HOWZAT

I started writing stand-up again; scribbling away all day. For some reason I’m unable to write stand-up on a computer – it has to be freehand, with a Biro and a notebook, like when I first started out, 20 years ago. As night fell I’d head for a little club, and try out what I’d written that day. Then, as far as the material was concerned, I’d become little more than an observer; ticks, crosses and question marks; the audience decide what stays and what goes. The question marks got a second try. I thought of them as jokes that were on a yellow card. I’d help all I could but if, after the next gig, the laugh was still weak, the yellow became a red.

My rule of thumb is that five minutes of material is 12 laughs, so for a tour show I need about 216 laughs. That’s a lot of ticks. I started the club gigs at the end of January, averaging about three a week. If I look back through my journal of the period (on the advice of Dr Samuel Johnson, I write in my journal every day), I can chart the ebb and flow as new material rises up or sinks without trace. From week one: “Still masses to do but I’m a stand-up again”; week three: “I walked back along the dark river with the rain in my face. It was a bad gig but, as Terry Griffiths said when he got knocked out of the world snooker championships, ‘There’s a certain beauty in defeat’”; week five: “Joyous tonight. I said to a bloke in the front row, ‘You should come up here. It’s brilliant’”; week six: “Rubbish gig. Half of me thinks the entire tour is in ruins, and the other half thinks this is why I do try-out shows and I’ll learn a lot from tonight”; week nine: “I stormed it: 52 ticks in all”.

About week seven, a friend bought me a watch that also measures heart rate. I’m told the human average is around 72 beats per minute. On May 15, just before going on stage in Windsor, my rate was 73. The gig was top-notch. Immediately after I left stage, I checked my heart rate again. It was 81. Two days later I did the same test before a gig in Aldershot. My rate was 74. The gig was poor. My rate afterwards was one 170. So, if the tour is a disaster, at least I’ll have had a good workout every night.

Having done so much television in the past ten years, the freedom to say more or less what I like has been electric for me, and I doff my hat to those jokes which have died, not just because they weren’t funny, but because they weren’t funny and were also offensive. For example, an observational comedy routine about the fact that they tend not to have incidental music in animal porn: “I watched one scene, where a woman was orally servicing a horse, next to some outbuildings, and the only sound was a distant cock crow. This is what Emmerdale would’ve been like if Hitler had won the war.” Yes, I know now it isn’t funny, and doesn’t really make sense but, on this occasion, the audience’s silent response did make me think that Terry Griffiths had a point. Admittedly, I would rather it had got a big laugh, but I did enjoy the fact that, while the young comics around me were quite deliberately, and sensibly, honing television-friendly acts that might get them on prime time, I, the mad old bloke recently released from a television-based ten-year restraining order, was spending much of my stage time screaming about stuff like paedophilia and terrorism.

Anyway, if you’re around this autumn, and you’d like to hear what 216 ticks sound like, come to one of the tour shows. “Still masses to do but I’m a stand-up again,” and I’m very, very happy about that. ©Frank Skinner 2007

Frank Skinner is performing at the Pleasance Cabaret Bar in Edinburgh (0131-556 6550; www.whatareyoulaughingat.co.uk). For information on Frank’s UK tour, visit www.frankskinnerlive.com

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