One of the odd advantages of retirement is that, if you are fortunate enough not to need the money desperately, you can finally devote yourself to activities you genuinely enjoy. A bit of consulting (until they want you no more), becoming a trustee (until they trust you no more) or stamp-collecting, until no-one writes to you anymore.
Or, in my case, standing in a former Newcastle strip club waiting to tell jokes to the early evening drunks.
The venue was called Nancy’s Bordello, which sounds less like a comedy club than somewhere you might accidentally end up in on a stag do. Happily, it was entirely respectable, apart from the sticky carpeting.
Becoming a stand-up comedian
This was one of the first clubs that gave me a spot after I retired and decided, for reasons that still aren’t wholly clear to me, to become a stand-up comedian.
Actually, that last bit is untrue. I had always wanted to be a standup-comedian but never had the nerve; my young ego wouldn’t have survived even a miniscule dying on stage. But now I found out that I still had a functioning, vulnerable ego after all.
I was terrified.
Still, after a few months I found my feet. I learnt how to hold a room, how to survive hecklers, and – crucially – how to appear confident while internally gibbering (a skill I had honed as a trainee in Obstetrics).
Then something unexpected happened.
The better paid I became, the less fun I had.
The inverse relationship between the fee and my enjoyment
At first this made no sense whatsoever. Surely being paid more to do comedy should improve the experience? Yet I discovered there was a curious inverse relationship between the fee and my enjoyment. If I was working for little more than petrol money and rubber chicken, audiences were charming. People chatted beforehand, bought you drinks, laughed generously and behaved as though you were doing them a personal favour merely by turning up (which I learnt was an ulcer cure for “turn” organisers).
The expensive corporate gigs, meanwhile, had the atmosphere of a hostage negotiation.
The organisers would greet me politely enough, but with the faintly clipped tone of people who suspect they may have been sold a pup. Nobody made much effort to talk to me because, after all, they were already paying me a small fortune to be amusing. Every laugh had to be extracted by force.
One particularly grim evening finally brought matters to a head. I had been booked to provide thirty minutes of after-dinner amusement for a large commercial company holding its annual gathering at a conference hotel somewhere off the M62. I had carefully customised my material, arrived early, worn a jacket that suggested reliability without implying accountancy, and generally behaved like a professional.
Then I saw the room.
The lectern problem
At one end stood a vast wooden lectern bolted to the stage with the permanence of a Victorian lighthouse. Attached to the top were two rigid microphones aimed at mouth height for someone approximately 6ft 4in and emotionally immobile.
I am neither.
Once installed behind it I was visible only from the eyebrows upwards, giving the impression that the company had hired an anxious thumb to provide after-dinner entertainment.
I knew within the first minute that I was in trouble.
Some tables listened attentively. Others began chatting amongst themselves almost immediately. A small delegation wandered off to the bar halfway through one of my better stories. One man appeared to fall asleep while maintaining direct eye contact with me, which is a surprisingly hurtful skill.
The vast majority were perfectly pleasant people individually. But collectively they became what all difficult audiences become: a distracted organism with access to alcohol.
Every laugh had to be mined like coal.
I survived, technically speaking. There was applause at the end and even a few cries for “more”, though these may have been directed at the dessert trolley. But I drove home that night in a state of deep comic despair.
Had my material been wrong? Should I have been punchier? More aggressive? Should I have abandoned the lectern entirely and roamed the room like an evangelical preacher? Was I fundamentally unsuited to comedy and merely too old to realise it?
By the time I reached the A1 I had almost convinced myself I required professional help.
I decided to seek a second opinion from someone whose judgement I trusted.
Listening and demographics
Many years earlier, when I was young and foolish in a more energetic way, I used to write comedy material for professional performers. One of them – now elderly but still hugely successful – agreed to meet me after a show.
He listened patiently while I described my disastrous corporate appearances.
Then he nodded.
“It’s demographics,” he said.
I must admit this was disappointing. I had hoped for something mystical. A secret breathing technique perhaps. A special posture. Maybe a lucky blazer.
But he was absolutely right.
A comedy audience is not really an audience at all. It is a collection of tribes. Age matters. Geography matters. Profession matters enormously. A room full of retired WI members does not respond in quite the same way as eighty drunken medical students with access to recreational nitrous oxide.
Professional comedians understand this instinctively. They become oddly forensic about audiences.
“How many?”
“What ages?”
“Corporate?”
“Drunk?”
Especially that last one.
My old colleague explained that he had learnt this lesson the hard way himself after years of accepting lucrative engagements where he never quite connected with the room. On one particularly difficult evening he had been booked to follow a younger comedian whose entire act consisted mainly of swearing at people creatively. The younger comic had brought the house down. My friend then walked on with his beautifully crafted, entirely clean material and died slowly in front of three hundred delighted obscenities enthusiasts.
He was paid very well.
He enjoyed it not one bit.
That, he explained, was when he realised the secret was not universal appeal – which scarcely exists in comedy anyway – but compatibility.
The right audience
The right audience makes you feel effortlessly funny. The wrong one makes you feel as though you are reading out appliance instructions during a flood.
Since then, I have become much choosier about where I perform. I now ask careful questions before accepting invitations. I once declined a speech to a support group for victims of medical accidents because much of my material concerns amusing mishaps in hospitals, and there are limits even to my judgement.
I also tailor material much more carefully than I once did. Gentler audiences get gentler stories. Younger crowds get faster material. Corporate dinners require jokes with enough momentum to overcome the gravitational pull of free wine.
None of this guarantees success, of course. Comedy remains one of the few professions where complete strangers can stare silently at you while you unravel psychologically in real time.
But understanding demographics has made performing infinitely more enjoyable. And I suppose I should have realised this all along. I was trained in demography while at medical school. But I hadn’t realised that demographics mattered both at making you ill and making you laugh.
These days, when a gig goes well, I no longer assume I am secretly Billy Connelly reincarnated. More often it simply means I have found my people.
And when it goes badly, I blame the lectern.
