Hecklers - A Stab at Psychology

I was playing a gig recently that was full of people there to enjoy the night, which they were as all the comics had been on point. The opener did well and the newish middle acts had been buoyed by the goodwill of the crowd into an optimal level of performance. In the second interval a guy arrived and started talking too loudly to the barmaid, his voice cutting through the chatter of the pub quite clearly.

After the break, as the compere took the stage and restarted the night, his chattering didn’t lower or cease…a quick look at the guy revealed that he was clearly drunk. He was mid to late forties, fairly dishevelled and his wellworn face had the look of many wrong decisions made.

However his body language conveyed a different impression…he had a swagger in his movements that seemed to be at odds with what one would assume (amateurly and with prejudice) that his status in life was. Elbows at his side, his arms were out at right angles and his chin was tilted back, revealing narrow, scrutinising eyes.

Sure enough, his brain decided that it was time for his presence to be felt by all.

‘Yeah’ he said to the compere, cutting him off ‘It’s alright for you to say that’.

The irony being that I don’t think the he’d even heard what had been said. His agenda seemed to be to get involved, despite having nothing significant or interesting to say.

He came out with a few more, witless, charmless utterances before the compere realised that normal tactics wouldn’t operate with this guy and he had to go into damage limitation mode before the disruptive influence ruined the atmosphere in the room. Suitably chastised, the heckler skulked by the bar and was quiet but seething for the rest of the night.

Thinking too deeply about this on the way home, I theorised that the guy had engineered a situation where his low sense of self-esteem was re-affirmed. His subconscious mind had cut a swathe through his conscious brain, which had been reduced to childlike jelly by the amount of alcohol he had drunk, and told him ‘Hey…here’s a great chance to prove what a wanker you are in front of everyone. If you do that, the world can confirm to you what you already know about yourself and then hey presto! You get the self-loathing and anger that justifies your position in life. The bonus here is, your conscious mind can blame it on the compere, not take responsibility and then actively not change your behaviour. Ever.’

Basically, he was never going to win and somewhere deep down he knew that and threw himself into the situation anyway. This is one of a number of different types of heckler that you will find at comedy nights all over the country.

As comics, we have to deal with hecklers all the time. I can sometimes quite enjoy the experience as it gives me a chance to spin something spontaneous and new out. Other times I am overwhelmed by the ill-conceived stupidity of what I’ve just heard...see above.

Many comics find the experience of heckling beyond irritating. Audiences do as well a lot of the time. I remember dealing with a table of persistent hecklers for several minutes, thinking to myself, ‘Christ, I’m on fire here. I’m slamming them. Boom, boom, boom,’ then hearing a woman from another table shouting out, ‘Is this all it’s going to be?’ I ended up dying on my arse because I’d stayed on them too long, thinking I was really clever.

They have to be dealt with, but as I’ve learnt, not to excess. As well as low self-esteem heckler, there are several other generic types that pop up.

Alpha Male Guy

There are different types of Alpha Male hecklers to be enjoyed. My favourite is the guy who will whisper his heckle to his girlfriend / mate as you are onstage, prompting a loud laugh from an audience member in the wrong place, normally during a set up. This type of behaviour can be a result of the male feeling somehow ‘demoted’ by your onstage presence and the attention you’re receiving, but not quite having the stones to confront you directly. When questioned on the whisper a standard response is ‘Oh nothing mate.’ Or the dreaded ‘Carry on.’

‘Carry on’ is the one that gets me the most. The audience member’s fear at being ridiculed manifests itself in a directive. By telling you what to do, he in some way assumes ‘control’ of the situation. (I say he, as I’m specifically talking about an alpha MALE…more about female hecklers later). As a comic, if you press the issue, a few different things can happen.

1. The guy reveals what he said and you can bust it open and throw it back at him because it’s shit. Often when someone is formulating a heckle (or repeating it in this case), there is a syntactic error or verbal tic that renders the whole thing meaningless. Usually this is because of nerves on the part of the heckler, overplanning their timing, or overthinking. At this point, hopefully, the guy takes the beating and doesn’t keep throwing good money after bad. Unless he’s particularly insecure or drunk, which will result in a fight to the death. The ‘death’ in this case being his ceaseless awkward replies to your putdowns destroying the atmosphere, you as the comic getting emotionally riled to the point where you lose control of the night, or the guy’s girlfriend or mates telling him to ‘shut the fuck up.’

