Below is a brief list of the best worst gigs I have ever been involved in. It should be noted that even if these gigs didn’t teach me an awful lot about stand up comedy I did have an enormous fucking laugh at each of them and since, whenever they have popped into my head.
Dalmatians Gig
No, this was not a gig for a load of giant dogs although in hindsight perhaps we would have got more laughs out of them. This was a warm-up gig for Reuben and I before one of the New Zealand comedy festival shows we did. It was at a gentlemen’s club in Auckland for ex-pats from the Dalmatia region of Croatia. Yes this is a thing that exists and yes it was as horrific as it sounds. Essentially it was a room full of men in their 70s and 80s for whom English was a second language. I honestly don’t know what they were expecting from us but I can guarantee it wasn’t sweary English comedy. If I had to guess I think they were expecting a double act similar to Laurel and Hardy with Reuben and I launching buckets of glitter at each other or chasing after each other on unicycles. It is important to note that we were not the headline act in this show but merely the warm up act before, and I must stress at this point I am not making this up, a belly dancer.
Naturally when we got there Reuben realised quicker than me that we were both going straight to Comedy Death so in order to cope with it, he bagsied going on first so that he could enjoy watching me perform to stony silence. I could hardly create an argument as to why I should go on first: “No Reuben, you go on first and warm them up with all that Dalmatian comedy material you have been working on for months, that’ll make the show flow better.” To be fair, Reuben did try. He sprinted on to the stage wearing some balloons that he had found backstage. That was probably the biggest laugh either of us got. I half-hoped someone would throw a dart at him.
After his set, I think he introduced me on with a big shit eating grin as he passed me the microphone. I don’t even recall what jokes I did. I do recall that at one point during my set a mobile phone went off somewhere in the crowd. Now normally in any comedy show if someone’s phone goes off the person is mortified and silences it as quickly as they can. However in Dalmatia all bets are off and the bloke actually answered his phone and just started a conversation. I think I knew at that point I was doomed. It wasn’t their fault, it wasn’t really our fault; it was just that we didn’t really know what jokes Croatian people like and they were likely just waiting for these two weird English pricks to fuck off so they could see a fit bird’s belly.
Football club fundraiser
One of those gigs which really does emphasise why a good sound system is important to a gig’s success. This was organised to raise some money for a local football team (or the Golden Shinpads gig, as Reuben repeatedly called it).
Before the gig I was at the bar (not a surprise) and someone there found out I was from Liverpool and one of the acts. It turned out this person was also from Liverpool and asked me if I had any good paedophile or racist jokes I was going to pull out tonight. That was to be a good indication of how my set was going to go that night (I don’t have any racist jokes and any paedophilic jokes are generally related to the Catholic Church). I remember the twat heckling me and I tried to take the piss back but the aforementioned sound system didn’t really help; it made it sound like I was trying to put him down using an out-of-range walkie-talkie. I might as well have said ‘over’ after every witty retort. Anyway, it was just one of those nights, capped off superbly with an argument at the end of the night with my girlfriend who had organised the gig. Comedy. Great.
British Isles
I can’t remember who organised this gig other than it was a one-off at a pub on the North Shore in Auckland. I do remember that it was on St Patrick’s Day and that I was the (mostly) sober driver who picked up my Irish mate Al from the pub on the way to the gig. He was already at that stage of being a bit pissed where his eyes had gone a bit; I could tell he was trying to be sober because he was the MC so was trying to focus on the task at hand but when I picked him up he was just trying to focus on anything. When we got to the venue I remember seeing a flyer for the gig which mentioned the line up being British, which didn’t go down well with Al. What also didn’t help was some bizarre tagline about ‘spanking the leprechaun’ which again, did not endear Al.
Anyway, this was another gig with an outstanding sound set up; essentially there were five or six of us on that night and we were in one room with a microphone. For whatever reason (probably a rugby game) the microphone was actually connected to the speakers in a completely different room. So you had the rather strange situation where people who couldn’t see you had excellent audio quality while the punters who could see you had to rely on your Brian Blessed levels of shoutiness to hear you in the actual show room. A mime artist would have done well.
Recollections are a bit vague but it was another one of those gigs where we knew it would be a bit of a struggle. Al was doing well to hold it together but as he was a few pints in a bit of drunk hunger kicked in and when someone walked past with a bowl of chips he helped himself. The chip recipient was not overly pleased.
There wasn’t a stage and so during his set, Andy elected to stand on a normal chair. For whatever reason, one of his jokes upset one of the natives who walked up to him while he was on the chair and said ‘Listen, we don’t want you…or your blowjob jokes.’ Surely that is exactly what people want on comedy nights in a pub? After finishing his set and putting the chair back, the rest of us went on and battled through the gig as the atmosphere in the room continued to sour. This was not helped after the show when Andy managed to (accidentally) break a glass pane in the other room of the pub (the one where the sound was). I think there was just a curse on us all that night.
Bizarrely, although I don’t remember getting too many laughs from my set someone from the crowd did get chatting to me after the gig and asked me to build them a database. Which is exactly why I got into comedy in the first place of course.
And the rest
As a final point I should mention that the vast majority of my gigs were good; I think you can only generally stick at comedy if you get some laughs along the way. But the good gigs don’t make for very entertaining stories really. It’s the ones that, even if they aren’t necessarily bad, have something happen in them that sticks with you. Like the smackhead at a gig in a pub in Liverpool who just randomly appeared at the side of the stage in the middle of my set to start shouting at me about being charged to come into the gig (it was free entry). Or the Americans who came to my show at the Edinburgh Fringe who told me they liked the show but asked did I have to swear aggressively like that (coming from people from a country where they shoot your face off for no reason).
But whatever happens in the future, as it was pointed out to me recently, it was all worth it.
Daniel McChrystal 