by Paul Kerensa
Title Page
SO A COMEDIAN WALKS INTO A CHURCH
Confessions of a Kneel-Down Stand-Up
Paul Kerensa
Publisher Information
First published in 2013 by
Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd
1 Spencer Court
140 - 142 Wandsworth High Street
London SW18 4JJ
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2013 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© 2013 Paul Kerensa
The right of Paul Kerensa to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Dedication
For Zoë,
who has lovingly proofread the entire book except this page,
so let’s hope there are no mistaks.
A Little Foreword
Excuse me for being a little foreword.
Good, now that’s out of the way.Welcome to the book. If you’re still in the shop, I’d just buy the thing if I were you - it’s a real page-turner. If you’re browsing for free on the internet - it’s a real page-swiper. I’d still buy the print copy. E-readers are all very well, but you can’t slam a fly in it, can you?
My name’s Paul.What’s your name? Why not write it here?
Excellent, now you have to buy it. So now we’re introduced. I’m a stand- up comedian, and I’m also a Christian. No, come back ...
I’m on the road a lot. Every Saturday night I’m at another far-flung comedy club. I have never seen this show they call Strictly Come Dancing. Ours is the path less travelled, except it’s travelled a lot, because it’s normally the M1.
The next day, I’ll wake up in a yet another spare room or soulless budget hotel; Sunday isn’t Sunday unless I can see a tiny kettle. If I want to go to church - and I do - I just find a building with a cross on top and wander in. I’ve only mistakenly picked a pharmacy on one or two occasions.
So this is a tale of two circuits: of comedy clubs and churches.That, in a nutshell, is what follows.
I’ve had heckles in Eccles and stage deaths in Caithness; we’ll visit the lot. We’ll be cheered and booed, and encounter loudmouths and dodgy promoters. We’ll do a lot of driving, face a bunch of onstage dilemmas and maybe even appear on telly. And the morning after the night before, we’ll meet vicars and pastors, Methodists and Catholics, Baptists, Quakers, candlestick-makers ...
I realise that the likelihood of you, dear reader, being interested in punchlines and praise is highly unlikely, but that’s okay. All you need to know is that I bestride both. If you’re a comedy fan, there’s plenty for you here about the world of stand-up and the reality of life on permanent tour. If you’re more church-inclined, there’s an ecclesiastical smorgasbord.
When at home on a Sunday, the ‘norm’ for me is a growing Anglican church: traditional in some ways, trying new things in others, and offering a bunch of things to the community - and that’s how I like it. On the road, I like to cast the net wide and find something different.
I can only write what I know, so if you’re hoping to read about a side of comedy or Christianity that I’ve left out, apologies. I simply haven’t been to an Eastern Orthodox or a New Monastic community. Equally I can’t tell you about doing Live At The Apollo or a corporate for MI5 - although I can’t tell you about that for different reasons.
I’ve written for TV, radio and stage, but this is the first time of book writing. If any of you know any reason why any of the words should not be joined together, you are not to declare it, please. If you’re a churchgoer and anything feels a little close to home, I hope I’m fair to you. If you’re a comedian and you think you recognise yourself, it’s probably someone else. Some names have been changed and occasion- ally I’ve contracted time or altered a placename - please forgive this.
A big thank you to David Moloney and all at DLT, and Nick Ranceford-Hadley and all at Noel Gay, for literally making this happen - without you, this book wouldn’t be a book, but scrawled on a toilet wall somewhere. (There are a lot of stories about toilets in this book - I’m sorry for that and don’t really know why.)
Gigantic thanks to my parents Di & Rog, and to Mark & Katie, John & Sue and James & Tabitha - your support in countless ways has made this possible.
Kudos too to the many friends who’ve read a chapter or talked it over: Liz Robinson, Henry Martin, Mark Woodward, Jon Sandys, Jon Holloway, Nick S, Eileen Collins, Tony Vino, Andy Kind, Russ Anderson, Iszi Lawrence, Jez and Jude Gibson, Andrew, David and Jenny Kember ... and anyone else that knows me. A big thank you too if you completed my online survey about churches - your help was invaluable.
Thanks too to the hundreds of comics, comedy-goers and congregants that feature in this book.Without you, I’d be alone in a big room.That happens in at least one chapter and it’s awful.
And to Zoë and Joseph and someone I won’t name for practical reasons: you’re stars, and the reason it’s a joy to hit ‘Home’ on the satnav.
I’ll also thank God, because He’s my co-writer, and so far hasn’t asked for a penny in royalties.
1
Scot Free
Chortling with the Church of Scotland
‘Excuse me? Where’s the nearest Church of England church?’
‘England,’ the Scottish woman inevitably replied.
The tourist information helper was an elderly lady who looked like she could be anyone’s grandmother, yet also handy in a fight. You could tell that her grey was formally ginger, in common with so many other locals.