2. He just clams up and doesn’t say another word for the rest of the night.

3. The guy’s girlfriend and / or mates misguidedly get behind him and they collectively fuck the atmosphere up.

4.The thing he whispered was actually hilarious and gets a huge round of applause from the audience. At this point, I believe the best thing to do is to give him the win and move on. Your ego takes a knock, he’s had one of the best experiences of his life and everyone is happy. This is pretty rare.

In my experience, a persistent alpha male heckler can often be brought into line by some kind of inclusion, acknowledgement or smile…a tacit offering of peace by way of a nod in his direction…if you create a ‘you and me’ sense with the guy or guys, often this is enough of a sacrifice at the temple of their ego.

(P.s I should know. Like most comics, I am myself a ridiculous alpha male.)

The Office Joker

This is the type of heckler most discussed on the circuit…the guy who’s the ‘funny’ one in the office and has probably suggested that a good idea for a Xmas party would be a comedy night. He has suggested this purely to provide himself with a platform on which to demonstrate to his friends that he is infinitely more hilarious than the comics onstage. The difference with this kind of heckler is that he has probably been training, maybe by heckling his comedy dvd’s in the privacy of his front room.

If anyone is questioning the assumed confidence that I have so far in this post that comics will generally deal with hecklers, I have a clichéd analogy.

Even if you are a naturally strong and talented fighter, you will lose a sparring session with someone who has accumulated years of training in their particular discipline. This is the general rule of thumb with hecklers and professional comedians. The office joker, however, considers himself the reigning heavyweight comedy champion of his office and he needs a new challenger.

A common characteristic of the Office Joker heckles is speed. He will start things off with a generic ‘tell us a joke!’ or ‘when’s the comedian on?’ and respond to your battle tested counter-strikes with speed and confidence, but very little content. If there is any content, it is normally of the following type. ‘yeah, that’s what she said’… ‘that sounds like Dorothy! Ha’ (reference to someone at his work that nobody else in the club knows) or another pet hate of mine, a repeated ‘What?’

Sometimes this is a good excuse for the rest of the office to have a go at the joker, as they have no doubt longed to for long periods of time. Other times (and this is especially pertinent if the joker is also the boss) they will back their table joker and sometimes can been seen clapping him on the back after a show for his ‘performance’. A ‘performance’ which has probably disrupted the enjoyment of every other paying member of the audience in the room.

This is a guy who would kill to do what you, as a comic, do for a living. But he can’t. What he’s going for is a sense that he went toe to toe with you and survived or beat you, because then he can tell himself on some level that he could have done it, if he’d wanted. He will doubtless tell himself this anyway.

How do you deal with this guy? Often there is no way but to completely ignore him. What can be really tough is a room with maybe four different office Xmas do’s in them. Then you’re dealing with four different versions of this guy. At the same time.

Hen Party Heckler

Again, a very common topic. The difference in my experience with stag and hen hecklers is that when a heckler from a stag party is put down, the guy’s mates are often delighted. You’ve made Stuart look like a bell end. Well done. Ha ha. With hen parties, you have to be very careful whilst responding to their interruptions…most times, especially if you get a big laugh from your riposte,  the result is a group of women bonding together to defend the poor defenceless lady from the horrible comic.

‘Yeah, she did just shout something nonsensical just before a punchline, but it’s a hen night! What do you expect mister comedian! Hey! Don’t slag off my mate and make her feel bad! Yeah, what an asshole. You’re not funny anyway. Let’s just chat loudly amongst ourselves now until he fucks off. If he keeps talking about us we can tell him he’s not funny again, or imply that he has a small dick. Then we can drunkenly complain to the management and try and get some money off or free drinks, because it’s a hen night.’

But to be honest, I don’t really blame them, no matter how ridiculous they are. It’s their special night after all! I just think you should never EVER book your hen or stag night at a comedy club unless all of you are aware that it will require you to sit down and pay attention to something for an hour and a half.

