comedy

Acting like a normal person

I can’t see the audience, but I can hear them laughing. I’m saying stuff and they’re actually LAUGHING. How is this happening? Maybe if I’d written what I was saying I’d have scribbled it out. But I’m not in the audience’s position. I’m not looking at me saying shit. I have no idea how this looks, how I’m coming across. I’d made a pledge to be myself to say what I feel. Don’t try to be funny. Just commit and act like a normal person would. I can’t see my wife and boys, I know they’re there and I know they’re enjoying it. I keep going. Encouraged, I do things that feel right. I make good moves. They keep laughing. It’s intoxicating. I’m getting the biggest hit of dopamine. Where have you been?

Two hours before the show at Nottingham Playhouse’s Neville Studio I was feeling out of my depth. I watched the others in my class and it felt like they were leaving me behind. They were so good. I was proud of them, but I couldn’t help thinking I wasn’t good enough. Maybe the show will be better without me? I tried too hard in rehearsal and missed things I should have done. I picked it up later and relaxed. The anxiety dropped and I started getting excited. The team I was put in felt right. We’d be fine. I could do my own bit without worrying about what they were doing or going to do.

A pep talk from Naomi. You’re funny and you’re really good. I believe in you. This felt massive. Just do your thing. We went second. The first team opened the show, which must have been hard. They grew into it and finished strongly. Then it was our turn. The audience suggestions included a pub, a sauna and a super villain’s lair. Dean suggested melding the lair with the sauna. Genius. We created the room and I made an icy bucket shower just outside the sauna. It made sense to me. Just making it got a laugh. Well, I gotta use that now, haven’t I?

I settled myself into the sauna. Cat, my scene partner becomes some masculine brute who wants to have it off with my wife. She decides I’m ‘Jim’ and I reply, ‘Super Jim, you mean?’ A guy in the audience says out loud, ‘ha, Super Jim’. I’m buoyed by that. I give Cat a name. Darren. An evil super villain called Darren. He wants my wife and I’m reacting, not with words, but with concerned expressions, and we’re getting laughs. Big laughs. Will Hines said the audience should be able to smell the bravery, and I think that’s what is going on. We’re confident and the audience is with us.

The next scene starts. Charlie is outside the sauna, at the water cooler. Yes, even super villains install water coolers in their lairs. He says something about the side of his face feeling hot and I get up and shut the sauna door. ‘Thanks, Super Jim,’ he says, and I acknowledge it. He then establishes his masterplan for world domination. He’ll make all water cooler conversations boring across the world. I know what to do. I leave the sauna, get a drink and say something really dull. ‘See, it’s working already,’ says Charlie. Mental fist bump.

 I can’t remember the moment I decide to use the ice bucket shower, but I do. I react with ‘ahhh shit!’ and there’s more laughs. It’s like someone has taken over. I overthink so many things in my life. I plan so much of what I’m going to say and do, and here, in front of 40 people, I’m just doing it without thinking. No internal judgement. No voice saying, ‘stop, you look stupid and they’ll hate you’. I’m living in the moment. It’s liberating.

It ends. Applause. Bows. I can’t stop grinning as we return to our seats. Did that just happen? The love of my family. The pride. I pulled it off. I was brave and committed. I had fun.

This whole experience, including the classes, has changed my life. Seriously.

Improv-ing My Life

With Improv the most difficult thing you can be asked to do is be yourself. Which for me was the problem.

At the start of my first workshop, surrounded by strangers, I looked at the exit. Should I just leave? I wasn’t sure I could do it. 

What if I opened up and they didn’t like me?

But surely it’s more embarrassing to go than stay, I surmised?

When did I accept I couldn’t be silly anymore? At school? It was cooler not to join in, apparently.

And yet, I used to take part in Christmas shows, doing Harry Enfield sketches. I did one-man Blackadder shows for my family.

I loved farting about.

At uni, I took drama as an elective subject behind Art and English, I didn’t know what else to do. I thought it would be like at school in year 9.

I felt out of my depth, and when I expressed that I felt uncomfortable, someone rolled his eyes and tutted. It was like a bullet to the heart.

I should have stayed and kicked his drama ass.

Those drama memories came back to me during my first Improv session.

But, while I was in a perpetual state of awkwardness, something happened…

Joy. I was having fun. Being silly. 

The reason I looked into Improv was due to a suggestion that it helped with ADHD symptoms.

You have to listen for it to work. You have to hear what your fellow performer says and work with their offers.

I’m easily distracted and it’s shown over the weeks. I forget what’s happening and I lose track.

This has got everyone laughing, and one person actually thought I was doing it deliberately. I wasn’t. I’d just forgotten what we were doing.

I’ve got better at listening.

Also, in life it’s not natural to embrace mistakes. To embrace failure. To let go of control. 

So often we deflect when we should be joining in because it matters what we have to say.

It’s also difficult to be present without worrying what comes next. 

Improv helps with all of this.

Naomi, our awesome American teacher, has created a safe space to play. She’s fantastic to be around and I hope we’ve given her lots of laughter too.

No one is there to show off, be the best… we are there to learn and to have fun.

Accidentally, maybe on purpose, we’ve created a comedy ensemble and we’re getting better.

