The Comedian Who Hated His Audience

It was only after he’d finished that he realised he’d come over a photo of Vladimir Putin. That this picture appeared on the front page of The Guardian only confirmed the moral felony. Guardian readers were not supposed to relieve themselves whilst viewing hard-core porn online, let alone spill their seed over pictures of probably corrupt Russian leaders. It had been the nearest thing to hand.

Soundtracks to such activities weren’t usually Benny Goodman playing Royal Garden Blue either.

Was nothing in his life as it should be? It was as if he was out of sync constantly, as if someone or something had set a metronome at odds to the rhythm of life and he alone had to play to the metronome.

Now he would have to shower again.

He had resorted to wanking out of a boredom so deeply set in it made him yawn. Such a boredom was worthy of the scrutiny of psychologists. What would they make of someone so utterly bored? His friend was training to be a Life Coach. Did he need a life coach; someone to help him develop strategies to move away from this demobilising ennui?

He was a hopeless case. He was so bored he thought that he didn’t deserve to live, and that if there was someone somewhere, a real lover of life who’d been told he or she had an incurable disease and was going to die, then it was only right that he should give that person his remaining years, which would only be filled with interminable boredom, and take ownership of the killer disease. There would be justice and fairness in that act.

He’d felt this strongly when his Dad was dying of cancer. He’d asked a God he didn’t believe in to give his dad his life, and he’d take the cancer. No actually, he’d tried to make a deal that he didn’t get the actual cancer but instead died painlessly in his sleep (a coward even in his nobility).

Days yawned before him and he was acutely aware of how the hours dragged.

‘No character’ was how a schoolteacher had described him to his parents. He’d always resented this but now he could see clearly what she was getting at. ‘No character’ in the sense that he couldn’t fill his time productively or in any disciplined way. After 35 years of playing the guitar, for instance, he was still shit. Wouldn’t practice you see. He could have been bloody Segovia by now. ‘Inveterate procrastinator’ was another term she could have fairly used. Always tomorrow he was going to start, and he’d yet to give any such proclamation truthful resonance. ‘Never tomorrow’ was nearer the mark.

And now this stand-up stuff. He breaks out in cold sweats on stage as he forgets yet another line or the next topic in his routine. He’d rather lay himself open to this horror than actually practice the routine thoroughly as you were supposed to. He avoided doing this while claiming to himself that it mitigated against improvisation. In this he was dangerously wrong. You learned it backward and word for word and then you were free to improvise or at least appear to be doing so knowing you had the safety net of the written routine to fall back on.

The phone rang.

-Wanker...!

It was Bill Wilkinson, fellow stand-up and possibly a homosexual. Bill had also assumed the mantle of his agent, a request that had never actually been made. Bill thought Robin should be making greater effort. Bill was absolutely right.

-Ah Bill, how pleasant to hear from you...

Never mind that, tosser – two references to male sexual manipulation in as many seconds, definitely a homosexual –you didn’t turn up for the showcase last night, why not...?

Robin, in the mists of time, had added himself to the long list of wannabe stand-up comedians residing in this grand old city of Edinburgh, city of the annual comedy festival. He’d often wondered why it was the host of the world’s most renowned comedy festival. It could only be because it held the requisite number of venues to stage such an event. The city surely held no other claim to it. It had no great comedy tradition for one thing - surely the main thing. Name one great comedy hero that hailed from Edinburgh, and don’t say Harry Lauder. Alright do say Harry Lauder, but that was a hundred years ago. Ronnie Corbett? Do me a favour. And the good citizens of Edinburgh? Not especially noted for their dazzling wit and repartee. It is in the west of Scotland that you find your comedians; professional and otherwise. In fact, a visit to Glasgow 50 miles or so across country would introduce you to a culture where everyone is a comedian – man woman and child. The patter would be as incessant as the rain in that bold city. Your ears would bleed with the weight of one-liners. You’d find yourself running at full pelt for Queen Street station to board a train back to comparatively humour-free Edinburgh, such being the pain in your sides from chuckling and guffawing.

Robin was from Glasgow. That’s why he now lived in Edinburgh. Glasgow was the city for laughs alright. It was also the city for bullying, knifings, territorial gang warfare and dark skies at ten in the morning. Robin felt safer in Edinburgh.

