My first ever stand up gig was in September 2002. Long time ago, that. Katherine Hepburn was still alive. I'd spent the previous two months going to stand up gigs as a punter with a real 'I could do that' smugness. I already knew what I didn't like. I think pretty much all 22 year olds who've not done the thing they're thinking of doing think that they're better than 95% of the people actually doing it. Although I didn't really know what a compere was I decided that all comperes were shit. Asking the audience where they were from, what they did, was unimaginative hackery - something I would never do.
Stand up seemed like a near blank canvas of an art form. The only requirement was to make people laugh and yet so much stand up seemed to follow the same narrow tropes. I was going to come along and change the game.
My first gig was at Pear Shaped, a legendary open mic night in Fitzrovia. I sat in the front row, drank four pints and watched the 16 comics before me perform with wildly varying levels of success. Back then at least a third of the open mic circuit were far worse than a randomly selected person on the street might be. It made for an entertaining rollercoaster of an evening.
At this stage I was a trained actor and had recently completed a tour with the RSC but when the host, Brian Damage, brought me up I was insanely nervous. I remember my leg visibly shaking onstage. I spent much of my five minutes commenting on the limb wobbling, winning me some laughs. It was enough to give me an enormous high and confirm my suspicions that I was in fact a brilliant comedian in waiting.
Three or four relatively successful gigs later and I did a Sunday night show at Up The Creek in Greenwich. Hosted by legendary drinker and club owner, the late Malcolm Hardee, I would later learn that the night had a reputation for brutal heckling. Unblemished by a bad gig I went up with my unformed open mic material and smashed it. A friend told me I was as good as any professional club comic and I believed them. Someone else told me that they'd heard stand ups got paid £400 for a twenty minute set. Rather than the fee for a headliner at a top club on a Saturday night I took that to mean - the standard rate for all stand up sets was £400. I planned my future;
If I already had 5 minutes of audience destroying material, within three months I figured I'd have 20 and would be invited onto 'the circuit' by whomever was in charge of that shit. I supposed I'd give myself one night off a week meaning I'd have 6 x £400 = £2,400. Sweet. Guessing that the travelling could get lonely I day dreamed about paying a friend to come with me and play tennis during the day.
The following Sunday, recent Perrier winner Daniel Kitson was headlining the Creek so I turned up and said hello to Malcolm Hardee who kindly told me I'd been good the week before and asked if I'd like to go on again. "It'd just be the same stuff" I said. That wouldn't be a problem, he assured me.
The atmosphere was very different. I watched two open mics get relentlessly pummelled by the crowd. It seemed the entire audience was there with the sole intention of humiliating the acts for their own entertainment. I've never seen a night like if before or since. As I stood beside him and we watched the victim before me get insulted by 200 people in unison, I heard Malcolm mumble to himself "perfect".
In introducing me as "Fergal Craig" he told the audience I'd been on the week before, had 'died a death' but was back to give it another go. Fuck. Up I went and said the first line of my elaborate first joke. "You were on last week!" someone shouted and the onslaught began. I went into my 'edgy' Holocaust material (all new open mics have either edgy holocaust material or edgy paedo material and it's always shit) and someone shouted that their family had died in the Holocaust and they were thoroughly offended. They said this with a massive smile on their face. A couple of minutes in I won some laughs by saying I was doing stand as a dying wish but the game was up and Malcolm dragged me off stage. Red faced, I went to hide in the toilet. Daniel Kitson found me and kindly consoled but the humiliation was so unexpected, so absolute that I didn't really do stand up on my own again for another six years.
My return came in September 2008. As my double act came to an end I started showing up at open mic nights again, just to prove to myself that I could do it. At this stage I had a career as a comic actor on the go. I'd been on stage in my double act a lot. My experience gave me an unfair advantage. Four months later I won the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year award which was sort of cheating. Second place was Seann Walsh and he was never heard of again.
