Passing on Wisdom

There's an odd thing your brain does when it knows you have to help out at a Comedy 4 Kids workshop. It starts by thinking of all the worst jokes you could possibly tell them, followed by which are your favourite highlights of say Jim Jeffries material. Then after you realise that is just too far, you wonder if what you should really be teaching them is that unless they want a lonely existence whereby they end up with favourite service stations and motorways, learn that the most obnoxious creatures on the planet are other people on a Friday or Saturday night and that they will go for months and months without being paid by anyone, then they probably shouldn't start doing stand-up. Instead, the first of my duties being just to answer questions about stand-up that any of the kids had, I decided to be optimistic, helpful and essentially full of lies. As it was the question I was asked were all completely irrelevant and involved 'what is your shoe size?', 'do you smell of poo?' and several questions about how much money I make. These last ones were the ones that mostly upset me, as my shoe size is a reasonable 9 (although 8 in Timberlands. Perhaps I am a tiny lumberjack/rapper) and I do not smell of poo. Well not today anyway. However, children who aspire to do comedy should not be aiming for that career because of money. That's where things are going wrong nowadays. There's less of this care, and want to do something because it's fun and more because they'll get rich and famous. So to diminsh this I told them I wouldn't tell them how much money I got but its not loads, hopefully causing them to rethink their careers and become valuable doctors or teachers. Sadly they still think I smell of poo. The gig that followed was much fun and mayhem with some children who live in a man called Lewis's eyes, a boy called Jack who insisted I was an idiot and another small boy who shouts at Doctors faces. What's not to enjoy?


Back to normal gigs tonight, which is a tad sad. More so because it is the gig in a cinema near Coventry. There are two things wrong with that sentence and I'll let you figure out what they are. I have complained about this gig before as it's not my favourite, nor do I think you should have comedy in somewhere that is designated for films. In the same way you shouldn't have go karting at the opera or a tiger at your nan's. The last one doesn't really work as a comparison, but I have been doing Comedy 4 Kids and that's how my brain is working today. It would, incase you were wondering, be a bad idea to have a tiger at your nan's. Unless of course it comes for tea as then it will be polite. Anyway to save myself complaining about this gig again read this:

http://tiernandouieb.blogspot.com/2009/04/return-to-cov.html

Its not so much the gig that makes me sad today, but more that its a normal gig rather than the warm-up for We Need Answers. Despite the advice I was given for how bad warm-up could be, I've really enjoyed this week. Last night was a particularly good show with very good guests. I had to do a little more work than usual due to technical difficulties, but this meant doing more material to a lovely crowd while Alex Horne played appropriate sound affects after certain gags. I never knew my funk music material would be considerably added to when followed by the sound of two men walking down stone steps and then some seagulls. I have only two more to do next week before life returns to the hum drum usual gigs where after my jokes there is just cold depressing silence.


Afterwards I had some drinks with my friends Jude and Rosie which was nice as I hadn't caught up with them for ages, and they had conveniently both been in the audience for WNA. After doing the bog standard usual thing of drinking in a pub, Jude decided that we were all cool enough to go to a late night drinking place in the West End that didn't have loud music or anything an old man like me might hate on a Friday night. It was a tiny unsuspecting corridor on Greek Street known as The Hideout (or as it says on qype.co.uk 'aka Trisha's'. I think this is wrong as it does not look like somewhere Trisha would own), that looks as though you are just walking into an unmarked office building, but as you head down the stairs there's a huge bouncer and a bar with booze in it. These, I find, are the best sort of bars. Slightly overcrowded, and when I say slightly I mean hugely, but very cool, there was something brilliantly secret about it. Even though lots of people seemed to know where it was and so I had to drink squished up against a wall. I like the fact that even after living in London for all these years, there are still pockets of fun dotted around that I stumble across. I wish more places like this existed, although I can't help but feel that they probably do and I just haven't been invited to any of them. Well I now know one of them. Not that I'll go again though, unless its really empty and I can get a seat. Or maybe I should turn up smelling of poo and clear the bar?