-wisnae my thing Billy boy. Bill hated being called Billy Boy, he was an ardent Celtic fan and the protestant connotation irked him –pissed-up students and wankers, don’t understand the McBride wit..

Truth was he’d bottled it and contemplated suicide, and then he’d bottled that as well.

-who does understand the McBride wit? Countered Billy boy –especially if the McBride wit sits on its arse at home..

This summation of the situation could not be argued with. The McBride wit had decided not to shake a leg and had decided to drown itself in the best part of a bottle of Bells. The McBride wit had thus transformed itself into a drunken self-pitying wreck until the McBride wit could no longer stay awake and had fallen asleep in its clothes. Comedians? There was too many of them. Who needed another one?

-aye well, he said – how did it go anyway? Was it a good night? Robin could feel a spasm of genuine remorse that he’d missed another opportunity for his ego to be warmly massaged. He very rarely, if ever, bombed or died as they said in the trade. Except that one night which still brought him out in a fresh frisson of terror whenever he thought about it, when the audience was infiltrated by bevvied Rangers supporters who were not attuned to his wry wit. Rangers supporters didn’t do wry wit. Some of them wouldn’t know what wry meant. Some of them wouldn’t be able to spell it.

Robin wasn’t good with hecklers. His mind went blank and he’d be reduced to petrified silence. Sometimes he was convinced that a stage was no place to be for a physical coward. His primary fear in life was that he would be picked on and humiliated as he had been so many times growing up and even as an adult (adult!! He didn’t feel that word had ever applied to him, an adult was someone he would never be). What if it happened on a stage in front of an audience?

So hecklers and the fear of them was the bane of his life. He couldn’t risk upsetting one to the point where they got up on stage and punched him (although this had happened notably to Jim Jeffries and Jerry Sadowitz and in a ‘rite of passage’ sort of a way had only enhanced their reputations). Up until now though he’d managed to ride the heckles with a boyish look of puzzlement which the audience took to be part of the act. When would he be found out though?

-Spazmo went down well again you’ll be nauseated to hear. Have to say that boy is going places, pure mainstream though he may be. Had them creasing up with his coffee-shop observations..

‘Spazmo’ was Don McGill, a seriously slick black comic in the Michael McIntyre mould who’d been attracting serious interest from agent’s influential with the Festival organisers. He was a toned-down Chris Rock who attracted a black as well as white audience who enjoyed his gentle admonishments of racial stereotyping and the absurdities of multiculturalism and political correctness. The other comics called him ‘Spazmo’ because they didn’t like him and resented his success which he continued to achieve with good looking sang-froide. ‘Mainstream’ comics were generally treated with this sort of disdain by their largely less successful, often less talented, peers. They also called him Spazmo because he spoke with a pronounced lisp. This distasteful moniker had been bestowed on him by the comic community when they’d realised that he had more drive and stage-craft than most of them put together. Soon he’d be within the radar of the derision of such as Stewart Lee, and once you’d attracted the derision of Stewart Lee, you’d made it.

It was pretty certain that Stewart Lee hadn’t even heard of Robin McBride.

Robin McBride didn’t really fit in to a category, mainstream or otherwise. His comedy sprang from the pain of his life.

 I was once a ( freelance) sperm donor when I was a student in Liverpool (yes I was a wanker for a living – some people would say I’ve carried this on, but...they don’t really know me)

It wasn’t my main income, of course, just beer money really, a supplementary income if you will.

You didn’t get much for it in those days; you couldn’t command fees for your sperm then, as you can now. It was before they changed the law which meant that any resulting offspring could legally seek you out when they hit eighteen

Can you imagine that, your biological kid, or kids plural, who knows how prolific your sperm became after you were done with it? Imagine they approached you, got in touch like. You’d most likely be a terrible disappointment to them for one thing – their expectations would not likely be met by the reality that you’re a forty year old civil servant, still on the lowest rung of the civil service ladder and who eighteen years previously had sought the avenue of sperm-donoring as a source of beer money

I knew a girl once who didn’t know who her father was – sought him out – turned out he was an active white supremacist in South Africa

Anyway, I did the sperm-donoring for a while and you know the sperm-doctor chappy (he actually resembled sperm, so devoted to it had he become, that he’d come to resemble his lifes work, he had white hair and it spiralled to a sort of peak, a bit like an ice cream. I sat looking at him in amazement, but he paid me the highest compliment a man can ever receive, he said – you know, you have an abnormally high sperm count, an abnormally high sperm count. And he’d seen some sperm in his time, a lot of sperm. God, the sperm that man had seen....

