
start-off. That was never counted.”
There is that moment when an incident, or something you read or watched or
just thought about - maybe a recent thing, maybe from years ago - suddenly
looms up in your imagination. But now it's as if a comedy spotlight has been
shone upon it, illuminating the tiny recesses, laying each detail open to
comic exploitation.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
It's a terrible thing, but comedians often base their emotional responses to
current affairs on how it affects their jokes. I had about ten minutes on
Osama bin Laden after the early try-out gigs. It had gone well three times.
I actually found myself thinking, I hope they don't catch him or find him
dead till I've finished the tour.
The key, if the routine had any hope of working, was somehow to remove Bin
Laden from the horrors of 9/11; to make him a human being again,
domesticated, potentially ridiculous. I'm not sure the audience ever quite
bought into that. The original version of the routine included lines that
did seem to unsettle the crowd. I used to say that he “had one big hit and
then disappeared, like a sort of terrorism version of Macy Gray,” then
follow that with: “Of course, I know Macy Gray had a second, minor hit that
got to No 18, but that's like the plane that hit the Pentagon - neither here
nor there.”
It actually got a decent laugh, but the sound was shot through with some sharp
intakes of breath. There was a second part of the routine in which I told a
true story about a phone call I got from America on July 7 2005, the day of
the London bombings. I was in a traffic jam in Central London, listening to
news on the radio, feeling sick with the horror of it all: bombs on three
Underground trains and a bus. My mobile went. It was an old friend of mine,
calling from his home in New York.
“We're getting garbled reports over here,” my friend said. “How many people
were killed?”
The radio estimate, at that time, was 18. So, obviously, I said, “Eighteen”.
“Eighteen?” he said. The phone line was a bit crackly so I couldn't discern
his exact tone but, nevertheless, I panicked. This guy was calling from New
York, the home of 9/11, and I'm telling him we've got 18 deaths. I felt like
a loser, like I was wasting his time. I actually heard myself saying, “I
mean, there'll be more. I'm sure of that. That's just a conservative
estimate and, erm ... There's a lot of injured. Some of them are bound to...
er...”
I know. It's unbelievable and horrible and ludicrous but it's what went on in
my head at that moment. It was a terrible day, I was shocked and upset, but
even so. I decided to tell the story on stage. It was, it seemed to me, a
story about my stupid insecurities rather than those bombings. But the
audience couldn't seem to get past the fact that the backdrop to the story
was so terribly sad. I gave it a second chance a few weeks later, but the
yellow card soon became a red.
After that gig, an old comic who I'd worked with a lot in the Eighties and
Nineties showed up backstage. He knew the modern comedy crowd sensibilities:
their likes and dislikes, their safe ground and their thin ice. I was still
working it all out, rubbing out the rules I learnt 20 years ago and
rewriting them as I went along. “It's hard with terrorism stuff,” he said.
“People are a lot touchier than they were ten years ago, and not just about
that . . . paedophile jokes, gay jokes, all best left alone.”
Maybe I should have spoken to this old comic earlier. Maybe I should have done
a refresher course, like people do when they haven't driven for years. [But]
you know, part of me would miss the tragedy of it; the unique but scary
world of a post-punchline silence; a glass replaced on a table, the muffled
biddley-beep of the fruit machine in the downstairs bar, the creak of boards
as I prowl the stage wondering if I'll ever hear laughter again. Maybe
that's why I eschew the Jay Leno method. Some dark part of me likes to be
there in the void that Frank built.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
It's ten past midnight and I've put aside worries about reviews and the
forthcoming tour, to worry instead about the show I just did. The first half
- the reliable half - went well. The second half - the experimental half -
was an enigma: most notably the sex-from-behind-in-a-shirt and the oral sex
routines. My oral sex jokes used to be just about oral sex; now they're
about psychosexual illness and the traumas of urban decay.
Nonetheless, while each separate joke got a laugh, it was like watching a
football side full of talented individuals but not playing as a team. None
of the gags deserves to be dropped but they won't win matches if they
continue like this. I've been a stand-up since the Eighties but I can't
remember this phenomenon occurring before.
“Can you move your right foot about three inches to the left, please?”
I'm in the hot tub with Cath, Cath's mum Sandy, Cath's sister Rachel and
Rachel's friend Danielle. The ladies all came in bikinis and I came in my
trunks (forgive me, the chlorine's making me skittish). I used to dream that
showbiz would be like this - me and four women in a hot tub - though I never
thought they would include my girlfriend, her sister and her mum. Even
though they are drinking what I've unfortunately come to think of as “the
HIV champagne” and I'm smoking my pipe, the overall effect is not so much
Playboy mansion as family bath night.
The ladies leave Edinburgh tomorrow; me, the day after.The club gigs, the arts
centre shows, the Edinburgh run, have all had their lows as well as highs -
but I'm doing it. I'm on that stage, one man and a microphone, doing jokes;
that's all the essential ingredients. It can be disheartening, humiliating
even, but it's also a f*** of a great job.
© Frank Skinner 2008. Extracted from Frank Skinner on the Road:
Love, Stand-up Comedy and The Queen of the Night, to be published by
Century on October 2 at £18.99; available from Times BooksFirst for £17.09,
free p&p: 0870 1608080, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
