Stand Up Comedy and the Axis of Bastards
Snakes in the Comedy Grass Roots
It's October 2001. They're still pulling charred corpses out of the remnants of the World Trade Centre and I'm about to go on stage dressed as Osama Bin Laden. I'm fifteen years of age and I have a problem with authority. Using Children In Need as an excuse I’ve convinced my headmaster to allow me to perform a stand up comedy to a paying crowd. Nobody has enquired as to the content, the panicked faces of teachers as I emerge on stage will set the tone for the rest of my performing life.
Don’t get me wrong. I'm not particularly seasoned. I'm by no means the Comedy Ayatollah. I've got a fucking long way to go and a lot to learn but I've been doing this sporadically for twenty years and when I get on stage people fucking laugh. So in 2019 with life in a sinkhole I decided to make more of a go of comedy.
I undertook a vapid comedy course run by the cartel using some cancer charity as a front. By the end of the scam I found myself praying for a brain tumour. It was only worth sitting through to reach the big gig on completion of the course.
Mentored by a comic who was often absent because he was fucking a girl on the class. In attendance, he ejaculated such viscous, woke hogwash that I'd have been better letting him cum on my face.
Comedy had rules. Organisers were not to be upset, audiences were not to be made uncomfortable. Always punch up, never down. Never approach anything that may offend anybody. Needless to say when the gig came and I disregarded everything and promptly napalmed the room.
Prior to this my life had stagnated. Toxic relationships, drugs and ruinous life decisions had crippled me while unresolved trauma screamed from every shadow. The stage provided a quietude I could otherwise only find in a drug soaked abandon. So finally at last I had found something of worth to substitute the chemical comfort blanket. An incendiary epiphany that ultimately saved my life.
Negotiating the grass roots comedy scene is fraught with peril. Self appointed authorities, gatekeepers monopolise entire regions, forcing their will in perverse packs like Asian grooming gangs. Communal narcissists circulating their mates around their gigs in a perpetual circle jerk like a sticky, arse-licking Magic Roundabout.
Modern grass root comedy gigs better resemble a Victorian Sideshow. True, they might not be conventionally funny but where else can you see a menagerie of gender fluids, albino midgets and the world's fattest human potato? You won't find a joke in among all the bearded ladies and anaemic quadriplegics but you will get to laugh at their expense. Otherwise they don't swing for laughs; they stand up there and deliver a Ted Talk about munter-awareness, baiting claplause while being thoroughly stunning and brave.
Your first challenge as a comedian is to get in among all these extra chromosomes and not kill yourself by alcohol poisoning. The second is to get up there and to tell cripplingly funny jokes that don't tow the line. The job of a comedian is to be thoroughly reckless. Inevitably it will incur the wrath of the cancellation crew that will very quickly inform you what comedy is. You'll go on a weird Stalinist list of bastards that gets circulated around all the promoters before being summarily executed.
It's in this Lord of The Flies reality I would find myself. Scratching my balls in a rained out, failing town somewhere in the armpit of the North. Waiting to go do my set to four other comedians and a pub dog, self medicating with alcohol.
Your farts can't make a sound in places like this because this is a safe space and farting is a micro-aggression. Doing so will mark you out as some kind of predator. Organisers have recently introduced a fun new game into the scene called Find The Rapist. Everyone plays it desperate to play another unpaid spot ten spot in a microbrewery. While exclusively male club promoters preach from the pulpits of threat and sinister action within the comedy scene.
In order to curry favour, smaller organisers enforce behavioural agreements stipulating no material can be in any way offensive, prejudice, racist, sexist, ageist or contortionist. Organisers can be cancelled too. Invariably these organisers either have a better show or in some way don't tow the line. Almost as if their narcissistic jealousy is the motivating factor. Usually they've booked an unruly comedian or allowed edgy material on their nights. If reasons can't be established they are fabricated by the collective and sent to the gulag.
In all this the true victim is comedy itself. Labour Party Conference material encouraged and an embargo on contentious topics, comedy has become extremely one dimensional and a chore to sit through.
I have been asked where the other comedians are. The purveyors of belly laughs. Those raised on an iron rich diet of Hicks, Carlin, and Rivers. They're fucking out there! Drink driving between open mic events performing only to other fledgling comedians, unable to develop their craft, unable to break ground, their spirit shot by the prevailing Munchausen ambience.
After lockdown, I found myself treading water in a bastard soup as the woke mind virus spread. In February this year I was into my third year drug clean and about to quit comedy. Then, like a gift from some demented, demonic spirit some silly old cunt punched me in the face as I took the stage.
Being assaulted on stage should have put me off comedy altogether. But it didn't. I flew into a maniacal rage and lost the inability to exercise any pretence of tolerance. I started performing the material I thought was funny regardless of the consequences. Suddenly I was in the bridge burning business. I started calling out the grass root scene as the cult of captured narcissists and virtue signalling, spineless charlatans that it is.
In April I was booked onto Comedy Unleashed and have this year played three shows for them. Demand for my act has been steadily growing. Thanks to this eminent event I've managed to crawl out of the grass root scene like Andy Dufresne crawling out of the shit pipe at Shawshank.
But I sit on the fringes of the grass roots with a cocked blunderbuss, waiting for some insidious reptile to throw shade. Often having to practice material there, thoroughly washing my hands afterward. The mistake of the comedy narcissist languishes in the presumption that I want exactly what they do. Some shit-dribbling BBC tour of duty around topical panel shows and mind numbing appearance at Live At The Apollo.
I want to play my own shows on my own terms to an acerbic fanbase of nihilistic zealots. I don't see myself as earning fans, more breeding an army of Orcs.
Comedy unto itself has been rendered redundant and the format has to be revised. What I do is very much a work in progress and some of the darkest shit on the circuit but there's unquestionably a market for it. Any kickback only demonstrates that I've hit the intended nerve. So I go harder.
The world is an intolerable open asylum. Like a chip pan fire of pronouns and climate change. Outraged ideological zealots stalk the Earth screaming blue murder at the moon. Fetishists are celebrated for their rampant paraphilic tendencies while they prey on the young who mutilate themselves to flea their adolescence. While a billion spineless dullards enable the horde of intersexual bears plea to the Rainbow God to rid the world of imagined oppression. All in vain hope they can rid the intolerable fear that they are not good enough. And that's where I come in, swinging my dick and missing heroin, ready to remind them that they’re worthless.
To meet increasingly demand for my unique brand of artistic terrorism I've written a longer set and will be staging it next year at fringes, festivals and failing towns across the country. I'll use this as a shameless merchandising opportunity and use the funds to hire mercenary forces to repel the assaults when they come to Lenny Bruce me. Le’st I will spend eternity trapped in a glass panel, spinning through space like Zod.
In spite of what I've written here there are a lot of good people in comedy. The best people I've met work in that industry. Whether it is enough to keep the body of the art form from becoming entirely gangrenous is anybody's guess.
Doing it for no other reason than if I do not express my subjective experience or else it will consume me, forcing me to relapse, then everyone has a problem. I'm obviously a maniac but this is me when I'm reasonably balanced. When I have a means to convert lead into gold; that's my main reason for doing comedy. We each have our own and the joy it brings people is invaluable, not least it's ability to challenge power. Like it or not comedians do have a free license to offend, it's been that way since Will Sommers was telling Henry VIII he was a fat bastard.
It is, as ever the comedian's job to give you something to laugh about. Equally to give you something to cry about. Buckle up bitches, this is really going to hurt.