Very Attractive Lady Heckler

I’m hot as. Everyone knows it. I’m going to sit in the front row and get up a lot so everyone can feast their eyes…hang on…why isn’t everyone looking at me? What the fuck? It’s like I’m invisible. Why are they looking at him / her? That person isn’t even attractive! Shit, I’d better remind everyone that I’m still here…

The very attractive lady heckler is an interesting one. Bear in mind, I’m not generalising about good looking girls in comedy clubs here, I’m generalising about the type that can’t bear the spotlight to not be on them for thirty seconds.

The heckles that come out of this situation are some of the lamest you’ll ever hear. Women who trade exclusively on their looks CAN (can, not do…and bear in mind again I’m talking about a specific sub-group within the area of very attractive females) tend to have underdeveloped social skills, because they’ve never really had to use them. Couple that with the fact that guys ‘always seem to laugh at their jokes’ and you have a devastating combination of confidence and ignorance. The same is true of men as well, but I haven’t noticed the same trend amongst really attractive blokes heckling in comedy clubs because they’re not being looked at.

Other women HATE this type of lady for obvious reasons.  The very attractive socially retarded lady often can’t and WON’T give up until she is taken about by her red-faced partner or asked by security to please keep quiet one too many times and removed. She has maybe never faced this level of social disapproval before and can’t accept being in the wrong, so misguidedly fights against it with everything she has. Which normally consists of implying the comic has a small dick and/or is ugly, if male…and well, probably the same with female.

Having said all this, I think some hecklers are great. I love the ones who go with you on the journey, who play along with you and respond to your ad-libs in a good natured way. I especially love the hecklers who, when questioned, turn out to be extremely candid about their private lives, giving you room, as the comic, to riff with them, show some skills and set up callbacks.

Fundamentally, at the time of a comedy gig, there is only room for three or four socially inept ego-maniacs in the room. They are obviously the compere for the night and the acts gathered backstage. It would be folly to suggest that the motives driving hecklers all over the world are different to those which drive us to be comics.

Doing an Edinburgh Show with My Dad

Last October, I was mulling over possible routes to take with my 2012 Edinburgh show. I wanted a multi-character format but with a bit of a narrative and had it down to three options.

I ran these past my agent and he made a suggestion about the ‘This Is Your Life’ idea. The suggestion was to have my dad in the show. My dad.

For the full hour.

For the full month.

He mulled it over then let me know that this option by far would be the most interesting. To give a bit of background, my dad is an old school comic who had a flirtation with the comedy TV shows of yesteryear, New Faces, The Comedians, etc.

The idea was (is) that the show would examine my dad’s life, actual situations in his background that had occurred and I would play different characters from his past, some real, some imaginary. We would have a third person in the show, a ‘Michael Aspel’ character who would ‘host’ the show and bring me on as different characters. That’s not really the point of me writing this though…

I rang my dad. After the fifteenth attempt at trying to explain the show to him, he still hadn’t grasped what I was talking about.

‘I just don’t get it. Talk to me like I’m a twelve year old and tell me again…’

Five further attempts (and my dad’s perceived mental age dropped to six) and he was still no closer. It was only after we did the first preview that it started to click a bit and even then he wasn’t 100%.

But he absolutely loved it. He hasn’t performed in anything like this before and was thrilled. So thrilled, that he began to make suggestions. And come up with ideas. Thousands of ideas. All of them utterly shit. Here’s a couple.

‘Why don’t you roll a fake eyeball along the floor into the crowd at that point?’

‘What would be really funny would be if we were both the sound effects people in a radio play…and we started trying to take over by getting all the sound effects wrong!’

The worst thing is when he comes up with a half decent idea. As I open my mouth to shoot him down for the millionth time I have to stop myself and concede that he might have a point. This has the effect of redoubling the volume of his ideas and reducing the quality proportionately.

‘I KNOW! One of your characters could be a pantomime horse!’

What has also been a bit of a struggle is the reversed authority roles. It’s understandably been odd for my dad to be told what to do by his son and it’s been hard for him to adapt to a type of humour he is unused to…but he’s been surprisingly flexible with both of those things.  

