Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down

by Jo Brand

  Sevenoaks

  Sevenoaks should really be renamed Oneoaks, having lost six of its famous oaks in the great storm of 1987. I have worked there a number of times. On one occasion, Andy was completely stuck on the M40 in one of those traffic jams that just doesn’t move for hours. Eventually it seemed he wasn’t going to get there (thank the Lord for mobile phones — at least I knew he wasn’t splatted against a tree), so I had to do the whole show on my own.

  You might have guessed that I’m not one of those comics that has hours and hours of spare material, so I had to quickly sit down with a pen and paper and drag up some old material from the recesses of my rather badly functioning memory. Success on these occasions also depends on whether the audience will play ball, because one way of stretching things out is to muck about with them. If they sit there in silence staring at you as if you are a disturbed impostor, this doesn’t really work, but thankfully the God of Comedy was on my side and I managed to do two forty-five-minute sets which they seemed perfectly satisfied with.

  On another occasion I arrived at the same theatre in Sevenoaks to discover that owing to popular demand, forty extra tickets had been sold and the excess punters had been accommodated on the stage.

  So I found myself performing, placed between four rows of audience, the ones toward the back having a panoramic view of my arse. It wasn’t ideal (for them, I would have thought) but again, having to deal with pretty much any eventuality, the solution seemed to be relentlessly taking the piss out of the poor sods who’d had the misfortune to be placed on the stage.

  Warrington

  I’ve been to Warrington a few times and they are well lary there in a fun way especially the women. One night after a very, very lively (for ‘lively’, read ‘very pissed’) gig, as we left by the stage door, Andy the support act was pursued the few yards to the car by a posse of big scary women shouting, ‘Show us yer helmet!’ I’ve never seen him looking so terrified. Made me laugh, though.

  Wolverhampton

  Wolverhampton is one of those places that people take the piss out of, for it being a bit shit. Granted, it’s not the most attractive place in the universe, but I have a real fondness for it. One night, doing the Wulfrun Hall, there was a fire alarm right in the middle of my set. We all duly filed out to the side of the building, where I did my best to carry on, bawling at the top of my voice, but it wasn’t terribly successful, and eventually we were all let back in and carried on as normal.

  You might be wondering how I remember all this stuff and it’s a good question to ask. I have the memory of a pissed goldfish and therefore in my head it is the spectacular moments of my life that tend to stick in the memory banks.

  I have, however, kept diaries, but they are not the well-written, lovingly cared for, intelligible and insightful tomes that certain people have managed. No, I’m afraid they’re a motley collection of books, notepads and random scraps of paper, written when I was bored, depressed or slightly bonkers. Consequently you might assume they are a bit rubbish and indeed you’d be right — a lot of them are. But occasionally I come across bits which are quite interesting, not in a QI, Stephen Fry sense, but hopefully they add to the whole.

  The following is the account of a short tour, spread out over three or four weeks so I could get back home every night.

  Northampton

  Bloody awful headache made worse by one or two drunken people shouting nonsense at me. Reasonable gig in the circs. My friend Mel from college days turned up with some friends. Had a drink after and slunk gratefully into the car.

  Aberystwyth

  Aberystwyth is bloody miles away They seemed pleased to see us.

  York

  They loved all local paper stuff. Lots of joining in.

  Portsmouth

  Terrible traffic, got there late, very rushed, put make-up on like a five year old.

  Grimsby

  Grim by name …

  Dartford

  Felt pleased could bring some joy to Dartford.

  Barnstaple

  Last time I did a gig here, I cried. Not so this time. Warm and fairly bonkers audience who don’t see women comics very often, I get the feeling. They were a bit squeamish about the ruder material.

  Halifax

  They were miserable; me too.

  Oxford

  Dreaming spires? Bloody pissed, more like.

  Derby

  Can’t stop thinking the base of the English KKK is near here. None in though, thankfully I don’t think.

  King’s Lynn

  Why isn’t there a motorway to King’s Lynn? Stuck behind lorries, tractors, caravans … you name it, they were all on the road. Frazzled and grumpy but don’t think they noticed.

  Liverpool

  Cheeky as ever, ranging from quite drunk to virtually unconscious. Good gig.

  Hayes

  Hayes is near Uxbridge.

  Hull

  Saw a sheet attached to a house saying, Happy 30th birthday, Nan.

  Bradford

  I love Bradford.

  Yeovil

  Good sandwiches for a change, rather than the usual sweaty cheese. Local paper very sweet — all dog poo and teenagers.

  Newtown

  Why don’t people like the Welsh? I bloody love em.

  Oh Gawd, where do I start? Producing stand-up material is such a strange mercurial thing that it’s hard to pin down. Besides, there are so many different types of stand-up that it’s difficult to categorise them. You have, for example, stream of consciousness stand-up, the sort Eddie izzard does brilliantly which I have always thought was similar to the symptoms in individuals who suffer from bi-polar disorder and who are in the manic phase of their illness.

