I've been doing stand-up for six years. This means I've just started talking about comedy like an old man. If I mention something from my first or second year of stand-up, I will say it was "years ago". It's true, but it's still a crazy thing to hear yourself saying. I can use phrases like "a long time ago" about a time when I was a stand-up comedian, and only slightly inaccurately.
I don't use these phrases if I'm in the company of some of the genuinely eminent comedians on the circuit. I work quite often with comedians who have done more than 25 years. This is always wonderful - and these guys still love doing it. They might pretend that they don't - they might talk about nothing other than how god-awful their life is - but it's transparently untrue.
This is an amazing thing to do with your life. Once you have spent the greater part of your life doing it, and can still be bothered to turn out, you become living, moaning, proof of that.
Alternative comedy was born in the UK in 1979. (Anyone who was doing this kind of thing before then can be considered to belong to alternative comedy's pre-history.) 1979 is the year dot. And "alternative comedy", as it was called then, has grown into what these days we call "comedy". It needed the tag "alternative" to distinguish it from the mainstream of the time. Now, that has reversed. "Comedy", unless otherwise stated, is alternative comedy. "Mainstream comedy" now requires the signposting.
So it's not so odd of me to think of myself as being a (very junior) member of the group "eminent comedians", as I approach my sixth birthday. It's purely mathematics. British stand-up, as we know it now, has existed for 28 years. I have done it for six of those years. Maybe not six of the most influential or important years, but six nonetheless. In about a year's time, I'll have been a stand-up for a quarter of the time this discipline has existed in this country.
With this vaguely in mind, I go to this evening's gig in Tooting. The double act who run this gig are one of the first names I heard about on the circuit. Back in 2002, I heard about a very childish spat in a new act competition. This double act were accused of stuffing an audience with their "drama-school mates" and thus skewing the audience vote in their favour. Back then, this sounded like the most glamorous rumour I had ever heard.
I can't resist repeating the slur to them this evening. They are nostalgically amused. But they also deny the allegations, with a remnant of vehemence. Even now, at almost six years distance from the original accusation, they insist that there is no substance to the allegations whatever. Time is evidently not as great a healer as everyone says.
As if to complete the gig's This Is Your Life feel, another act on the bill started about the same time that I did, so we get nostalgic. How many people from those line-ups of nearly six years ago can we still remember? And where are they now?
But this is stand-up - it is addictive. Just as successful comics profess to hate the work but keep coming back, so lowlier acts find it very difficult to walk away entirely. Where are they now? The answer is most often, "I was gigging with him last week. Still doing the same jokes. Died on his arse."
