Just call me Johnny Three Gigs. Why? Well because you idiot, yesterday I did three gigs. Oh you were asking why you were calling me Johnny? Valid point. I have no valid reason to give. Now stop asking difficult questions. Yeah I did three whole gigs. How did they go? Well I feel I haven’t done an amateurish just-type-how-gigs-went-till-you-all-get-bored-and-never-read-my-blog-again blog for ages, so why not have a little foray into the old school blog style as we find out about gigs 1 to 3. Then I’ll tell you where I went on my summer holidays and what I did and when I ate ice cream.
GIG 1: Kids Comedy Show at the Cambridge Comedy Festival
This mostly involved being heckled by a 2 year old who would shout nothing but ‘penguin’ whilst handing out bourbons to other audience members. This was both a brilliant thing and a hugely irritating thing as it was pretty hard to ignore. You can’t just slam down a 2 year old with abuse. Not because she’d get upset or anything, but more because she wouldn’t understand and would carry on shouting ‘penguin’. I’m not wasting my prime insults like that. It was a small crowd of people due to the badly timed huge free festival in the park nearby on the same day. Huge free festival are bastards like that. I hate them. Unless I’m at them. Then I love them. Its all relative. Like families.
The few kids that were there were grade A mental though which was what was needed with extra kudos to 7 year old Sebastian who said he was afraid of dreams and therefore has never ever slept and instead spends his time standing on his own head. Sometimes I wonder if we are needed for these shows at all or if we should just charge kids to stand in a room and shout at each other. Its far funnier than my material.
Helen Arney did some ace songs with a brilliant improvised penguin tune, and Alexis Dubus got the entire room to waddle which was brilliant. Much fun. But next time I’m heckled by a 2 year old, shit will go down.
GIG 2: Preview number 11 at the Cambridge Comedy Festival
Last Thursday, at preview number 10, I felt I’d found a real turning point with my show. I had suddenly felt a lot happier with it and it all seemed to have fallen into place. The only downside of Thursday is that I had spat words out like a gattling gun, charging through my set as though I was racing against time. I still managed to get in 51 minutes though and so I had thought that with a bit of pacing I’d easily hit my target 55 mins and we’d all be dancing in the street. Well not all of us. Just me. And people would think I was weird. So I’d stop pretty quickly. But those 30 seconds of dancing would be great. I’d probably do the cha-cha.
So yesterday I consciously thought I’d slow things down. And I did. For a bit. But somehow I gained pace and ended up finishing everything at 46 minutes. I had lost 5 minutes. I hadn’t forgotten anything, I had just somehow gone so fast that I had bettered my last time, but for the worst. If I was an athlete I’d totally high five myself now. Which would be a clap and not so great. But I’m not, and I need those five minutes back. Plus another four. If you come to my preview on Monday, I may ask you to shout when I’m going to fast. Or I might need some sort of electric shock system: If this Tiernan goes over 100 words per minute he’ll blow! Or suck more likely.
Still it was fun, the crowd were great and one man came up to me afterwards and said it was amazing. Which was very nice and not a compliment I usually receive. Unless its from the ladies…eh? Eh? EH? NUDGE NUDGE? WINK WINK? EH? Sigh.
GIG 3: Lounge On The Farm
It took much longer to get to Lounge On The Farm than I’d thought, thanks to the M25 being a stretch of tarmac hatred. How can they have traffic on a Saturday evening? I sat for 35 minutes in a solid going nowhere jam in the heat. I’m fairly sure my right arm is now so cooked you could eat it. Don’t eat it. I need it. When I finally got to the festival, it all seemed pretty chilled. Its a lovely site and its al very well laid out with three or four different areas segregating all the major stages so nowhere has any big noise clashes. The comedy stage was laid out with haystacks for people to sit on (brilliant, unless like me you have hayfever) and lots of cushions and blankets, ensuring people really would ‘lounge’. As a result, the gig was really nice. The one heckle I had was a positive one telling me to go to a festival called ‘Small World’ which I already like the sound of, and I managed to stick some new Edinburgh show stuff into my set too. Right, that’s all a tad boring isn’t it? Sorry.
Unfortunately for you, the rest of the evening was all lovely too. I bumped into silly amounts of people I know. Being an old student of Kent Uni, it appears lots of alumni and current students head along to the festival for a bit of nostalgia. Which is odd as we didn’t have any exams on a farm. Not even field studies. Arf. See it was worth waiting for that one no? No? Oh. So I saw some people that it was really nice to see again, met a few Twitterers and had to work out the awkwardness of whether to ask their username or real name first and spent time hanging with two old friends Louise and Kieran who I’m staying with. I haven’t seen them since their wedding back in September so it was great to see them. They also have a brilliant cat who has spent the entire morning so far looking at me with sheer discern.
So that’s it. I’m back at Lounge On The Farm today, so I’m slightly worried about doing the same material again. Of course, I could do different material, but that’s not the point. I will ask the audience and hopefully when I’m on, at 3.30pm, they will be half asleep anyway and not really care. Little all matters today as tomorrow I get my diabetic pump and become the glucose intolerant version of the Six Million Dollar Man. Expect tomorrow’s blog to be full of me typing ‘waa waa nee nee waa waa nee nee’ which is the noise of my bionic eye.
