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.

Having a day off

Me 'I'm having a day off today'
Rest of The World 'What do you mean? You do stand up, every day is a day off for you dickhead.'

In a way I'm jealous of  9-5ers...you have set boundaries for your working life. You clock in, you do your stuff...you tit about on facebook for the last hour on a Friday and then you clock off into pure funtime.

Massive generalisation I know, but here's the thing. If you are a stand up or a self employed person, you have to set those boundaries for yourself, which is a lot harder than you think it will be. Time spent not working (writing, planning, gig booking) is plagued by the notion that you should be working...the kind of work stand-ups have to do when they're not gigging is hard to quantify and can also be at the whim of inspiration.

So you can have days where you feel you should be working but there's no mojo there...there's nothing to write and it's hard to just settle into accepting that you're going to have an unproductive day. Why do you think I started this blog???

I can't quote the study properly but I remember reading that the human brain has an intrinsic need to work, to the point where if someone is doing no 'work' for long periods of time they will automatically define certain periods of leisure in their sub-conscious as 'putting a shift in'. The brain needs to feel it is exerting some form of effort, which is presumably a sub-conscious survival instinct.

So an unemployed person might put in a gruelling six hours on their x-box, which the sub-conscious will define as a  'work shift' thereby righting that wrong.

The way this manifests itself for me as a comedian is constantly trying to think of new material, new directions and spending gruelling six hour shifts on my xbox. Seriously.

But the stress of constantly trying to think of shit I should be doing (xbox aside)  is kind of like a workday in itself, with an inbuilt nagging boss that sometimes you have to tell to back off, hence the statement at the beginning.

The answer is simply good organisation, goal setting, discipline and when the time comes the ability to shut yr mind off for a day or two and simply enjoy the fact that you're lucky enough to do a job you love. Even if your boss can be a dick sometimes. Today I've spent about three hours worrying about not writing, two hours  putting writing off and about an hour writing. I'm exhausted.

Breaking it up...

Ever since I got punched in the eye (with a camera, by a Glaswegian woman, mad with drunken fury that I’d stopped her trying to murder her friend), I’ve been questioning the wisdom of intervening in street confrontations.

I was put to the test on Saturday night. Another girlfight, less vicious and this time set in Birmingham. Two girls, each in five inch heels teetering and pushing at each other while one bloke was in the middle desperately pleading with them to become calmer. He was looking around for help exactly the way I had been in Edinburgh that night. Did I help him? I didn’t. I had visions of one of those stilettos, stained in WKD blue, puncturing one of my lungs as it got hammered through my chest...less PTSD, more Post Female Rage Disorder. In the end one was led away, everything died down and nobody was any worse off.

If I had intervened, nobody would have thanked me. The girls wouldn’t have thanked me, the other blokes passively watching wouldn’t have thanked me (I was screwing up their chances of seeing a fight) and the bouncers likely as not wouldn’t have thanked me for trying to do their job. What would I have got out of it?

When I was 11 I was beaten up by about four other boys as I was walking home from a car boot sale. It wasn’t a particularly vicious beating…I had some bruises, a bit of a black eye and a slightly red cheek, but psychologically it was much deeper. I refused to go to that part of town for nearly two years afterwards…my dad doing all he could to try to get me over it by making me walk back there with him, but the idea of just being in that area filled me with dread. While it was going on, all I had wanted was for someone to intervene in some way. To stop what was happening from happening and I guess that what has made me lunge in stupidly in the past and try to help other people.

To highlight the stupidity of doing this at all…in mid-July I was at a bar in the West end of London watching a band, a typical busy meat-market type bar full of tourists trying to get off with each other. The crowd ‘billowed’ out in front of me and suddenly I saw one guy get another in a headlock, while a third started hitting the trapped guy in the face.

I was completely overcome by three things…how unfair it was that two guys were ganging up on one, how tightly the guy was trapped in the headlock and how ratty looking the third bloke was, who was aiming gleeful punches at the restrained bloke’s head.

I found it hard to watch. I jumped out of the crowd onto the ratty bloke and pushed him off. Suddenly I was face to face with the bouncers, who’d come in a second later to sort it out. They were stood with a bloke in a ripped t-shirt.