As a fellow Celt (Cornish) and redhead (strawberry brunette), I feel a kinsmanship with the Scots, whether they like it or not. Even as I boarded the flight at ‘London’ Stansted, I could tell I was among friends. I say ‘friends’ - there were surly looks from a couple of ginger giants certainly, and maybe I spent too long staring at one redhead family.
I say ‘London’ Stansted too, because it really should be in inverted commas. Living between Gatwick and Heathrow, either ‘London’ airport would have been ideal, but no, the gig promoter booked me into Stansted, a mere hundred miles away from my house. I wouldn’t mind (well, I would) but at the other end I landed in ‘Glasgow’ Prestwick, an airport that also suffers from Stansted syndrome, being a good hour from the city it represents. Door to door, it would have been about as quick to drive, cycle or pogo stick. The entire trip involved 150 road miles and 250 air miles.
Given the choice, I’d have taken the train. It’s better for the environment, and my sanity. Of course my false impression of a rail journey to Scotland is of an old-fashioned smoky platform, where I take the overnight sleeper, sharing my cabin with a wistful world traveller and raconteur. We compare Panama hats and make bets that we can’t circumvent the globe in a hot air balloon, until we join a Belgian detective for cocktails and arsenic in the dining car. In truth, it involves four changes and a traipse across the London Underground with luggage before I even board the train. This is followed by a six-hour journey panicking that I’m sitting in someone else’s seat because there’s
a big bloke in the one I’ve booked, all for a mere two hundred pounds.
The choice was out of my hands - I was furnished with an e-ticket for the plane as soon as the gig was diarised, so I easily jetted from Cambridge Stansted to Ayr Prestwick for a weekend of entertaining stags, hens and a few couples who’d misbooked. Friday and Saturday were planned out; I just had Sunday morning to plan.
Yes, I’m the one person who reads those guides in hotels and flicks to the back for the list of local churches. Typically, my hotel didn’t have one, but I thought the tourist information centre might help get me my God fix. I rephrased the question of course - asking for any kind of fix in Glasgow city centre can introduce you to some unsavoury characters. I was already in danger of crossing this good woman by forgetting that Church of England may not be so common when not in England.
‘You’ll be wanting Church of Scotland,’ she said kindly. It didn’t sound that kind, but given the idiocy of my previous two questions, anything but a head-butt could be considered kind.[1]
I’m not clued up on the difference between Churches of England and Scotland, so presumed it just meant shortbread and Irn Bru for communion.
‘And I’d find one ...?’
‘Right on Renfrew Street, left on Renfield Street, right on Renferren Street ...’
I needed to retain this information till Sunday morning. It lasted all of three seconds before exiting my brain. I thought to ask her again but she gave me a look that said, ‘Get lost’. So I headed back to the hotel and got lost.
This venue could be a tough gig, often with large parties and big celebrations. I love a party blower as much as the next man, but the bigger the group, the higher the ratio of ‘people who haven’t really come along for the comedy’ versus ‘the person who booked it’.They can be tricky.[2]
Friday night was lovely though - the stags and hens were on good form, and there were a few work parties who all seemed to have achieved the impossible: leaving the office joker at home, or telling him the event was somewhere else.[3] The other comics were a joy to be with, everyone had a nice gig, and we all patted each other on the back on a job well done, and by ‘job’ I mean, ‘twenty minutes of talking at people’.
Saturday’s show was different: full of large single-sex parties and a big footie match that meant drinking from noon.
Call-time came, as did stag do after stag do after hen do,[4] in all their shapes and sizes ...
A rough guide to rough stag and hen parties
The Shameless Fancy-Dress Brigade: Six foot six and bold as brass, dressed as Scooby Doo, marching through the streets of Glasgow. They’ve been drinking since Thursday and they lost the groom-to-be about a day ago.
The Geeky Stag Do: The cutest of pre-marriage revellers. Most wear glasses, and the ones who don’t keep bumping into things.
The Underattended Hen Do: Four of them, still in work clothes. Someone has planned this particularly badly.
The Learner Plates: Found attached to any hen. Sometimes if they’re having a post-wedding hen party, they’re P-plates. In either case, their behaviour normally means they need their licence revoked.
Angels and Demons: If more than one hen party is gathered, the odds are that you’ll see one lot with angel wings and the other with devil horns, as if the dress code was ‘spiritual warfare’. It’s a glimpse of the end days, only with more high heels and sambuca.
Overweight Superheroes: Always a favourite with men of a certain age. If at the same event as the tottering angels and devils, it’s a glimpse of Armageddon with a chubby Bananaman come to save the day.
As the audience passed us on the way to falling into their seats, even the non-religious comedians started praying for a show like last night’s. We paced the floor, and we paced the Red Bulls.
Bombastic intro music blared out of the speakers and woke up two drunk Spider-Men. The compère walked out to the baying mob, and spent a few minutes trying to get them to notice he was there.As I was the first act on, I keenly watched both compère and audience for any hint as to how to play this: any glints of fun folks in the audience we could chat to or lightly rib. Any chance they might warm to a one-liner or two, or a rant, or a spot of wry satire about the government’s attitude to public sector pensions.
