June 18th, Wednesday. Gig No.55, Heavenly, Green pub

Tonight was a bit of a wake up call. I get to the gig late, do my set, go through the motions, then piss off upstairs to watch Spain get knocked out of the World Cup. Delicious. Then I bump into two guys I know from my early days on the circuit. They’re in a sketch group, and have become very successful. On telly and everything. They’re doing a set in a comedy club next door and get me in so I can watch. And their stuff was fantastic. Inventive, unpredictable, fluid, clever stuff. Their final bit was genuinely brilliant. And these guys are (slightly) younger than me. And started doing comedy at around the same time. Fuck.

My first thought was: I need to be in a sketch group. There’s a freedom about it, less pressure, more scope for interesting ideas. But then my second thought was, who’d want to be in one with me? I’d just be the overbearingly obvious star of the group, and would make everyone else look bad in comparison. Every night I’d get all the big laughs, and slowly their bitterness would erode all good will, consume us all and ruin everything. We’d be like the Commitments. I’d be the amazingly talented twat singer, and the others would turn on each other and FOOKIN’ implode.

YA GOTTA , YA GOTTA, YA GOTTA TR--Y A LITTLE TENDERNESSSSS!!

Take your own advice kids.

The second thing I was thinking was, I need to stop going through the motions. (Taken literally, that sounds revolting. ‘Going through the motions’. Sounds like I‘m literally picking through my own bowel movements. I‘d have to shit on a newspaper and acquire some kind of makeshift combing device. Why? Maybe, like a WW2 POW, I‘m shitting out my gold teeth to use in exchange for the forged passport papers I need for my imminent escape. I‘ll have to pretend to be some sort of peasant, on account of the fact I have no fucking teeth.) I’ve taken my eye off the ball. These guys have been working on their craft, they are making art, and are professionals. They’re growing, and creating interesting comedy. Me? I’ve been doing the bare minimum. ‘Gig No52 done. 53 done. 54. 55 ooooh fuck oh yeah, I need to try and be good too’. I want to make really good comedy like them. Interesting, original funny as balls comedy. I won’t do that doing absolutely no work on it outside of gigs, and just turning up, doing my 5 spot and ticking off the gig on my wall chart.

Wall chart:


I need to actually sit down every day and write, work new stuff, figure it out, practice. Actually go to work and devote all my energies onto the act. This is it. Like the little athsmatic kid in The Goonies would say: ‘This is OUR time!’ (Meaning, this is MY time. I’m not mental, I don’t have two personalities. Anyway, yes, I was in the Goonies.)

I wonder what would have happened if the Goonies were in a WW2 POW camp. Dr Josef Mengele is about to round up the gang for his grotesque experiments. They are being chased around the camp by the Italian camp guards the Fratellis, and they are just about to scoop the kids up when!! Sloth and Chunk come to the rescue!!! Sloth clunks the Fratellis skulls together, pulls up the camp fence perimeter and gets the kids out under his legs. Chunk is last. “You’re coming!! Come with us!! No!! No!!” The music swells. (There’s a violin troupe in the camp) Sloth looks at Chunk, with a sweet tenderness not seen since Hitler saw his first concentration camp. “SLOTH LOVES CHUNK!” “NO!!! NOOOO!!!” (This is stirring stuff, I’m crying my eyes out here) The kids escape from the camp and they all make safe passage through neutral territories aided by the French resistance. (If you haven’t seen the Goonies, you’re probably thinking I’ve gone batshit mental. If you have seen it, you’re thinking the same thing.)

Maybe I have gone batshit mental. (I alluded to it in the last blog, that was a joke, this time I'm definitely worried) I guess the relentless nature of this challenge has been such that I’ve switched off from it. I don’t think about it. I turn up to the gigs, tick them off and switch off - straight away. Don’t think about it at all. That’s what trauma victims do. I’m sure there’s a term for it in psychology books. Hold on, let me Google it..Let me think.. Um..Trauma detachment? Lets see.. Dissociation!! That’s it! I fall into a fugue state of detachment from reality. That’s what I do. It’s my coping mechanism. Gigs are so relentless, trying to do 365 gigs in a year is so traumatically stressful, I am mentally fragmenting my current reality out of my conscious experience. I fall into a temporary amnesia. Every gig I do, I am not really there. I am somewhere else. (That’s lucky really, tonight I was shit.) IT WASN’T ME. It was my ‘other’ self, the detached uninvolved me who is an empty emotionless droid going through the motions. Sifting through his own shit with a fine tooth comb.

Ok, thats enough. What I’m trying to say is, I need to stop doing the bare minimum and start focusing on really making this act work. No more fucking about. This it it. This is OUR TIME. (Divergent dual personalities take turns to suck on asthma pump. Swap own teeth for passport papers.)

Gig No.55 done. MC/promoter Njambi McGrath