The curious thing I’ve learned about myself is I am not the voice in my head. That guy is a joyless prick. I don’t have to listen to him anymore.

The real me keeps showing up, laughs at himself, and has a go. It shuts that little fucker up. 

I play. I am free. And, my face hurts from smiling. 

It’s a great way of getting out of my head as I shift focus from me to my partner.

There’s nothing better than the buzz knowing what you’ve done together has been pure joy for you and those watching.

There have been moments when I’ve felt desperate to be funny. I know this is when the ego is in control. It feels the need for validation. The desire to be good at it.

But what I understood from Naomi is when your brain says, ‘this needs to be funny’, you stop reacting and you start writing, killing all the spontaneity. 

It’s the quickest path to freezing. I did that one week in reply to a scene partner who asked a simple question. Instead of answering I tried to find a funny line.

The brain searches, it judges, it hits a dead end and… Blank. 

The scene ends before it has even started.

The laughs come from the situation and the circumstances. 

One week I was a vampire at a blood donor clinic. Hiding in plain sight. I didn’t have to try too hard for that to be funny.

Or, with another scene partner, figuring out we were divorced dads having forced fun in adult soft play. I’m trying to stop him from harming himself by drowning in a deep ball pool. Dark themes. But the absurdity of it got the laughs.

That’s the beauty of it all. You don’t know where it’s going to go.

I’ve always believed I wasn’t enough. I thought my physical clumsiness, my social discomfort, and my general twattery were weaknesses.

But, while my brain may sneer and try to stop me joining in, it turns out people actually like it. It’s my funny.

They like me. 

And, to quote John Candy – in Planes, Trains and Automobiles – I’m starting to ‘like me’.

Agadoo and All That

Pop songs conjure up a place and time. Even if they’re a bit crap. The kind of tunes your brain tortures you with when you’re lying in bed squirming about something stupid you probably said in 1997. Agadoo by Black Lace is a track as good as a time machine. Always has been, always will be. For good, for worse.

I was watching an episode of Top of the Pops from 1984, and there they were, with their mullet-lite peroxide blonde trims looking like the Scandinavian Chuckle Brothers. Alan Barton is wearing a knitted jumper with circular patterns, and light coloured jeans. Guitarist Colin Gibb is in a white denim jacket cut off at the arms, with sunglasses, and black jeans. They’re both walking from side to side and flicking a foot out, the same way your great aunt would dance to, well, pretty much any song at all.

The lovely beach and the sky…

The Eastgate Bar, in Ingoldmells, near Skegness, was as big as a school hall, and had a bar down all one side. It had a high wooden partition to encourage a queue rather than have the chaos of a six-deep free for all. Kids weren’t allowed at the bar, unless you were ordering a milkshake in the daytime. Dads would queue in silence, holding the glass they’d keep all night – it made the lager taste better, apparently. One hand in their pocket, shaking their change, fondling their car key. The look on their faces told a tale, they’d rather be anywhere else than here. ‘We could have been in Bendidorm…’ doing exactly the same thing.

The back of the Eastgate was mainly windowed, and in front of them were a row of arcade machines including Space Invaders. It disappointed me when I was finally tall enough to see the screen, after hearing such exotic sci-fi sounds coming from the box. That, and the artwork on the side, promised so much more than the crappy green pixels on display. But still, lads from Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and Sheffield, united over this game, it would be in play all night. Records broken. The joystick, and buttons, sticky with sweat and crisps.

The Eastgate Bar was referred to as Mr Tutts’ in our family. Named after, I believe, the magician who returned every summer. Real name unknown. Thinking back, Mr Tutts had these dead eyes, the enthusiasm long gone. The same look on his promotional photographs – posing with a dove on his arm – that he signed as a prize. There’s only so many times you can hand a magic wand to a kid, and act surprised when it goes floppy when your back’s turned. 

The smile of his assistant (his wife) revealed her disdain at entering a cupboard only to ‘disappear’ (she wishes she could have). Or, folding herself up in that box to be sawn in half… again.  I’m sure there was a happier time when they packed in their jobs in teaching, or in a bank, and decided to pursue their love of magic and entertainment. Maybe there was a part of them that thought they’d end up on New Faces with Marti Caine, and then the Des O’Connor Show, or Wogan. Spending their winters in the Canaries, or even the Bahamas. As it was, they spent the holiday season on England’s east coast, doing the same act night after night after night. Perhaps they made just enough to get through the lean months, before starting all over again.

Once Mr Tutts finished his act, he’d start up the disco, get the lights going, and mumble something into the microphone. The air would be thick with cigarette smoke, and the windows dripping with condensation. ‘Burning up and sopping wet’, faces blue, red, and sticky from sugary drinks, a hundred kids would pile on to the dance floor, and Mr Tutts would slap on Agadoo, and then disappear for a few minutes while he sank a pint and thought about his life choices.

Agadoo plonks me in a metaphoric DeLorean (or more relevant to eighties Nottingham, a Ford Cortina, a Flux Capacitor in the glove box), and transports me to the Eastgate Bar. Six years old, and messing up the moves our grandma had shown us in the caravan, mouthing something vaguely similar to the actual words… ‘Agadoo doo doo, push my apples up a tree, Agadoo doo doo push my apples, I need a wee.’