We’ve wound each other up something rotten and know how to push each other’s buttons…and our exchanges can look quite brutal to onlookers, particularly Chris Henry, who is playing the Michael Aspel role in the show. Even after six months of work with us he is still regularly shocked by the way we talk to each other. Dad and I will happily call each other every name under the sun and in that moment, mean it.

But in spite of all the teeth gnashing, at the end of this run, regardless of how the show is received, I will have worked with my Dad, in a comedy. We’ll have that forever. And despite initial misgivings, I’m absolutely delighted we’re getting a chance to do it.

He’ll never read this, because his knowledge of the internet starts and ends with him typing ‘sex’ into google. And so I can quite safely say here what I would never say to his face…that he’s absolutely brilliant.

Milo McCabe: Kenny Moon, This is Your Life 5.35pm The Billiard Room, Guilded Balloon

Not-so-lazy Comedians

Having a day off as a comic is more of a dilemma  than one who is not involved in that end of the industry might expect.

I have several friends with jobs requiring traditional hours of employ, five days a week, that look at what they perceive to be my three 20-30 minute windows of work and laugh in my face whenever I describe myself as ‘working hard at the moment’. The irony is, I sometimes find myself getting jealous at the absolute nature of their downtime…evenings and weekends where work is the furthest thing from their minds.

As a self-employed professional comedian, physiologically speaking, the effort expended in this job can be a constant ongoing process with no definite breaks or rest periods…time not spent gigging or travelling to gigs (which, to be fair, is most Sundays to Wednesdays for me) is spent writing that years Edinburgh show, coming up with / trying to come up with new ideas, booking / confirming gigs, chasing gigs and thinking about all the other things I COULD be doing to further my career.

Time spent not doing that stuff can tend to be spent (in my case) worrying about the fact that you aren’t doing that stuff as much as you should.

Being a comedian means that you are ABSOLUTELY in control of your professional future (as much as is possible within an unquantifiable ceiling of comic development) and whilst that can be considered an incredible freedom, it’s also a burden of responsibility. A socially healthy brain will recognise that if things don’t work out to the extent they COULD do for you, there is no-one else to really blame. And that can be a fairly stressful day to day existence.

Combine that with the fact that on a gig-day, I am aware all day long that I have a gig that night. By this I mean a kind of low level sensory awareness that is there from the moment I wake up, some kind of internal physiological preparation for what is to come…this feeling isn’t relieved until after the gig, where it translates into a temporary euphoria (provided everything has gone as it should!!) which lasts for about 45 minutes in my case, and is then replaced by a kind of nothing.

I know this is specific to me, but I’m sure other comics feel similar (maybe not to such extremities) and this can be construed as the body and mind, literally, working all day long.

I personally think the thing to do is to isolate a certain day in the diary where, as a comic, you don’t think about work in the slightest. Again easier said than done.

It’s actually quite hard to have a ‘fuck all’ day without feeling the guilt of a self-employed person’s inner boss berating the unworthiness of this decision. I've lost count of the times my inner boss's self important onologue has completely ruined an otherwise enjoyable xbox session.

Minor rant …I guess the point I’m making is having defined periods of relaxation is a luxury not afforded to doing this job…however when you love the job you do, I guess time off is less important…

Intentional Death and Ironic Racism

Earlier this year, for a video segment of my Edinburgh show, I appeared at The Comedy Store in character as ‘Tyson Moon, the son of a seventies comedian’.

The story thread in the show went that Tyson, the socially inadequate son of a comedian, was being groomed by his father to take his dad’s decades old act back onto today’s circuit to remind people how strong ‘old school’ comedy was.

The Kenny Moon character is broadly based on my dad Mike McCabe, himself a professional comedian who appeared on The Comedians, New Faces and other shows like that, back in the day.

To finish this segment  off, I decided to go and perform some of my dad’s dodgy old jokes (as well as some I’d heard told onstage on a trip to Benidorm earlier that year) at The Store’s Gong Show and pretty much die on purpose, so the footage could be aired as a VT as if it were taking place live.

I knew before going on that I was going to be politically incorrect and die on purpose, but I hadn’t anticipated the whole thing going on as long as it did. The footage below was actually edited to take some of the bigger laughs out, as it didn’t suit the character to do so well.

