on my way to a work-in-progress

a splurge of neuroses

It’s 2.5 hours til show-time, so I thought I’d free write, neurotically. Because unedited neuroses famously leads to great, readable, prose. Didn’t Jack Kerouac write On The Road on a bit of toilet paper in prison with his own piss or something? I mean, I hated it, but that’s not the point.

When you’re working up a show, the only way to know if the jokes you wrote in your bedroom are any good, is by having a go at saying them in front of people who have paid money. This is simply the most horrifying thing imaginable. There is no other job, as far as I’m aware, that boasts ‘have a bash mate’ as its sole method of training. Even the temp job I did for eight weeks in 2007, where I took staples out of documents and gave them to another girl to scan, involved basic instructions.

I used to spend the hours before a work-in-progress displaying fairly acute signs of food poisoning, with the only way I could get myself on stage being two large glasses of wine. Without the wine, my hands would shake like a cartoon. With the wine, I merely looked (in the words of my then-director) ‘quite scared’.

To combat this, I decided to give myself two years to work up my current show. The first year was to stop me from looking too freaked out to be funny, and the second year was to work up my current show.

I’m thrilled to report that, while I can’t tell you if the hour is good or not (art is subjective), I no longer throw up, or need to drink beforehand. I just feel like something terrible is about to happen and I’m nude, which is totally manageable.

Why am I writing about this? Because I am distracting myself while on the train to a venue in Kings Cross from the terrible thing that’s about to happen/my nudeness.

I’ve never had a good gig at this venue and, without wanting to be a bad workman blaming his tools, it’s because the stage is too high, the toilets are too near the stage and the tools are bad. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that I’m creating a self-fulfilling ‘I have never had a good gig at this venue’ prophecy. It’s the tools ok, the stage is so high that you can’t get any kind of atmosphere going, and the toilets are right next to the performer!!! How can an audience laugh if they’re too busy worrying about needing a wee??? I will die on this (too high, with too-close-toilets) hill.

I always, a couple of hours before a preview, start to get intrusive thoughts, as though a monster has taken control of my faculties. Actually, less of a monster, more an uncanny version of me. Similar, but slightly different. The voice is a half an octave more strangled, for example. The eyes are totally black. She has one extra nostril. I like to call her Stovie Marting.

Stovie Marting usually starts thinking: ‘You are a terrible narcissist’ and ‘No but literally what is the point of your job? People are dying in wars. People are dying trying to help people dying in wars, and you’ve just spent four minutes photoshopping the word ‘ole!’ above a shrimp’.

Then the worst thought pops into my head. Or rather, Stovie Marting’s worst thought.

‘But I guess I’m creating laughter, and that’s a good thing in a world that’s-’ I can’t complete the thought because I start vomiting so much pink glittery fairy magic dust that it’s impossible to think any further.

Anyone who believes they are doing live comedy for any other reason than ‘needing attention’ is living in a unicorn land of tiny horses and frog-babies (I’ve lost control of the metaphor). The creation of laughter and good times is a joyful byproduct of the job, but nobody ever woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and cried ‘I must create a service for The People!’ before becoming a comedian. Many comedians, however, have woken up with this thought, which has then led to them giving up comedy for a job that provides a genuine service. Such as [insert any other job you can possibly think of on earth].

I’m not saying being a comedian is bad, but let’s call a spade a spade unless it starts charging people to watch it tell jokes. To pretend I’m doing a Service For The Greater Good is to bellow so much smoke up my arse I’m surprised I’m not medically dead. Or a cloud. That’s not a typo, by the way, I do mean bellow. As in, I am using a pair of antique bellows to shoot smoke up there (very dangerous).

Anyway, these are Stovie Marting’s thoughts, and she will remain with me until I transcend into the next stage of anxiety, or she falls asleep/passes out (presumably after hyperventilating, due to her additional nostril).