Such an asset was I to his organisation that after a few weeks of committed and successful donoring, he let me bring it from home; I could do it at home and bring it in on the bus.

I never thought about it at the time, when youre young and vibrant you worry less, but...say that bus had been involved in an accident and, god forbid I had been killed. I would have been found there, dead on the bus, with a vial of my own sperm in my pocket. Now, nobody wants to be in that position. What would the police and the ambulance people have made of that? They probably wouldn’t put 2 and 2 together and say ‘He must have been taking a vial of his own sperm to the sperm-donor –place..!’ Most people wouldn’t know of such places back then.

Invitro fertilisation was, well in its infancy. Theyd have no explanation, no explanation other than ‘Here’s a guy who liked to carry small containers of his own sperm around the place, how odd’.

And, worse, if it had been a crash there’s every chance that vial would have broken, and its contents burst asunder, what would they have made of that? Covered in your own sperm all around the pocket, groinal-type area. Maybe they’d have seen those movies where people are aroused by car crashes and injuries and that and thought, ‘this must have been one of those guys, he realised in a split second that the bus was about to crash and this is result, covered in sperm...

Another thing that I found interesting about the whole sperm-donoring thing, was where they put you to do it was a little toilety-place, just a plain room with white tiles and that, but there was no like stimulants. You’d have thought that given the nature of the task ahead, that there would be a little stimulation in there, some soft porn at least, get you in and out, and not labouring up there for hours, but no...

In fact, all there was this Home and Gardens magazine. Now, I don’t know how you feel about garden furniture, but it doesn’t light my candle...no matter how you might dress it up..

Which is interesting given what I saw on the internet some time back, and it’s even worse I think than that bloke in Falkirk who was reported for masturbating whilst bouncing up and down on a trampoline in his garden. An intriguing social image you have to admit. I think they drink a lot in Falkirk..

No, this was this guy in America, his neighbour; upset by his behaviour caught him on film on her mobile, making love, if that’s the correct term to a garden table, yeh through the hole in the middle

Sex, to me, while it should be adventuress and playful, you know fruit, licky stuff...it shouldn’t be arduous, you know not such a chore that you find yourself lugging garden furniture about the place. And a good sized garden table, well you’d have to hold it up to achieve centrality. This is to dis-regard completely the obvious chafing problem. This is hard, compacted plastic you’re dealing with this, not soft, warm fleshiness at all..

I would have loved to be at the court case, that would have been a gas..

Anyway I’m left in the toilety room in the sperm-donoring place with the copy of Home and Garden, when I come across...no that’s phrased incorrectly. The only human beings I can find are this family, depicted in their back garden having a barbecue. It’s the wife and husband, son and daughter domestic idyll...so I’m gonna have to use that. Problem is, in the picture, they’re sorta bunched, and I can’t concentrate to the extent I need to because of the proximity of the husband, and especially the two kids, I mean they are disconcertingly close.

So what I do is I fold the page so that it’s just the wife.

Now the wife is nothing special, she’s not wearing a Basque or stockings or anything, she’s actually wearing a pinny (amazing I can remember vividly after so many years), and I bet this woman, when she got this little homely photo-shoot job for House and Garden never dreamed that she’d be the subject of such desperate, sensual attention. Because, I wasn’t the only donor to have been in that toilety place for this purpose. There could have been dozens, for this was a well-thumbed magazine, furiously using this woman, imagining her doing all sorts of things, in and out of that pinny of hers..