I looked the bouncers in the eye

‘I was trying to stop it…that dude was being battered by two other blokes and you shouldn’t throw him out’. I turned to the ripped t-shirt guy ‘this fella is ok, don’t throw him out’. They didn’t but threw the other two out.

Long story short, I had unwittingly defended the neck-cranker.

Ratboy and victim got thrown out together and god knows what happened to them, but me and neck-cranker had a few shots of sambucca together and he was a decent guy…and if his story was true, he wasn’t the instigator anyway…

So it’s a tough one…I got involved, albeit slightly, but would have ended up sticking up for the outnumbered guy even though he was in the wrong…the whole thing would have been a silly macho disaster area. But then to never get involved? It’s horrible when the diffusion of responsibility kicks in and nobody steps in to help in a situation where someone is getting victimised but as soon as someone does they throw themselves directly in the line of fire and have to be prepared for the consequences.

When I got chinned (in my eye) by a girl with a camera, I had no perception that I could get hit. As far as I was concerned, I was stopping a larger girl hitting a smaller girl while all around, people did nothing.  Ten minutes later, they were apparently friends again and I was desperately icing my eye prior to my show the next day. The only reaction from the crowd (and there must have been at least twenty people there) was a massive ‘Ooooohh’ when the girl connected her swing. It was like they were watching youtube live.

Would I intervene again? I think it’s hard to say. It depends on whether a black eye is worse than the powerless angst of knowing you let something bad happen when you could have helped…if someone had stepped in and helped me when I was 11, they’d have stayed in my mind as a hero forever.

Coming out of character

I've been doing a character called Philberto on the comedy circuit for a few years now and when I come off stage there are a significant number of people who aren't sure whether they've seen a character or not.

Philberto is a Portuguese reality tv show winner...at some gigs I am able to go into the background of this but at gigs where it seems a simpler approach is required I just go for tried and tested material that works. This ends up with me basically just doing Philberto as a Portuguese comedian...which it's fair to assume he's become after 4 years on the circuit.

The dilemma i'm facing is whether to come out of character at the end of a show...at some gigs if I can't be bothered to explain to audience members who talk to me that it is a character, I just keep it going offstage till I'm out the door. At other gigs I blow myself out of the water onstage and admit it, which gets a reaction varying from 'wow I had no idea' to 'that dude just tricked me' to 'why?'

Having just done my first Edinburgh show (and indeed, first gigs for years) as ME presenting four different characters it was a different proposition. Audiences knew straight away they were dealing with a persona and there was none of the confusion I can sometimes face in the first minutes of a club gig, which can lead to a kind of 'what's that foreign bloke going on about?' vibe.

Someone pointed out to me that as me, I have virtually no online presence at all, as I've always been listed as Philberto. After the latest Edinburgh run, that has to change and now I'll be listed as 'Milo McCabe as...' when I'm performing club gigs.

As big as that is in my mind, 95% of club audiences pay no attention at all to the names on the bill if they aren't immediately recogniseable from TV...so I really doubt it'll make any difference whatsoever.

Why do characters and not 'straight' stand-up? It's an odd one. There's the obvious answer that having a character can make things easier by putting up a barrier between the performer's real personality and the crowd...kind of giving the stand-up a shield to hide behind if things get tough...and that's why a lot of comics start off as character acts and then evolve into 'themselves' or a version thereof onstage, but I went the other way, funnily enough for the same reasons.

When I started out as 'me' I was anything but. I got away with it, by and large, with a mixture of projected confidence and energy, but nothing that came out of my mouth was genuine. I wasn't doing stuff that I found funny, I was doing stuff that I thought would be funny and was ultimately soulless.

When I started doing a character, in a bizarre way I found that I could be much more honest with my performance...exhibit certain aspects of myself behind the safety net that comes with a persona...it's not me, it's him. I could genuinely give it 100% onstage and I could do stuff that I liked and found funny.

I'm a white middle class guy from Surrey who's never had any genuine hardship and a healthy relationship with my parents...I don't have any strong political views, don't have a big point to prove to people and am not massively status driven...basically, I don't have  many of the building blocks traditionally required to be a really good comic...but I do have a comedian for a father and a personality that can be baffling for some when I'm not self-monitoring.

And I love comedy that doesn't make sense as long as it comes from a genuine place...comedy that you can't see coming or where it's come from and being a character act gives me more of a license to do that.