After ten minutes of making them cheer, the compère put the microphone back in the stand: amber light to a comedian. Any second now he’d say my name and ‘The Power of Love’ by Huey Lewis and the News would play (my choice of intro - it gives the audience a sense that they’re about to get upbeat, cheesy, middle-class nonsense).
‘... Please welcome Paul Kerensa!’ and ‘Gold Digger’ by Kanye West played.
Now, I’m not blaming the entire stage death on that one technical hiccup, but perhaps if their expectations had been more in-line with what I was going to do, the show might have gone better. I don’t do any jokes about life in the hood. I live in Guildford.We haven’t got a ghetto. We occasionally have a gateau, but Waitrose runs out of stock so quickly.
It wasn’t a death - just a minor injury. Some jokes were hitting home, but so were some audience heckles. Generally the set consisted of me trying to get them onside by playing the ginger card. ‘I’m one of you!’ was the theme, even if my accent gave away that I very much was not, and as we’ve already established, I’m strawberry brunette.
The crucial rule for lairy gigs is to never leave too long a pause. I did once (to breathe) and a loud heckle came from nowhere - well not nowhere, right at the back near the toilets. Because it was right at the back, and the general hubbub of four hundred people wasn’t too quiet, I couldn’t pick out any of what was said. It didn’t help that it was in strong and slurring Glaswegian.
‘What’s that?’ I asked to get a second hearing.
The sentence was repeated, which is more than I can do here. It’s in no way intended as a slight on the people of Glasgow - it’s my soft Cornish ears that are at fault. I’m from the other end of this land mass. We’re not meant to be able to communicate. The Tower of Babel: it’s in the Bible. So no offence to the many lovely and often quite compre- hensible Glaswegians, but if this man sounded drunk and aggressive to me, it may have been because he was drunk and aggressive.
I panicked. What joke did I have in my arsenal ready for this? I needed a putdown, and fast. Show who’s boss, which I think was meant to be me, although all evidence indicated otherwise. So - and I’m not proud of this - my response to his heckle was an unrepeatable sentence that implied I knew of his mum.
The whole room fell silent. I had silenced him! It had worked! But I had silenced everyone. Especially my conscience, who just gave an internal,‘uh oh’, followed by the sound of a closing door and a flushing noise.
‘All he said,’ came a soft Edinburgh voice from the front row, ‘was that he’s ginger too.’
Whoops. I’d just started a fight for no real reason. He was merely commenting on the fact that as a ginger man, I wanted to feel connected to this audience, and he was reaching out - one redhead to another reddishhead. I had shunned his metaphorical outreached hand, and instead upped the ante.
‘You’re ginger too?’ I blustered.‘Ah.Well, what I just said about your... I’m sure very lovely mother ... At least it would explain why you’re ginger too.’
I’d nearly got away with it, until a different heckler pointed out, ‘You’re not even that ginger,’ followed by the audience breaking into small groups to discuss just how not ginger I was, as well as drinks orders and how bad the football was today.
I made it to the end, using the compère’s technique of making them cheer to ensure I left the stage to applause (‘A round of applause for our fine ginger friend at the back! ...Bye!’), and made my way to the green room, red in face if not in hair.The other comedians were a mix of supportive and brazen about the fact that they hadn’t seen the act because thei
r food had arrived.The nagging thought remained that I’d stopped being me onstage tonight, albeit briefly. There’s no harm in dropping the script for some light banter, but when you stop doing what you want to do onstage - and what I want to do is tell jokes and make people have a nice time - then you start to question the act.
Annoyed with myself, and a little ashamed, I decided I deserved nothing more than to go back to the hotel room, via the bar, and maybe the cinema.
***
I should have got a map. I’m walking through the streets of Glasgow looking for the church in Renfrew Road, or was it Renfield? My inability to listen has caused me to needlessly offend a well-meaning heckler with words I generally don’t use onstage, and has now caused me to become lost. I’d ask a stranger for directions, but there aren’t many about at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, and even if there were, I’m afraid my ears will land me in hot water.
Last night’s gig is reverberating around my skull. Onstage you present a persona - it’s not necessarily you but it is a version of you. I’m not an aggressive man. I try to be nice. Yet last night was one of those gigs where I decided to play the audience at their own game, and actually found the hecklers to be far nicer than I was. I don’t like what this says about me. I’m hoping it just says, ‘I misinterpreted a Glaswegian accent’. Yet I can’t help but think of the Liverpudlian priest who once said to me post-show, ‘It’s nice to see a comedian who doesn’t think you need to be vulgar to be funny.’ If he had been at the gig last night, I’d have wondered what he’d make of it, and why he’d come all the way from Liverpool.
I walk, lost. I’m just about to give up and retrace my steps when I see a sign. Not a heavenly sign as such, but a street name: Renfrew Street. This was one of the names the tourist information lady mentioned! Probably! And look! There’s a lovely family of five redheads all dressed up nice, turning left onto Renfield Street.