Today I was flyering our show for the first time and discovered, to some confusion, that I didn’t know as much about comedy as I thought I did. I don’t pretend to know very much mind you, having only been doing it for a couple of years. Still, you’re learning all the time and today was no exception.
The revelation itself came from an elderly lady who seemed to be in a spot of bother, shaking her head and muttering about something. I tend to be very reluctant to talk to people I don’t know, a barrier which she quickly overcame by suddenly launching into a fierce monologue about banks and everything bad about them.
“Do you know…” she spat, “I’ve been going to that same bank for a hundred years and they still ask me for ID? I mean, really! So of course I had to go all the way back and blah blah blah and they wouldn’t accept that so blah blah blah…”
As it happened, we shared a mutual hatred of banks and so I started to agree with everything she was saying. Until the conversion took a slightly odd turn.
“I hear some of them aren’t even based in the UK anymore. A lot of them have their headquarters in all sorts of places. Is it Barclays? – I think it’s Barclays – actually have their headquarters in Spain!” She thought for a moment and then cautiously intoned: “And you’ve got to be very careful about something like that.”
I had meant to suggest that I was simply uncomfortable with the general level of incompetence in high street banking staff, but now I found myself apparently teetering on the brink of a big racist whirlpool. If this woman had such negative feelings about the Spanish it was probably best not to bring up anything that might cause her to use the word ‘coloureds’. I decided to take a different tack and tell her about a positive experience that I had when banking, which was when I had to go in to do my bit in setting up a business account for Ladma. You see, when you have a personal bank account you are, in your bank's eyes, a kind of money generating livestock. You are part of the seething mass of plankton that feeds the banking whale, and you have no individual rights or identity. If you have a business account on the other hand, they greet you as if their whole lives had been completely pointless up until the time they finally got to meet you. The manager (who deals with the business accounts) would probably even give you a blowjob if you asked, although I haven’t tested this.
She then wanted to know of course, what my business was. I said that Ladma is a comedy group that I am part of and held up one of the flyers to show her. Before I continue I should add that we don’t really make money from what we do, we once won a competition for which we got some money and so we had to have somewhere to put it. Anyway, when I said that I was in a comedy group, her face suddenly lit up.
“Oh how exciting!” she cooed. As it turns out, she had spent her life in theatre as a singer and actress and all kinds of things, probably calling everyone ‘darling’, singing all the time, criticising other people and doing all the other things that hardcore thespians do. She also seemed to have quite strong views about comedy that were heartfelt, if not a little out-of-touch.
“I don’t care for a lot of these young comedians these days,” she said solemnly.
“There is a lot of rubbish out there,” I replied.
“I just can’t stand some of them. What do you think of that Stephen Fry?”
Judging from her face, she didn’t much care for Stephen Fry in particular. I gave a very neutral, noncommittal response to this and the conversation moved on. I actually quite like Stephen Fry, but I wasn’t about to cause a rift between us, particularly when we were otherwise getting on so well. She began to ask what sort of thing we did in our group and I said sketch comedy. I wanted to give her a point of reference that would be familiar, so I said “a bit like Monty Python”. She acknowledged this without approval, presumably because they also ranked among those other youngsters who had ruined comedy. She went on to enquire what else we did, so I said we did some music as well and I was responsible for that. She liked the sound of that very much.
“Oh how wonderful!” she beamed. “I expect you wear white face paint don’t you?”
She expected wrong. I replied in the negative.
“Ah…” she said, shaking her head. “Lazy!”
In our defence, we had no idea that we were supposed to wear white face paint. I can only say that we haven’t been doing this very long and we’re still complete amateurs in many respects. But are we also lazy?
"Yeah, we are a bit," I replied.
Chris
No comments:
Post a Comment