This brought about one of my worst ever gigs. Hackney Empire put on a showcase for some of the finalists. Returning confidently to the scene of my victory I had no fears about my 20 minute headline spot despite not having 20 minutes of material - I'd play with the audience, I'd improvise. I was an idiot. The second half of my set was an abomination sprinkled with actual arguments with members of the crowd and was followed by the compere Jo Brand berating the audience for being mean. I didn't give up stand up this time.
Over the course of the next couple of years, in comedy terms, I fucked up a bit. I once heard Tim Key interviewed on a podcast. He said (hope I'm remembering this right) that he started out awful and didn't really have any option other than to be alternative and creative. I started out quite good but I didn't really know what kind of stand up I wanted to be - I just knew I didn't want to die because dying is painful. So I did things that I thought would make an audience laugh - not always things that I found funny.
That isn't to say that I stopped dying. Gigs at Imperial College Students Union and the Latitude Festival stand out - there were others. Usually a fall came when I overstretched myself. The worst instance was when I agreed to do a show at the Leicester Comedy Festival. That was a major fuck up. I didn't have anything approaching a show but was on a good run of gigs and wanted to have a go at an hour. In one of the worst decisions in the history of British comedy I agreed to let reviewers in. Maybe I thought, maybe it will be brilliant. It wasn't. It was really bad.
I wasn't bad at stand up though. I started to MC Knock2Bag gigs and found that I really liked being a compere - despite previously deciding all comperes were shit. Did I ask the standard - 'what do you do?' questions? Of course I did. It's a really good question that can take you anywhere.
I set myself the challenge of getting Jongleurs gigs. Firstly for ca$h but most importantly because I wanted to know if I could do it - if I could survive in the combative environment I had so spectacularly failed in the past. Turns out I was relatively good in those Saturday night bear pits.
I had developed a good six or seven minutes on accents. This was broad material that seemed to work with pretty much any crowd. At first I loved performing it but then it became a bit of a problem. I couldn't seem to work up anything that was quite as successful and I was addicted to opening with it because it won me so many credit points with the audience.
I became a regular compere with Jongleurs. Some nights it was enormous fun. Big crowds, enjoying their Saturday night out. A big laugh in a room with such a high Jaegerbomb per capita rate is a very big laugh. Other nights I felt like I was trying to win the approval of the people who bullied me at school. Sometimes in those rooms my accent material felt, rather than a lovely little play around with sounds, like taking advantage of lazy stereotypes. I was good at compering, I was quick, but sometimes I panicked and said something to appease what I thought the crowd wanted and berated myself on the way home. The worst instance was when I called a hen night 'sluts' for no good reason in Portsmouth. I got a cheer from the crowd but I was just being a bully with a microphone. It's hard though, this stand up lark. Sometimes you just end up calling a table full of women sluts and spending the train journey home wondering if you're a comedian or a misogynist ring leader.
I gave up stand up not long after that incident. Jongleurs were being shit about paying me (and a lot of other folks) and I'd lost the enthusiasm to do other, lower paid, more alternative nights. I had found myself in this awful position in which I felt low when the audience weren't laughing but zero high when they were because that was just what was supposed to be happening. On reflection I think I was simply having a bad month and should have ploughed on, thrown away some of the material I'd grown to dislike and had some fun again. But I was acting and writing and stand up was only ever a side gig so I didn't feel like I was abandoning my calling.
Now, thanks to the love of a good woman, I find myself living in Montreal for a year and I've started doing stand up again. I'm starting from scratch - all new material - observations on the nuances of the Geordie dialect don't work well here. One enormous advantage is that I immediately have an angle - I'm the British guy. In the UK I was just another British guy in a country of thirty million British guys.
I'm surprising myself by how much I'm falling in love with stand up again. I shouldn't have given it up. What an amazing thing to be able to do. There are a hundred things to think about as a comic - Why won't this prick respond to my emails? If I grow a moustache or something will I get on panel shows? Why is that bit not getting a laugh anymore? Should I start wearing a suit maybe? Where's the best place at this venue for a pre show shit? Am I actually a 'comic' because everyone in the dressing room seems to feel like a 'comic' and I don't.