What was bizarre about the situation was going on, KNOWING I was going to die. That that was the intention…that I would turn the whole room against me and it was quite a unique feeling…a total lack of nerves and adrenaline, just a calm acceptance of the grim reality I was about to create for myself (via the detachment of being in character).

Literally going onstage was bizarre. It was like being in a trance. I had nothing to be afraid of because I was sprinting at the worst possible outcome head on. It’s quite hard to describe the feeling of being in a situation where the only way you can screw it up is by being good.

It’s actually a very liberating state and perhaps could lead to some good work, but I imagine that it’s something that’s very hard to artificially create onstage…a very genuine, ‘I don’t give a damn’ mentality.

I was allowed to do this by the Comedy Store management on the basis that I didn’t qualify for the final, as that wouldn’t be fair to the newer acts. ‘There is literally no chance of that happening.’ I said to Simon at the time, ‘if I’m still on after 3 minutes I’ll start doing some racist stuff’.

The ‘racist stuff’ in question was jokes I’d heard told this year in Benidorm. Myself and another comedian went over there to do some research and have a bit of fun (which we did), but I was staggered by some of the material I heard on a stage in 2011. Maybe it’s naïve of me but the experience was as close to being in a time warp as I think I will ever find myself…and it was all  getting big laughs too.

Part of my intention with this character was to show that these jokes…jokes that would end a TV comedian’s career today in a heartbeat…were really part of the norm just a few decades ago. The fact that they seemed to still be getting laughs today from certain people didn’t really occur to me so much at this point.

What surprised me…both during this show and in Edinburgh, was how well these jokes went down and the laughs they got. I’ve got no problem with it being funny in an ironic way and people laughing at the small-mindedness  of this character,(as this was my intention) but I did get one or two comments from people along the lines of ‘…yeah, you can’t say anything about them these days, can you?’ which kind of knocked me for six, as solidarity with people expressing this kind of view was the last thing I had intended. Again, maybe that was naïve of me.

I was thinking about developing this into a 20 minute set until I realised that it could well get people laughing for the wrong reasons and give people the wrong idea about me…namely that I was using a character as a veneer to enable me to tell these jokes in a format that could be deemed ‘acceptable’. 

There’s a lot more to this character than that…he’s the son of a narcissist who would only get attention and approval from his father when he appeared to take on his values wholesale, leading to him unquestioningly adopting viewpoints and opinions rooted in the seventies, including the issues mentioned above.  It’s a character rooted in an era he wasn’t ever around in in a hopeless quest for approval from his self-absorbed dad.

If I ever do anything else with this character beyond last year’s show, I have to make sure this point is well illustrated, otherwise I could come across as actually having the attitudes I’m attempting to lampoon.

Here’s the gig

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftMunD0lefc

Here’s a bit more background on the character

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-3FWCG4xqc

The Story of MC Spitfire (adult content!!)

I was killing time on facebook recently and clicked on a mate's status update. Not a proper mate, just someone I met once through a friend and got on with. That doesn't matter...it lead me to the true and tragic story of MC Sptifire.

MC Spitfire was a drum n' bass MC a few years back who got in some kind of a feud with another MC of the same ilk. Their beef lead to the unknown 'beefee' luring MC Spitfire into a webcam chat under the pretence of being an ex girlfriend of his.

Despite having no return webcam feed of his own, MC Spitfire was convinced enough of her identity to masturbate on his own webcam feed, even going so far as to stick a finger up his own butt on camera. Sure enough, the guy posing as this girl subsequently posted this footage. All the details, incl pics are here

http://www.dogsonacid.com/showthread.php?t=631260&page=2

I don't know anything about him, drum and bass, mcing etc but it seems from the stuff I've read on the internet that his work as an MC was completely ruined from then on in and I was thinking to myself...how many professions would this damage to that extent?

If you were a celebrity chef, actor or comedian then doing this on camera would be pretty bad, but would it devastate your entire career to the extent that it seems to for poor Mr Spitfire? Probably not. Plenty of people have been caught out on webcams before, but I don't think it's ever been as graphic as actually fingering their own assholes.