  This is because when people are in the manic phase, they have something called ‘pressure of speech’ and ‘flight of ideas’ which means they splurge out the first thing that comes into their head, and the rate of their speech is so fast and difficult to follow that it can appear like a surreal comedy routine. I remember a manic patient who was a quite delightful posh bloke who had been ill on and off for years, being admitted under a section of the Mental Health Act, which meant he was detained against his will as he was a danger to himself or others. An hour or so after he got there, he came up to the hatch where we were serving up lunch …

  His speech went something like this:

  Him: ‘Splat that on, darling, splat it on, splat it on, come on, come on … and I’ll have a spoonful of those little green fuckers [peas] yes, yes, yes, more green fuckers than that, more green fuckers, crikey you’re fat, been eating your green fuckers, have you?

  You’re a big girl, you’re a very big girl … give me some of those little bastards too, will you, the yellow bastards, come on, the yellow bastards [sweetcorn]. Come on, custard as well …‘

  Me: ‘But you normally have custard with pudding.’

  Him: ‘Not me, love, I have it all on together, pour it on.’ STARTS SINGING: ‘Pour the fucker on, pour the fucker on … ee-i-addio, for fuck’s sake pour it on.’

  Me: ‘I can’t, it’ll taste horrible.’

  Him: ‘Don’t care, darling, don’t give a flying fuck…’

  AT THIS POINT, HE POURS CUSTARD ON HIS HEAD AND STARTS TO DANCE, SINGING TO THE TUNE OF ‘KNEES UP MOTHER BROWN’:

  ‘Custard on me head, custard on me head …‘

  We nurses then distract him and someone takes him off to get cleaned up.

  I’m not attempting an exhaustive investigation of types of jokes here, but a slightly more scattergun analysis of the sort of jokes I do.

  Most comics do the traditional form of stand-up which involves a build-up to the joke and then the punch line, which is usually a reveal or something unexpected.

  For example, an early line I did was, ‘I’m anorexic,’ (hopefully people laugh at this point because I’m obviously not), and then I follow it up with, ‘because anorexic people look in the mirror and think they look fat, and so do I.’

  Anorexics thin
king they look fat has to be a well-known symptom of the illness or else the audience won’t get the joke. I have had some complaints from people who are relatives of anorexics, but I’m not having a go at anorexics, I’m having a go at myself.

  Comedy Poems

  On occasion I have written comedy poems. When I’m writing them I always think it’s important to combine two genres, so the clash between them adds even more humour.

  For example, a few years ago I was asked to perform something different’ at a benefit that I would never normally do, so I wrote an ode to the menopause which was based on Shakespeare.

  It went like this:

  ODE TO THE CHANGE

  But hark! What light through yonder window breaks?

  Oh no, a day that heralds wing-ed towel,

  Transforming me into a vicious hag,

  With all the bonhomie of Mr Simon Cowell.

  Oh will this hellish torment never end?

  When will my meno ever pause?

  All I want for Christmas is a

  Day off periods, please Santa Claus.

  Hurry, menopause, and take me over,

  I don’t care any more, just do your work,

  So my ovaries ain’t gonna go no more,

  I couldn’t give a flying furk.

  Strange symptoms 1 am told must be expected,

  I will embrace them, love them, use them well

  As surfing on the gushes and the flushes,

  I bulk-buy gin and slap on KY® jell.

  For the quality of mucus is not strained, it dries, hair falls,

  And ends up on your chin,

  And when you saunter to your local pub,

  They shout, ‘Hooray! Brian Blessed’s in.’

  If HRT’s the lubricant of love,

  I will transform into a stoutish Barbie,

  Although my beloved may well say

  That I remind him more of Mr R. Mugabe.

  Then I’ll sit in bed all day and call for chocolate,

  Hurrah, I hear the sound of husband’s door key

  Now is the winter of my discontent,

  Made glorious summer by this bar of Yorkie.

  This was performed at a benefit show at the National Theatre and the audience weren’t particularly impressed by my idiot’s guide to Shakespeare.

  And here’s another poem I performed for a bit after Princess Anne’s son Peter married a Canadian called Autumn Kelly It’s called:

  THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR

  Marry me, Autumn Kelly, we’ll have a massive party and get pissed.

  I’d love to, but you silly sod, you’re not on the Civil List.

  We can’t afford a lavish do, we haven’t got a bean,

  Oh fuck it then, let’s flog the pics to Hello! magazine.

  We’ll get your nan there, Pete, with her crown on, what a lark.

  And your granddad will, I’m sure, spew out the odd racist remark.

  And your Uncle Charlie will be running round, all prissy and manic,

  Sniffing at the vol au vents in case they’re not organic.

  And security will lurk about, behaving like the Stasi,

  And perhaps your cousin Harry will dress up as a Nazi.

  And giggling debs and vacuous chinless wonders will abound,

  As the great ship of the monarchy begins to run aground.

  And will our grasping and our greed not be seen as a bad thing?

  No, the public will just love it, they’ll all admire your bling.

  We sip champagne all night and raise two fingers to the twats,

  They’re as bloody daft as one of Cousin Beatrice’s hats.

  But it might have the same effect as It’s A Royal Knockout.

  We could risk opprobrium and a palace lock-out.