Comedy wasn’t difficult – you were either funny to a group of people or you weren’t, and the funnier you were the greater in number the group of people would be. That was the theory anyway. Some comedians were very funny to a little group of people and not funny at all to a much larger group of people. The opposite applied too. To many connoisseurs of comedy, the most famous were the least funny. Philosophers of comedy tried to analyse and pontificate on what funny was. Though as Ken Dodd famously said, none of them had to play the Glasgow Empire

To Robin McBride’s mind, there were now way too many comedians. At Festival time the city of Edinburgh was infested by them. The railings around Princes Gardens were festooned with poster after poster, hundreds of yards of them. There was an overload of mirth. The product was being diluted by over-exuberance. Yet, he couldn’t deny there was a market for it. The principle of supply and demand in this area was sound. It had become a career of choice for many. Young and Oxbridge-educated lampooning their privilege, middle-aged Scousers telling you about their hilarious families and holidays in Rhyl, thousands of Sarah’s and Jeremy’s and Sean’s all with their whacky perceptions of ordinary life.

One day maybe, he thought, every human on the planet will be a professional comedian. Audiences will comprise of professional comedians watching other professional comedians perform and then follow them on to the stage one at a time when it’s their turn.

Laughter, it seemed, was the hottest property on the planet. In fact, the more he thought about it, the healthier this sounded. Maybe one day, laughter would expose and eradicate war and suffering. Laughter would indeed be the best medicine.

Either that, or people would just laugh and ignore the troubles of the world. Warmongers would remain rich, and comedians would get rich and turn up at charity events proclaiming the importance of caring and sharing.

What a cynic he was. Just as a bit of brightness appeared on the horizon he slammed the door shut and was back in his gloom. But that was his comedy – droll, self-deprecating, bordering on maudlin.

He couldn’t stand all those happy comics. To him happy and comic did not belong together. Milligan was far from happy; Cook was depressive and bored; Sadowitz was/is angry and misanthropic. Woody Allen, Tommy Cooper, Kenneth Williams, Tony Hancock, Lenny Bruce. The list was endless. All troubled in some way.

Why were there no women there? He had never liked female comedians, that’s why. Couldn’t think of one he liked. Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman? ‘Spose so! Women weren’t miserable enough. They were too optimistic about life to be truly funny about it. And it was probably no coincidence that the two he’d thought of were Jewish. Jews were natural comedians, they’d had to be.

I’ve lived a sort of ramshackle life; it’s followed no real direction, no great determination have I demonstrated, quite the opposite in fact. I’ve had over 30 jobs and over 40 addresses – that tells the story perfectly. Most people when you ask them, I ask people at work, how many addresses have you lived at? They say, ‘well I grew up in such and such, then I got a flat when I was at uni, then I got married we bought a place and then we moved to where we are now, that’s 4’, and that’s pretty normal, then they ask ‘Why? How many addresses have you had?’ and I say 42.

I guess you’re more likely to get caught in weird situations the less normal or mainstream your life is. If you play by the rules, the rules pretty much protect you. Put it this way you’re less likely to find yourself cowering behind a sofa, at the most intense point of an LSD trip while someone is throwing claw-hammers at you, if you’re saving up for your honeymoon in Gran Canarias and putting a deposit down on a little 2-bedroom place...

Funny thing about comedians is that they don’t necessarily like people very much. How could you entertain people you didn’t like? Well, they weren’t really people for one thing, they were an amorphous mass called ‘audience’. The happier you made ‘audience’ the better off you’d be –egotistically, financially, maybe even in the sense of revenge.

Or maybe he was generalising too broadly, or speaking too much from personal experience. Maybe he should say that this comedian didn’t like people very much. But he’d met others who seemed to have little but contempt for their fellow humans. Comedians were often damaged goods, and who had damaged them? Other people of course.

Robin thought of his childhood in Glasgow. It wasn’t a happy one. It shaped who he was. It shaped his comedy.

I once sellotaped my head-hair onto my pubic area. At primary school I was moved on a year due to being cleverer than my contemporaries. I never considered this an advantage as it meant that for the rest of my schooldays I was a year younger than my classmates. In puberty this can prove crucial in a number of not-so-subtle ways.

 One of these was pubic hair growth. Being 12 not thirteen was a big deal. Being thirteen not fourteen was an even bigger one.  When changing for gym or swimming the presence or otherwise of pubic hair was of vital importance – a defining moment no less. Well, for me it was.