Other professions affected to that extent by fingering footage...
MP? Yes
Teacher? Yes
Lawyer? Yes
Footballer? No, I doubt it. You'd get shit off the fans probably for a year or two then it would get forgotten about. I believe there's internet footage of keeper Thomas Sorenson getting far worse done to him floating about and it hasn't done him too much harm.
Comedian? No. (would be interesting to see how Stuart Lee would deal with it though.)
Actor? Not really (unless you were someone like Steven Seagal. I think he'd be screwed. It probably wouldn't do Danny Dyer too many favours either)
Director? No. They have historically got away with far, far worse.

Beyond positions of high moral responsibility it seems like the reason this would be so destructive to a high profile person's life and career is if they had a particular responsibility for being 'macho', which I guess drum n bass MC's do. I'm also guessing there aren't too many openly gay ones.

If footage had emerged of MC Spitfire slapping a girl around, bullying bullying old people or something similarly reprehensible, would he have had to cancel all of his gigs the way he had to? probably not. Chris Brown still gigs yet this guy has apparently completely disappeared from a comunity he was having success in.  

I guess there's something about sticking your fingers up yourself for sexual pleasure in the public eye that absolutely rules you out of being a credible MC

Gym Bully

I was getting changed in the gym the other day and I saw a schoolkid boasting to his friends about how he'd 'constructively' broken down another kid's confidence by repeating tauntings about his sexual shortcomings. Talking about how this kid had a small dick and couldn't ejaculate and how he was going to carry on with his character annihilation until he had broken this poor unknown victim.

The schoolkid was about my height, six two, probably around sixteen and powerfully built for his age. His two friends were much smaller. I had my back to him as he was boasting to his friends, who weren't really joining in with it, just sitting there. It made my blood boil. I looked around and one of the kids looked really uncomfortable and for a second I thought he may be the subject of the conversation, but this couldn't have been the case, unless the bully was taking extremely theatrical and surreal liberties with his use of the third person. He didn't seem to have the ingenuity.

They walked off and I (fresh off my last intervention, which has left me with a tiny yet seemingly permanent scar - see my 'Breaking it up' post) did nothing but feel sorry for the poor lad being spoken about and angry at the bully's nature...it was obviously insecurity and projection writ large and this unknown kid was paying for it, probably because some aspect of his character projected a weakness that the bully detected in himself and subsequently loathed.

Would this nasty kid ever understand? Would he ever work out the demon inside of him that drove him to be so persecutory was coming from a place of weakness? Would the bullied kid be ok? Would he have a sick feeling in his stomach every time he went to school? All through my workout I alternated between thinking that I should have calmly addressed this kid's behaviour in the hope of educating him in some way and the law of the jungle rule...natural selection, don't get in the way. The 'strong' prey on the 'weak' and this kid would have to work stuff out for himself...also was I getting the wrong end of the stick completely? Was the bully actually the bullied and using the environment to get some sort of verbal revenge in a way he never would in this other kid's presence? From his demeanour and physical build I doubted it. Why did I even take this on in the first place...was it a case of having too much empathy or too little...was I just projecting from having been bullied a bit myself when I was younger?

Back in the changing room he was there again, but this time with two other guys, older and his size. They were talking about a fight that had occurred in that locker room, the previous Saturday. He was describing some 'boys from Brixton' jumping over the barrier, having a workout and then starting on some innocent  members of the gym. This isn't a 'ghetto' gym by any means...it's the David Lloyd in Kingston.

 I interrupted their conversation and asked him what had happened and he told me the story. Him and his friends didn't quite know how to take me...I was wearing nothing but a towel. Their confusion at my open natured semi-clothed intrusion meant that they simply accepted me into the conversation because they weren't sure what else to do. This bully kid was taking a nasty delight in describing what had happened...at first I thought that he was one of the guys that had been attacked before he said as he was leaving, 'they were my boys, innit'.

The guy was just a nasty, spiteful ignorant riot-type who seemed to delight in the idea of threat and violence. If I'd have said something earlier, he wouldn't have listened to me in the least, he would probably have gotten aggressive and returned with his friends and I might have been facing three of these dudes. Naked.

