God, I really hope people read this blog. If I don't generate enough comments by the end of the day my editor is going to think I'm such a failure. Embarrassing, isn't it? But this is what I've been hearing in half the stand-up shows on the Fringe this year. A joke fails, or threatens to, and the comic just cannot help but share their anxiety with the audience.
"This is going well," grinned Rob Deering, or something similar, when it wasn't. "I've messed that joke up," said Tim Vine. "That was one of my best." And you could see that he was quite cut up about it.
Yet stand-up comedians, more than any other artists, should surely be familiar with the sting of conspicuous, humiliating failure. Their job is to make you laugh, and if they don't, there is nowhere to hide. Tumbleweed rustles across the stage. They are alone with their inadequacy. And there is nothing funny about it.
Which is why so many comics, including some of the very great ones, respond by making a joke out of it. "Ooh, that wasn't very funny," Eddie Izzard used to whisper to himself, and the microphone. And it was a rare Goon Show indeed that did not contain at least one of Spike Milligan's "That joke didn't get a laugh!" But while titans like these can withstand a few admissions of fallibility (and even sometimes get bigger laughs from them) most Fringe stand-ups are still fairly small fry in their audience's eyes, and cannot afford to be belittled any further.
Playing to a large and appreciative crowd, Tim Vine had enough laughs in the bank to ride out his crisis of confidence. But Rob Deering, in a smaller venue on a Tuesday night, did serious damage to his act - which, frustratingly, was otherwise quite good. Likewise this year, Matt Kirshen, Andrew O'Neill and even Scott Capurro, among those I've seen, have also succumbed to sabotaging themselves under stress. (Though Capurro, as usual, had plenty of help from a drunk and angry crowd.)
What all these performers forgot, I would humbly suggest, is a founding principle of their profession: stand-up is dictatorship, not democracy. Audiences cannot laugh and pity simultaneously; they must be ruled with an ironic fist.
This need not mean being haughty or detached. Lucy Porter kept an amicable relationship with her audience without once ceasing to control them. Even Hans Teeuwen, with far more precarious material, seemed utterly indifferent to the baffled faces that watched some portions of his act. Like the great Charlie Chuck, he exuded only extraterrestrial calm, allowing the strangeness of his show to grow, without any distractions, into hilarity. And until they're filling 500 seats a night, all stand-ups would do well to follow his example. "Never apologise," as the apocryphal royal motto has it. "Never explain."