I got bogged down in all that for a while. Probably will again one day. For now though I'm enjoying this brief oasis of just trying to come up with funny things to say on a stage.
Stand up seemed like a near blank canvas of an art form. The only requirement was to make people laugh and yet so much stand up seemed to follow the same narrow tropes. I was going to come along and change the game.
My first gig was at Pear Shaped, a legendary open mic night in Fitzrovia. I sat in the front row, drank four pints and watched the 16 comics before me perform with wildly varying levels of success. Back then at least a third of the open mic circuit were far worse than a randomly selected person on the street might be. It made for an entertaining rollercoaster of an evening.
At this stage I was a trained actor and had recently completed a tour with the RSC but when the host, Brian Damage, brought me up I was insanely nervous. I remember my leg visibly shaking onstage. I spent much of my five minutes commenting on the limb wobbling, winning me some laughs. It was enough to give me an enormous high and confirm my suspicions that I was in fact a brilliant comedian in waiting.
Three or four relatively successful gigs later and I did a Sunday night show at Up The Creek in Greenwich. Hosted by legendary drinker and club owner, the late Malcolm Hardee, I would later learn that the night had a reputation for brutal heckling. Unblemished by a bad gig I went up with my unformed open mic material and smashed it. A friend told me I was as good as any professional club comic and I believed them. Someone else told me that they'd heard stand ups got paid £400 for a twenty minute set. Rather than the fee for a headliner at a top club on a Saturday night I took that to mean - the standard rate for all stand up sets was £400. I planned my future;
If I already had 5 minutes of audience destroying material, within three months I figured I'd have 20 and would be invited onto 'the circuit' by whomever was in charge of that shit. I supposed I'd give myself one night off a week meaning I'd have 6 x £400 = £2,400. Sweet. Guessing that the travelling could get lonely I day dreamed about paying a friend to come with me and play tennis during the day.
The following Sunday, recent Perrier winner Daniel Kitson was headlining the Creek so I turned up and said hello to Malcolm Hardee who kindly told me I'd been good the week before and asked if I'd like to go on again. "It'd just be the same stuff" I said. That wouldn't be a problem, he assured me.
The atmosphere was very different. I watched two open mics get relentlessly pummelled by the crowd. It seemed the entire audience was there with the sole intention of humiliating the acts for their own entertainment. I've never seen a night like if before or since. As I stood beside him and we watched the victim before me get insulted by 200 people in unison, I heard Malcolm mumble to himself "perfect".
In introducing me as "Fergal Craig" he told the audience I'd been on the week before, had 'died a death' but was back to give it another go. Fuck. Up I went and said the first line of my elaborate first joke. "You were on last week!" someone shouted and the onslaught began. I went into my 'edgy' Holocaust material (all new open mics have either edgy holocaust material or edgy paedo material and it's always shit) and someone shouted that their family had died in the Holocaust and they were thoroughly offended. They said this with a massive smile on their face. A couple of minutes in I won some laughs by saying I was doing stand as a dying wish but the game was up and Malcolm dragged me off stage. Red faced, I went to hide in the toilet. Daniel Kitson found me and kindly consoled but the humiliation was so unexpected, so absolute that I didn't really do stand up on my own again for another six years.
My return came in September 2008. As my double act came to an end I started showing up at open mic nights again, just to prove to myself that I could do it. At this stage I had a career as a comic actor on the go. I'd been on stage in my double act a lot. My experience gave me an unfair advantage. Four months later I won the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year award which was sort of cheating. Second place was Seann Walsh and he was never heard of again.
This brought about one of my worst ever gigs. Hackney Empire put on a showcase for some of the finalists. Returning confidently to the scene of my victory I had no fears about my 20 minute headline spot despite not having 20 minutes of material - I'd play with the audience, I'd improvise. I was an idiot. The second half of my set was an abomination sprinkled with actual arguments with members of the crowd and was followed by the compere Jo Brand berating the audience for being mean. I didn't give up stand up this time.
