Wow! Today marks ten years to the day since my first stand-up gig.
On 22nd November 2014, a shy, skinny, virginal boy graced the stage of the Star & Garter pub in Leamington Spa to perform a short set as part of Warwick University Comedy Society showcase. Spoiler alert, that boy was me. Also, that boy was about 7 other people on the line-up. It wasn’t the most diverse selection of comedians.
But even when everyone is a carbon copy of you, you can still stand out. And I did stand out. I stood outside the venue shitting myself. Shaking. Crying. Pacing up and down the street trying to learn my jokes. I had been terrified about this for weeks. I wasn’t a performer. I had never confidently spoken in front of anyone, publicly or privately.
I was once cast as an Innkeeper in the Nativity when I was 8. But even that was nepotism because the director was my primary school teacher.
My only line in that was, “Sorry, there’s no room at the Inn” and I couldn’t do it. I would freeze. Rehearsals were brutal as I let my fellow castmates down again and again. Good honest folk who had families to get back to, tea towels to return to their kitchen drawers.
Eventually, they took the line away from me and I had to just gesture with my hands that there was no room at the Inn. It made things simpler, but I was in my head about the motivations of the character. Was there really no room at the Inn? Was my decision to turn away a pregnant woman clearly deep into her third trimester rooted in misogyny? Did I perhaps have my own fertility issues?
But then, if I’m being honest, when it got to opening night (which was also closing night), it all fell into place. I felt free up there. For once in my 8 years of life, all the noise in my head quietened. It all became clear. Whether I knew my conscious motivations or not, I became the character. There truly was no room in my Inn, and I was making no exceptions. And get that donkey off my fucking porch.
The audience lapped it up. The whole play went down a storm, and a debauched afterparty of fruit shoots and e-numbers ensued. My mother, as was to be expected, showered me with praise. But my Father, an emotionally stunted man staunchly against the performing arts, even said: “That was very good, son. You seem to have a knack for it.”
I thought maybe this was something I could do more of. Maybe next time I could do something with lines. Maybe I could properly go for it. Why not? But then the doubts crept back in. I’d never been to drama school, I didn’t have an agent… No, it was silly. It wasn’t for me. I knuckled down and focused on my studies.
Every time a new school play was announced, I’d fantasise about auditioning but decide against it.
It was a pipe dream. The cast of a school nativity is very much like the academy of a football team – if just one person makes it then it’s a good crop. And if anyone was gonna do it, it was Lauren Carter, the girl who played Mary. She was a superstar. She was pretty and confident. She knew how to say lines loud enough for everyone in the school hall to hear. It was incredible to watch her perform. She was 8 years old, but she carried herself like a 10 year old – the same age as most of the boys she dated.
But even as I refused to pursue a life on stage, the oddest thing happened: the stage came to me. My whole school career became a performance, because I realised I could make people laugh. I’d make sarcastic comments in lessons and people would crack up. I loved it. It gave me the same buzz as refusing a pregnant woman accommodation.
I was dry and wry, and maybe a little bit sly. I’d make puns and misdirections and callbacks. I’d challenge the power structures that surrounded us, often making humorous observations that exposed the disconnect between how we saw our teachers and how they saw themselves.
Classmates would even say to me, “Eric, when you’re older, you should be a comedian,
starting off on the open mic circuit and slowly working your way through the club and festival scenes, while at the same time using clips to build an audience and carve out a niche in the future digital spaces that will exist.”
And best of all, Lauren Carter found me funny. I remember sitting next to her in Science once and making her laugh all lesson. I can’t remember what any of the jokes I said were, and they were probably dreadful, but what can’t be denied is that she was laughing. It brought us to a level playing field. She was this beautiful actress who could say lines really loudly for those at the back and suddenly I was worthy of her attention.
I held onto that, and when I got to university, I already knew I wanted to do stand up. I knew I was going to join the comedy society there, and I knew I was gonna make myself perform in the shows they put on.
10 years ago today was the first such show. It was towards the end of my first term at uni, and I’d signed up weeks before, long enough for all my anxiety and fear to have built up to an unbearable level. Although people found me funny at school, I’d never done it on stage. I’d never said anything on stage. I was happy with my Innkeeper performance in the endm but it had no lines. And what if that was the only role I could do? What if I didn’t have any range? Stand up isn’t about there being no room in the inn, it’s about inviting everyone into the inn with you, showing them your interior world.
The performance space was a function room upstairs in the pub. It was really small, maybe with a capacity of 25, so all the performers waited anxiously on the staircase for their turn. I was getting drunk. I think another act had a bottle of whisky and I started swigging that to calm my nerves.
I was on in the second half of the show and all the acts before me absolutely unalived it. I was happy for them, but it meant the pressure was increased. If I was bad, it would stand out even more.
I got up there and it was a blur. I think it went okay. I couldn’t really take it in. Thinking about the material I did, it couldn’t have gone that well. There was some really bad stuff in there. I remember the jokes I did included a poem about cheese and a really distasteful joke about Madeleine McCann. Maybe that goes without saying – I dunno who’s doing really tasteful stuff about Madeleine McCann; who’s bringing the art form forward with their abducted child material? I think there was also a joke about the Ebola epidemic, which had a punchline that included the word lazybola.
So even considering that it must’ve been objectively bad, and any laughs I got were the polite laughs of encouragement, the buzz was incredible. So much more than the Nativity. I instantly wanted to do it again. I knew that I never wanted to do anything else.
I dunno where all my self-doubt had gone because again like Nativity casts and football academies, even if one person makes it out of a line-up of new comedians is unlikely.
But I guess I thought, fuck it. Maybe I could be that one. What else was I gonna do with my life? I knew I wasn’t good yet but if I just kept doing it then maybe I would be. I didn’t want to make the same mistake as before and push down my ambitions in favour of concentrating on learning joined-up writing.
If ages 8-18 were frustrating years of running away from my true self, then the last 10 years have in some ways been making up for lost time.
Also, it actually turned out to be a bit of a killer crop (sorry unaliver crop) with several people on that line up going onto make films and TV shows and albums – one person even helps people avoid tax by using offshore accounts on the Isle of Man.
I’m so glad I signed up for that gig. If I didn’t, then maybe I would still be putting off my ambitions to do comedy to this day. Instead I’m now deep into what is at least a middlingly successful career. With the exception of everything else I do for money, I now do comedy full time. It’s kind of mad. Next year I’m doing a tour and people are actually buying tickets.
I’m very grateful for the places comedy has taken me. Don’t get me wrong, I still have periods of being deeply depressed and frustrated about my career - I’m not gonna lie to you and say following your dreams means you’ll never suffer from erectile dysfunction - but the positives far outweigh the negatives.
I don’t think I ever will.
Here’s to the next 10 years! X
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