Oh god, we’re getting close to the venue now. At this point, I try and think about two parts of the show I’m looking forward to doing. For example, there’s a bit about apples I’m enjoying at the moment, and another bit about freight. For anyone trying to get a handle on this show, don’t worry, it’s not as mad as it sounds. It’s just your classic hour of standup about freighty apples.

I remind myself that none of this matters in the broad spectrum of life and (so this doesn’t spark a slide back into ‘why aren’t you a full-time anti-war activist instead’) look up facts about how big the universe is. God, it’s very big. I contemplate Jupiter. I eat a protein bar because I’m consistently low on protein and, sure, protein bars are Ultra Processed but if I eat any more pulses today then let’s just say Jupiter won’t be the only gaseous orb in the solar system [look to camera].

Stovie Marting is so loud right now. I genuinely feel I have to justify why I’m not a full-time anti-war activist. But that would be mad wouldn’t it? So I won’t do that. I won’t talk about how I am absolutely terrible in a crisis. And that I read somewhere that people either lose their hearing when highly stressed, and can’t focus on spoken instructions, or lose their sight, and can’t focus on anything visually. I think I have both. When approaching a roundabout during driving lessons, I’m unable to see oncoming traffic as well as hear my instructor saying ‘please brake for that oncoming traffic’. My strength is not on or near the battlefield. It’s - I was going to say ‘in a medieval court jingling my hat bells for the king’, but it’s not that either because I currently can’t hear or see due to the stress of this gig. After some thought, I think my strength is staying at home doing social media sketches about malfunctioning technology (for the king).

I’m glad I didn’t talk about that, because it would have been unnecessary and embarrassing.

Back to the universe. Once I’ve engaged with the sheer scale of the Oort Cloud, I gain back my faculties, and can turn to more practical solutions. I think about how short term failures make the show better. The worst WIPs I’ve ever done have forced changes I wouldn’t have entertained making otherwise. It’s an acute microcosm of life in the sense that, whatever the failure, I learn very fast, and very painfully, with zero room for nuance. There’s no agonising over what it meant, or how I can reframe it to mean something better; if people don’t laugh, I have to work out how to fix that. Gross to watch, helpful to experience (to the audiences in Henley and Leicester, and that first night at Alaska Bar in Waterloo earlier this year: I’m so sorry).

We are now fifteen minutes from the station, and I have started to feel deeply, chemically tired. Someone told me this is to do with adrenalin, which seems evolutionarily counterproductive, unless my yawning is Darwin telling me I should have been a tomato farmer. I blast loud music to keep myself hyped. Queens of the Stone Age en route, Coldplay back. I won’t apologise for liking Coldplay because they have some proper bangers in their back catalogue and I’m very white.

Just scanned my playlist and it’s all men. No girls allowed. Oh my god I’ve just realised, right this moment, in real time, that Girls Aloud is a pun on Girls Allowed, oh my GOD. Is Coldplay a pun?? OK, google has confirmed: it is not. Horrible to be living in a world where, at any moment, anything could turn out to be a pun.

Happily, I don’t feel as chemically tired anymore because of pun-adrenalin, but it will return when I get into the venue. It always does.

Then it will remain, until the moment before the lights go down, when the tech person says ‘ok, all good to go?’, and I will suddenly feel very calm and still like in 2009 when the bars came down and I simply had to accept that Space Mountain was about to happen to me. I was going to go on this rollercoaster whether I liked it and not. Almost a relief, really, to be done with the worry. Another metaphor for life! Christ, I’m on a roll.

I now have to get off the train, so thank you for ingesting this hearty wedge of prose, and for being with me at this most neurotic of times. Writing it all down may have distracted me, but the big question is: has it helped my nerves?

Absolutely not. Oh well.

EDIT: the work-in-progress was fine, but I maintain the stage height and toilet placement killed at least six jokes.

FURTHER EDIT: Three days after this work-in-progress, the venue got shut down and there was a bailiffs notice attached to the door. The venue was a criminal! I KNEW SOMETHING WAS OFF. SOMETIMES GOOD WORKMEN SHOULD BLAME THEIR TOOLS.