Older boys had pubic hair I didn’t. What to do? Manufacture some? Snip some from the head and attach to pubic area? Brilliant!! I toyed with the idea of elastoplasts, thinking it may match my skin tone, but it was too dark, if only you could have gotten the clear stuff back then. I tried glue – but it doesn’t work well with skin and hair, don’t ask me why, I’m not a chemist. Sellotape doesn’t work much better but by this time it was worth a try and I was desperate. My school days were a series of humiliations and failures as it was, so I was determined to win on this one. I would have pubic hair and that was that. I spent ages in the toilet at home. My mother and father must have thought I was merely masturbating. Indeed, I’m pretty sure they would have rathered I was if they’d have known what I was really up to, attempting to simulate pubic maturity by snipping off hair from my head and attaching it to sellotape and then attempting to secure it onto my groin. The stuff of child psychologists, I fear.

The end result was impressive enough, admittedly to my desperate young mind, for me to attend school with my underpants full of sellotape and hair. I got through the changing room experience without comment.

Trouble is that when your swimming, water tends to have a degenerative effect on any glue-based adhesive. Afterwards, I put my trousers straight on over my wringing-wet swimming trunks and hoped no-one would wonder why there were pieces of hairy sellotape floating about the pool.

His past was comical, he had made it so, but at the time it was no joke. Some things you just couldn’t make light of.

You know folks, so victimised and bullied was I at school, that even the teachers had a go ha ha yeh I know crazy innit?

Comedy wasn’t about literal truth though. It was about a funny slant, even of the most painful events. People wanted you to make light of things – they wanted to laugh and be entertained. It was grotesque really. The comedian and the audience connived to trivialise pain. So what! You might say. The world is full of pain – horrible pain. We need relief from it, not constant reminders.

Yeh even the teachers hated me, I could see it in their eyes.

No matter, it wasn’t worth making an issue out of. He had more important things to take care of.

He’d started this comedy racket accidently. Started doing the Edinburgh Open Mic circuit as a singer/songwriter. His songs weren’t that strong but his voice was. Strong and sensual, he was told it had a hypnotic quality. Women seemed to like it at any rate, and that was pretty much all that mattered to him. Sexual conquest through musical talent was quite a thrill if you thought about it – singing women into bed. He’d even sang a couple of men there too and thereby discovering quite late on his bisexuality.

In a sort of Billy Connolly-esque way his little comedy monologues and one-liners began to become more of an attraction than he’d intended. People began to request certain routines – the sperm-donor thing becoming a particular favourite. He had a natural comedic intuition for the best way to deliver a line; his timing was well-tuned and totally natural. From just filling in between songs, the comedy quickly began to be the main thing with a couple of songs thrown in as fillers. Now he didn’t even do any songs, they tended to spoil the comedy mood. He dabbled with comic songs, but these he felt were contrived. Unless you were as good as Loudon Wainwright or Digby thingy off Radio 4 you shouldn’t bother.

This was supposed to be a dream come true. This was to be the making of him.

And still it bored him.

Did you ever look at nature in detail? The rivulets and patterns the sea leaves on the beach, the delicate curves of a flower, the way the sun glints on the pavement after a spring shower...AND STILL FEEL FUCKING BORED RIGID!!! 

He would need to make more of an effort.

I went out with a girl who was turned on by the sound and rumble of trains. I found this out as we were walking across the Hungerford Bridge in London on our way to see a show at the Royal Festival Hall. 

Don’t know if you know, but it’s a footpath across the Thames which runs alongside the railway line where trains go in and out of Charing Cross, and this train was rumbling by and she started grabbing me, which was really unlike her cos she wasn’t really into the old hanky panky that much, nowhere near as much as I was anyway, so shes cuddling me and, I swear, her eyes went way up in her head, like she was in some sort of sensual trance. I was thinking ‘fuck the show, let’s get a fast cab home’, but then the train had gone and so had the moment..

Put a seed of an idea in my head though. My brother worked in a library and he procured for me these soundtrack LPs of train noises and that ‘Diesel Deltics thru tunnels’ was the one I thought would be a winner. So I made some nice food that night, got some nice wine and made it all romantic and that. Then I shoved on the LP. She wasn’t best pleased, didn’t see the funny side at all, which was the least I was hoping for. We didn’t last long after that....