  The older royals might treat us like we’ve got the lurgy,

  Fear not, my sweet, that’s an honour just reserved for Fergie.

  Puns

  Puns tend to be the stock in trade of the traditional comedian, although occasionally I’ll bung a few in. Here’s one:

  ‘My ex-boyfriend came round last week — which was weird ‘cause I didn’t even know he was in a coma.’

  Pure Abuse

  If I want to have a go at people I don’t like, the abuse just needs to be comedied up a bit and delivered with enough conviction. Add a bit of alliteration and you will find that even a phrase like ‘Toffee-nosed, tedious Tory twat’ will get a laugh — although not a very big one, obviously.

  Funny Stories

  Quite a few things that have happened to me make me laugh, so occasionally I will take the risk that they will make the audience laugh too. For example, a few years ago I received some strange fan letters from a guy who also sent me several pictures of himself. They were somewhat unsettling. Then one night, I was watching a documentary about stalkers and there he was on screen, stalking a woman in Essex. All I had to add was, ‘Two-timing bastard!’ to make a joke.

  Heckle Put-downs

  Prepared heckle put-downs should be jokes in themselves and should be really funny i.e. funnier than the original heckle if you’re going to take the hecklers on. Just thinking about what sort of heckles I might get enabled me to write appropriate jokes for a series of possibilities e.g. ‘Where’s your girlfriend? Outside grazing, I presume.

  Irony

  Irony is a great staple of the British comic and identifiable on the continent of America even though we’re always saying it isn’t. Everyone gets it, so it enables me to do jokes like moving the microphone out of the way at the beginning of my set and saying, ‘I’m just going to move this, or you won’t be able to see me otherwise.’

  Shock Jokes

  Shocking jokes get journalists in the right-wing tabloids very hot under the collar. The proponents of these sort of jokes these days are Frankie Boyle and Jimmy Carr, and they shock because they have a go at groups who have made it clear they don’t think it’s on to take the piss out of them — such as people with a disability. I always tried to turn this round and point my joke gun at white men, the most powerful group in our society thus:

  ‘I think they should change the law and allow women to be armed. Then we would be safer in public. We could shoot anyone at night that threatened us, and in fact any bloke that got on our nerves.

  This ‘misfired’ and didn’t go down too well with the unreconstructed males in the audience, as I’m sure you can imagine.

  I think the joke I’ve done that most shocked people, judging by their reaction anyway was a joke about the Jennifer (daughter of David) Lynch film Boxing Helena. I never saw the film but the plot, very simply put, involves a surgeon amputating a woman’s arms and legs and keeping her in a box.

  I explained this premise to the audience, who received the information very matter-of-factly and then I said I was worried about how such a woman would cope with personal hygiene without any arms or legs. I went on to ask them to imagine what it would be like for her having periods, trapped as she was like this in a box, and particularly if it was a cardboard box, how it would get all soggy and revolting. At this point there would be, without fail, a noise from the audience which signified their revulsion at the mention of periods and sogginess. I would then say ‘Oh I see, you were quite happy with the idea of a woman having her arms and legs chopped off and being put in a box, but you seem to be completely revolted by the idea of her having a period. What’s the matter with you?’

  Some of the audience would laugh and applaud; others would just continue to be revolted. I was trying to make a point about how ridiculous some of our taboos are. Even in this day and age it seems so pathetic to me that we have to shroud periods in ridiculously euphemistic terms, but we are quite happy to see women being mutilated for our entertainment. Funny old world, ain’t it?

  As far as actually thinking of and writing the jokes, it’s hard to put my finger on how I actually do it. I very rarely sit down at my computer and write for hours on end, because I simply don’t have the time (
or the inclination) to do this. I always have hundreds of half-filled little notebooks everywhere with scribbled ideas for jokes, or stuff I have read in the paper that I think would make a good routine. Jokes tend to ferment in my head over a few days rather than present themselves on the page fully formed.

  Sometimes, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with the most brilliant joke in the history of the universe in my head and then go straight back to sleep having failed to write it down. When I wake up in the morning, of course the bloody thing has flown out of my brain, never to return. Sometimes I can’t find a pen so I’ll write on my hand with eyeliner or lipstick, and many’s the occasion when I discover a scrap of paper with a smudged bit of lipstick on it and wonder wistfully if that would have won the Joke of the Year competition.

  With me, my jokes tend to be highly structured. They certainly were when I started. Every single word in my set was pored over, learned by heart and parroted at an audience in a pretty predictable way That’s why when I first started, my voice sounded so stupid and flat. As I got more relaxed, so did my voice and I was able to loosen up and not be so obsessive about learning everything parrot-fashion.

  These days it’s difficult to do new stuff. Audiences have a certain expectation of you, so if you do ten minutes of new material that bombs, they understandably feel a bit short-changed and rightly so. Comics approach new stuff in different ways. Some hide in tiny little theatres in the middle of nowhere and punt out an hour of new stuff to a small audience who may just be pleased they are there. Others disguise bits of new stand-up in their current routine, which is what I tend to do. This means that sometimes I hang on to ancient material for too long, but I am too much of a cowardy custard to replace it all in one fell swoop with a potentially rubbish new set.