2009-06-04»
my secret shame»A couple of months back when I decided to go and see some live comedy in the city. I mostly avoid watching stand-up, because I’ve picked up the habit from real comedians of sitting at the back, nodding and saying “Okay, that’s funny”, instead of actually laughing. Also, after a decade or so of orbiting comedy, I was pretty burnt out on watching it. The last time I’d seen any stand up in the US was in 2002 or so, and it wasn’t that appealing. Racist jokes about Mexicans and other people who don’t go to comedy clubs, extended Seinfeldisms, and witty self-deprecation from guys who were hovering dangerously close to public self-loathing didn’t seem that interesting.
The show I went to in April was interesting, though. Even the new acts were clearly very polished, and the established acts were clearly going in interesting directions. Nobody made bad mistakes, and some of them were making deliberately great “mistakes” — trying out new directions that most circuit stand-ups just don’t dare do. The mood of the show was very upbeat and friendly, and the comedians obviously liked each other and hung out socially. I went away thinking “there’s something going on here”, and spent the night clicking around the web to find out what it was.
Here’s what I patched together. In 2000, San Francisco got a comedy college, started up by old hand Kurtis Matthews. Matthews had been doing comedy from 1984 onwards, starting in L.A. and rising up with Bill Hicks, Jon Lovitz and others. In the late Nineties, he burned out on the dream and instead pursued his (by then) elaborate fantasy of actually getting a proper office job and not having to live out of Travelodges, Denny’s and unfriendly bars. But still the back-monkey wouldn’t exit: he still wanted to be involved in comedy, just not as one of its many frazzled front-line infantry in the sweatshop comedy club chains of America. So he started teaching comedy in his home town: taking all those people who wanted to do stand-up the way some people want to sky-dive — not necessarily as a career, but as a primal fear to overcome — as well as semi-professionals who wanted some honest feedback and advice from people who weren’t, at that moment, drunk and waiting for buffalo wings.
My stand-up career began and ended on a Summer night in Edinburgh in 1990. I’d finished college. My parents had just separated, so I didn’t really have a home to come back to. I’d rolled up to the Fringe without any shows to be in, because one of my friends had called me and told me that my best friend had broken up with his practically-wife, and was now sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend. Oh, and they were all trying to run shows and sleep in the same room, as you do when you go to Edinburgh for the Fringe. I think I was there on a combination-mission of suicide-watch and youthful rubber-necking.
I also desperately needed to know what to do with my life. My college friends, Ben Moor and Al Murray, were both setting off to London to be famous. Others, like Stewart Lee and Rich Herring, were already there, grinding through the circuit. Armando Ianucci was I think doing some weird thing on Scottish radio, but there were rumours he was heading down south too. We all knew Armando was brilliant. We all wanted to be there when he hit. Meanwhile, my father, alone and worried that I was become attracted to a duther education course in Advanced Bohemian and Defaulted Student Loans, had put in an application in my name for a job at a computer magazine called .EXE. They were asking for 1000 words and an example of my coding style.
I hung around Edinburgh, without a show. I stood in as compere for a lunch show we did called the £1.99 cabaret, masterminded I think by Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley. Eventually I plucked up enough courage to do a real open mic, outside the protection of an audience half-made up of my friends. I’d seen Stew and Rich do it; it couldn’t be that bad, could it?
I don’t remember much. I remember we all had 30 seconds or so before we were gonged off. I remember a Scottish lady actually standing on a table and screaming at me “You’re shite!” for most of my half-minute. I remember running into Simon Munnery, but I couldn’t tell him what had happened. I wandered around Edinburgh’s yeasty night for hours.
At the end of the night, I decided, grandiosely, that I had two options as a life goal. Either I could do stand-up, or I could try and devote my life to writing a computer program that would make people cry (with happiness or sadness, I didn’t care). I plumped for the latter. No-one I explained it to understood what I meant at the time, because this was before Myst or Doom or the Internet. A few weeks later, I went for the interview at .EXE. They asked me who my favourite comedians were. They hadn’t heard of them, because all my comedy heroes were 23 years old or younger. I was 21.