Over the course of the next couple of years, in comedy terms, I fucked up a bit. I once heard Tim Key interviewed on a podcast. He said (hope I'm remembering this right) that he started out awful and didn't really have any option other than to be alternative and creative. I started out quite good but I didn't really know what kind of stand up I wanted to be - I just knew I didn't want to die because dying is painful. So I did things that I thought would make an audience laugh - not always things that I found funny.
That isn't to say that I stopped dying. Gigs at Imperial College Students Union and the Latitude Festival stand out - there were others. Usually a fall came when I overstretched myself. The worst instance was when I agreed to do a show at the Leicester Comedy Festival. That was a major fuck up. I didn't have anything approaching a show but was on a good run of gigs and wanted to have a go at an hour. In one of the worst decisions in the history of British comedy I agreed to let reviewers in. Maybe I thought, maybe it will be brilliant. It wasn't. It was really bad.
I wasn't bad at stand up though. I started to MC Knock2Bag gigs and found that I really liked being a compere - despite previously deciding all comperes were shit. Did I ask the standard - 'what do you do?' questions? Of course I did. It's a really good question that can take you anywhere.
I set myself the challenge of getting Jongleurs gigs. Firstly for ca$h but most importantly because I wanted to know if I could do it - if I could survive in the combative environment I had so spectacularly failed in the past. Turns out I was relatively good in those Saturday night bear pits.
I had developed a good six or seven minutes on accents. This was broad material that seemed to work with pretty much any crowd. At first I loved performing it but then it became a bit of a problem. I couldn't seem to work up anything that was quite as successful and I was addicted to opening with it because it won me so many credit points with the audience.
I became a regular compere with Jongleurs. Some nights it was enormous fun. Big crowds, enjoying their Saturday night out. A big laugh in a room with such a high Jaegerbomb per capita rate is a very big laugh. Other nights I felt like I was trying to win the approval of the people who bullied me at school. Sometimes in those rooms my accent material felt, rather than a lovely little play around with sounds, like taking advantage of lazy stereotypes. I was good at compering, I was quick, but sometimes I panicked and said something to appease what I thought the crowd wanted and berated myself on the way home. The worst instance was when I called a hen night 'sluts' for no good reason in Portsmouth. I got a cheer from the crowd but I was just being a bully with a microphone. It's hard though, this stand up lark. Sometimes you just end up calling a table full of women sluts and spending the train journey home wondering if you're a comedian or a misogynist ring leader.
I gave up stand up not long after that incident. Jongleurs were being shit about paying me (and a lot of other folks) and I'd lost the enthusiasm to do other, lower paid, more alternative nights. I had found myself in this awful position in which I felt low when the audience weren't laughing but zero high when they were because that was just what was supposed to be happening. On reflection I think I was simply having a bad month and should have ploughed on, thrown away some of the material I'd grown to dislike and had some fun again. But I was acting and writing and stand up was only ever a side gig so I didn't feel like I was abandoning my calling.
Now, thanks to the love of a good woman, I find myself living in Montreal for a year and I've started doing stand up again. I'm starting from scratch - all new material - observations on the nuances of the Geordie dialect don't work well here. One enormous advantage is that I immediately have an angle - I'm the British guy. In the UK I was just another British guy in a country of thirty million British guys.
I'm surprising myself by how much I'm falling in love with stand up again. I shouldn't have given it up. What an amazing thing to be able to do. There are a hundred things to think about as a comic - Why won't this prick respond to my emails? If I grow a moustache or something will I get on panel shows? Why is that bit not getting a laugh anymore? Should I start wearing a suit maybe? Where's the best place at this venue for a pre show shit? Am I actually a 'comic' because everyone in the dressing room seems to feel like a 'comic' and I don't.
I got bogged down in all that for a while. Probably will again one day. For now though I'm enjoying this brief oasis of just trying to come up with funny things to say on a stage.
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