I know it's not on me at all. It has nothing to do with me and I've learnt my lesson before, but there is seemingly no way of avoiding the powerless angst that follows encounters with individuals like this. You just have to hope that karma evens out the misery for guys like this and hopefully, he might one day work a few things out. What do I do next time I see this guy? Probably quietly seethe. What else can I do?

Bad Gig

On Saturday I had my first bad gig for a little while and it was entirely my fault. Oh dear.

Thursday and Friday I had a great time, really enjoyed myself at my gigs and went home with that buzzy excited contentment that you get as a comic after a good night. Especially Friday, where I felt like I'd faced down some hecklers really well and turned a potentially tough room around in my favour.

Saturday was a gig in the same venue as Friday. They were a nicer crowd. MC and first act had done great. I'll smash this thank you and head into my Sunday/Monday weekend feeling all happy with myself. I'll probably treat myself to a baguette on the train home cos I'm so ace. A baguette and a magazine about cage-fighting.

What a bellend.

I wasn't in a bad mood when I arrived at the gig, but I was in a complacent one, which is arguably a worse state to be in before a gig. The complacency wasn't based on the quality of the venue by any means...the gig is very well run and always great fun to play...hmmm...always...until tonight. My complacency was based on me having a good run and not respecting the nature of my job to its fullest, a state I haven't really found myself in for some time. I was actually unaware of what was going on in my head at the time... I was fairly pleased with myself and thought I was just relaxed.

I came onstage in quite a low energy state. I got a wolf whistle. I have a line to deal with that which gets a good response most of the time. This time it got nothing, the reason being that with hindsight it only works if I've made my character look friendly/warm/humble. If I seem disinterested or disengaged, it can make me look like an arrogant prick...yup...

Then a loud drunk female voice at the back...now it's time for some of my spontaneous brilliance...but again, contextually with my low key beginning, instead of looking decisive and skillful I look scornful and harsh. I went in too hard. Now I'm arrogant AND aggressive and I've been mean to a lady at the back. Instead of a vulnerable comedian beating back a bullying heckler (yay) I've been a loudmouth onstage attacking an innocent who just wants to join in (boo). Where a verbal hug would have worked wonders, I've thrown a nasty right hook.

I can get this back with my material...but the material which flies so well most nights had a new background. If i'm bumbling, vulnerable and silly, then it's great. If I've come across as aloof (which I have so far) it sounds harsh and jarring. I'm getting a few good laughs but it's mostly people laughing at the bizarre nature of my stage presence this evening...and it's a few isolated pockets of people at the front.

I can literally feel my aura wither. My throat tightens up a bit and time goes weird. At a GREAT gig a few things happen...you feel powerful and in control, like you could pretty much say anything and it would work. There's so much space on the stage and in your mind and when heckles come at you, it's like they're in Matrix bullet time...you can dodge easily and your mind throws the perfect response your way, which you channel out to the crowd. At a great gig I feel like I'm having an out of body experience sometimes, like I'm not in control of what is going on, I'm just a passive observer. At this gig I felt like I was driving a coach full of people too fast along a precarious hilltop and I could go over the side at any minute.

I didn't die. I got that coach under control. I went into survival mode and got a late equaliser, ending the night with a dubious score draw on a really old bit that works when I  push the boat out on it energy wise, but I didn't feel at all happy when I came offstage. After the applause died down there was an instant chatter among the crowd about what they'd just seen. I couldn't make out specifics, but most of it seemed pretty bemused.

It's such an obvious rule of comedy...your first 30 seconds onstage will completely define the rest of your set and it's soooo important to make that first impression, otherwise you really are swimming against the tide. I was really annoyed with myself on the train home, (eating beef jerky and reading a discarded paper) because it's such a basic thing to screw up as a comic. My number one danger area in stand-up is coming across cocky and aggressive and unfortunately that can be where my personality can default to onstage as some kind of defense mechanism.

BUT these are the gigs that we learn from as comics and are arguably the most valuable. I will not forget the importance of a first impression in a hurry and I imagine this experience will help cement that in my mind.

Next gig is tomorrow. There's going to be one happy/silly/vulnerable/ humble comedian bounding onstage, of that you can have no doubt.