We All Stand-up Together.


Tonight, I did a short spot at the open mic night Big Nose Comedy in Kilburn – and it’s fair to say that the stars aligned for me in both a negative and positive way, as the sad passing of George Martin this week resulted in it being a Beatles-themed gig; a subject that’s right up my street; my zebra-crossinged-in-1969 street.

(I’m referring to Abbey Road.)

I was second on in the first half, which was nice, as it meant I could relax fairly early on in the evening, rather than spending the whole night trying to keeping my brain in gear. For some reason, I was very nervous just before I went on, to the point of having the shakes. I made sure I psychologically knocked these jitters on the metaphorical head with a mantra the Maharishi would have been proud of: “David, you’ve played bigger rooms than this. David, you’ve played bigger rooms than this”. I’ve performed at the Liverpool Empire as a fucking Beatle, damn it, so I can riff a bit about them for five or so minutes.

In the end, it didn’t go too badly, considering the brand spankingly barely-in-my-head nature of the material. If I’d had a little more stage time, I could have settled into what I was saying, and squeezed more humour out of it. I stand by the opinion that it’s hard to be funny in five minutes, as you barely have time to get your personality across – and I’m bloody hilarious at the five-minute ten-second mark.

I took my laptop with me tonight, to use it as a substitute to working with a projector, so I could get a couple of slide-based gags across. It didn’t work as well as I would have liked, as the screen was a tad small for the room, but it still reminded me how much more comfortable I am doing stand-up with visual assistance, particularly when I’m doing a short set. This could either be down to habit and experience, or it could be symbolic of the direction my solo work should go in. It’s the closest I can get to working as a double act without my partner on stage, and I like to have something to work off of – even if it’s a picture of a wet-look mulleted bored-looking Beatles lead guitarist I’m feeding from. I’ve now got an mental image of a lactating George Harrison that I’d really like to shake. 


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