The Humorist by Russell Kane

Author:Russell Kane [Kane, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857209238
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

6

Good Material

I awoke shivering. Freezing. Fucking freezing. Four minutes past something. I gasped, the safe reality of my pastel-blue bedroom seeming a non sequitur. Cloying wafts of vanilla plug-in air freshener aided a fuller consciousness. My jotter with two paltry pages of half-hearted plans sat on my duvet near my knee, my pencil inertly next to the last word I’d doodled an hour and a half before. Stretching my icy forearm from the bed I placed my moist palm against the chipped white ridges of the radiator. Scalding.

The dream had been powerful and simple – a recurring nightmare rooted in a real-life trauma. I had not dreamt it for years. I’m standing onstage, at the Laughing Goat, Camden, 1992, the only other live stand-up performance I ever attempted. I had always known I must try it at least once – see if theory could become practice. The whole thing had been disastrous. Five minutes of hell. The five minutes in which I realized once and for all there was no correlation between the things I saw and the things I might say. I would never decant the nectar of which I was a connoisseur.

I tried blinking away the vivid visuals recalled by the dream. No good. They burnt and they came through and stayed viciously hot in my mind.

Onstage, two minutes, eighteen seconds into my routine about life at the Centre. I knew it was funny. Perfectly, mathematically, funny. But although my material was pure-hewn art, every word died in my mouth. I sucked the joy from every syllable. The marrow of each word dissolved into an insipid paste. During the third disastrous minute, as I continued dying horribly, the audience started their disaffected mutterings. I switched my mouth to automatic. My mind presented the horrible truth. To these shallow comedy-consumers, my material was unimportant, the vapid cult of personality paramount.

July 1992. I was a bad pun away from writing my first reviews. Ents floor had begun to respect its strange older-than-usual junior. I knew my time was coming. After ten demeaning years, the senior critics (Raymond Collins and Jackie Barker did theatre as well as comedy back then) finally saw how my strangely mechanistic observations gave their flaccid pieces the stamp of expertise. I knew material, I saw how it worked. In seconds, in fractions of seconds, I could break things down into precise technical paragraphs of buffed and oiled critical malice.

Sadly, this burgeoning respect from my journalistic peers prompted me, aged twenty-eight, into the Laughing Goat ordeal. I wouldn’t have attempted this had I not foolishly believed I could succeed. Though this made it so much worse. I had read and reread my five-minute monologue. It could not have been improved if Aristophanes himself had redrafted it. But my material, it turned out, was not the point. Bad jokes about wanking, good jokes about the Gulf War, neither here nor there. If the audience deemed the comedian a joyless, impassive – let’s be honest here, a boring person, he was toast.

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